Search the archive.

Ultimately, the proposal for degrowth as proposed by the Degrowth movement turns out, much like that of green growth, not to be a solution. Most importantly, degrowth has been criticised that its proposal to reduce the GDP of advanced economies will have no significant impact on reducing the world’s Material Footprint (MF), or carbon emissions, significantly enough to avoid an ecological overshoot. This is because most (63%) of current carbon emissions come from developing countries - where it will only continue to increase in the foreseeable future. The 2022 Emissions Gap Report notes UNEP (2022, p. 67) that “virtually the entire future increase in global primary energy demand is expected to occur in these [developing] economies.” And after the GDP of rich economies are downsized - say by a significant 40%, there would still remain a footprint of 60% and 60% of their economies to de-carbonise (Hickel and Hallegatte, 2022). van den Bergh (2011, p.885) concluded that “Even if we would manage to ‘scale the economy down’ to 50% [....] we still only would have reduced the size of the environmental problems by half. But this is by far insufficient for most environmental problems.” It is clearly insufficient to halt the growth in material footprints and carbon emissions and not reduce these “tout court.” Phillips (2019) uses the example of the successful reduction in the hole in the ozone layer to illustrate the shortcoming of the Degrowth proposal, explaining that: “we embraced degrowth with respect to ozone depletion by attempting to arrest growth in, say, the number of fridges in the world—or even reduce the total number—instead of regulation to enforce technology-switching, disaster would have befallen us. Saying ”this many fridges and no more” would only have arrested the growth in emissions, not emissions tout court” (Phillips, 2019). Moreover, even if the GDP growth of all countries, not only that of the developed countries, could be curtailed, it may still not be effective to reduce carbon emissions and MF sufficiently to achieve climate goals. This can easily be seen using the so-called IPAT identity, used to gauge the drivers of the environmental impact of the economy (Bretschger, 2021; Stijn, 2021). The IPAT identity decomposes the environmental impact (I) of an economy into the consequences of population (P), affluence (A) and technology (T) (Holdren, 1993). It can be written as follows (where a ‘hat’ over a variable indicates a rate of change): I = Pˆ + Aˆ P + Tˆ A (1) If affluence (A) - say measured in GDP - is reduced as per degrowthers’ proposal, it will lead to a reduction in impact (I ). This is the basis of degrowth. However, if Pˆ continues to grow, and if technological innovation (Tˆ) declines or remain slow, then the reduction in impact caused by GDP degrowth would be offset. The important point to note is that both of these offset mechanism are more likely to apply at lower levels of GDP. Furthermore, if reduced GDP lead to a reduction in technological innovation in the richer countries, the environmental impact may be even worse. Holdren (1993, p.5) shows in this regard that “a change for the worse in the technology of production is more serious environmentally if it occurs in a populous, affluent society than if it occurs in a small, poor one” - which are the type of the societies that the Degrowth movement want to downsize. Worse even, not only is downsizing the economies of rich countries not likely to be effective, but it may worsen ecological overshoot in several ways. “degrowth might turn out to be dirty” (van den Bergh, 2011, p.882). One is that countries will have less resources to invest in climate change mitigation and adaptation technologies, and hence they will be more vulnerable to the impacts of ecological deterioration (Phillips, 2019). A second is that firms may substitute more expensive cleaner production techniques for cheaper, but more polluting, technologies. Third, government revenues will drop - an inevitable consequence of economic shrinkage. Governments would not be able to borrow further to spend on social and basic needs or environmental protection. They would need to repay their existing debt - in the EU, the rule that government debt cannot exceed 60% of GDP implies that, if GDP declined, debt would also need to fall (Stijn, 2021). Fourth, poorer households in (degrowthed) rich countries are likely to revert to deforestation30 and environmental destruction - as they did during the 2021/2022 winters in Europe when faced with rising energy prices following the Ukraine war (Moloney, 2022; Rankin, 2021; Kauppi et al., 2006). A further shortcoming of degrowth is that if one considers degrowth as a method to decreasing carbon emissions, it is a much more expensive method than any currently comparable technological investments as green growth is pushing for. According to calculations by Jakob and Edenhofer (2014) if the world shrinks GDP per capita by 10% (around US$7,000 billion), it will reduce carbon emissions by about 3.3 gigatons, meaning a cost of US$ 2,100 per ton of emissions. In comparison, the social cost of carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) has been estimated at US$ 185 per ton of emissions (Rennert et al., 2022). In additionn to being likely ineffective, to worsen the environmental challenge, and a very expensive way to reduce carbon emissions, degrowth may disproportionately hurt the poorest of the poor - and make global inequality worse. One mechanism through which this could occur is that degrowth in the Global North will severely curtail development in the Global South because of the intertwined nature of the global economy (and there is no time for the Global South to successfully “decouple” if at all that is possible). The COVID-19 crisis emphasized this inter-dependency - poverty rose more sharply in the Global South than the Global North - and indicated how difficult it would be for the Global South to decouple from the Global North. Hence it may be indeed the case that, ”the degrowth people are living a fantasy where they assume that if you bake a smaller cake, then for some reason, the poorest will get a bigger share of it [. . . .] that has never happened in history” (Horowitz, 2022).Ultimately, degrowth will make global inequality worse because it will be the poor will pay the price, and not the rich, who has the means and connections to find shelter31 - and who has arguably the most wasteful consumption. Hence, “Degrowth is, in essence, a form of ecological austerity for working-class people” (Chambers, 2021). Finally, in the words of Stijn (2021) degrowth is not only ineffective, likely to worsen the environment, very expensive and a form of austerity for the working class, but redundant: “Economic degrowth is not necessary, because it targets the wrong enemy. GDP is not the enemy; environmental impact is the enemy. Environmental scientists are able to determine upper bounds on environmental impacts such as pollution. For example, climatologists have determined the carbon budget: how much greenhouse gases can still be emitted that keep the atmospheric temperature increase below 1,5°C. But GDP is measured in dollars, a totally different quantity than kg CO2. Hence, none of the economic degrowthers are able to say what is the upper bound or true limit on affluence. There are no scientific studies that estimate the maximum level of GDP that is still permissible.”

