Thomas Malthus said that people will adjust to a higher material abundance by making a larger population. Instead of creating a utopia, tech breakthroughs would just increase population size, and the population will grow until the numbers create hardship. You raise the carrying capacity, humans will increase. (So the only answer would be constant growth, we can’t make people behave differently.)
Limts to Growth study modeled many scenarios without really making a specific forecast. Every scenario eventually reached a collapse. In the LTG, the major variable was (as the title suggests) that Growth rate changes the speed of collapse. The more you limit Growth, the longer it takes, the more Growth increases the faster. One of the scenarios had a near steady-state and collapse was pushed out centuries. The Business-As-Usual Growith Maximalist approach brings rapid collapse. However, in the run-up to rapid collapse, people do not have to adjust their lives. In the restricted growth scenario, austerity and limits to family size would have started immediately.
In Zero Sum Society, the argument is that most of the democratic systems have an asymmetrical /lopsided ability to give benefits versus give losses. We have some ability to hand out new money differentially (you can give new funds to some people and not others). If you take money away from some people and not others, they respond politically AND the mechanisms of the system (rights, laws) tend to protect the status quo. What he argues is that democratic system do not have any ability to deal with a “shrinking pie”. Editorial note is that deindustrialization leading to MAGA would be an example of people responding to economic loss democratically by lashing out at the whole rotten system.
The common thread is that we use growth to manage aspects of human behavior that we would not be able to manage at all, without growth.
The three sources all basically say that we use Growth as a quick fix to try to outrun short term problems that we struggle to solve. But that it’s a trap. Every source says that you deepen your longer term problems by trying to grow in the short term.
The article says this:
The logically inescapable point here is that in a zero-growth economy there could be no place whatsoever for this psychological motive (growth / progress / gain / profit) or economic process. People would have to be concerned to produce and acquire only that stable quantity of goods and services that is sufficient for a satisfactory quality of life, and to seek no increase whatsoever in savings, wealth, possessions etc. It would be difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of this cultural transition. A zero-growth economy cannot exist unless there is enormous change from the mentality that is typical in consumer society and that has been the dominant driving force in Western culture for several hundred years
Jared Diamond has a book “Collapse” (2005). The book has a lot of criticisms. Anyhow, what he argues is that human cultures have tended to create collapses when the culture largely fails to respond to challenges from the bio-physical world. Example the Norse in Greenland starved out instead of adapting to the local food items that the natives relied on, because of their cultural traditions winning over 'reality '.
Threading it all together, we have a culture and institutions and psychological expectation for constant Growth.
Can you expand on that ? I’m not sure what you mean. Like, papers over the cracks ?
Thomas Malthus said that people will adjust to a higher material abundance by making a larger population. Instead of creating a utopia, tech breakthroughs would just increase population size, and the population will grow until the numbers create hardship. You raise the carrying capacity, humans will increase. (So the only answer would be constant growth, we can’t make people behave differently.)
Limts to Growth study modeled many scenarios without really making a specific forecast. Every scenario eventually reached a collapse. In the LTG, the major variable was (as the title suggests) that Growth rate changes the speed of collapse. The more you limit Growth, the longer it takes, the more Growth increases the faster. One of the scenarios had a near steady-state and collapse was pushed out centuries. The Business-As-Usual Growith Maximalist approach brings rapid collapse. However, in the run-up to rapid collapse, people do not have to adjust their lives. In the restricted growth scenario, austerity and limits to family size would have started immediately.
In Zero Sum Society, the argument is that most of the democratic systems have an asymmetrical /lopsided ability to give benefits versus give losses. We have some ability to hand out new money differentially (you can give new funds to some people and not others). If you take money away from some people and not others, they respond politically AND the mechanisms of the system (rights, laws) tend to protect the status quo. What he argues is that democratic system do not have any ability to deal with a “shrinking pie”. Editorial note is that deindustrialization leading to MAGA would be an example of people responding to economic loss democratically by lashing out at the whole rotten system.
The common thread is that we use growth to manage aspects of human behavior that we would not be able to manage at all, without growth.
The three sources all basically say that we use Growth as a quick fix to try to outrun short term problems that we struggle to solve. But that it’s a trap. Every source says that you deepen your longer term problems by trying to grow in the short term.
The article says this:
Jared Diamond has a book “Collapse” (2005). The book has a lot of criticisms. Anyhow, what he argues is that human cultures have tended to create collapses when the culture largely fails to respond to challenges from the bio-physical world. Example the Norse in Greenland starved out instead of adapting to the local food items that the natives relied on, because of their cultural traditions winning over 'reality '.
Threading it all together, we have a culture and institutions and psychological expectation for constant Growth.