\Engrained mental models of perpetual growth make the degrowth transition impossible

Earth Overshoot Day, "when humanity has used all the biological resources that the Earth regenerates during the entire year", fell on 28 July 2022. In 1971, it fell on 25 December. This acceleration in using biological resources means that humanity is overshooting planetary boundaries. Our ecological crisis is an overshoot crisis, of which anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity losses are symptoms. The full scale "of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms - including humanity - is so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts." We face a “ghastly future.” To avoid this, the degrowth movement is calling for an end to economic growth (as measured by GDP) and shrinkage of the economies of developed countries. Developing countries should use this space in world GDP created by the contraction of developed economies to develop - freed from the unequal and exploitative restrictions imposed by global capitalism. Degrowth advocates do not believe in green growth, the compatibility of continued GDP growth within planetary boundaries, or that technological solutions exist - they reject techno-optimism or any possibility of decoupling between growth and the material footprint of nations. Limitations of Degrowth Degrowthers diagnose a real problem. Unfortunately, the downsizing of western economies is not a solution. At least seven reasons can be highlighted why degrowth is insufficient. Degrowth will not decrease decarbonization Most (63%) of current carbon emissions come from developing countries - where it will only continue to increase in the foreseeable future. The 2022 Emissions Gap Report notes (p. 67) that “virtually the entire future increase in global primary energy demand is expected to occur in these [developing] economies.” Even if western economies are shrunk, they would still be extensive and emit significant carbon. Degrowth will make matters worse Degrowth may be dirty. Global redistribution, as degrowthers envisage, will increase aggregate consumption through a well-known "growth through redistribution" effect. Inequality reduces economic growth, hence the opposite will raise growth. Businesses may substitute more expensive cleaner production techniques for cheaper but more polluting technologies. Governments would also not be able to borrow further to spend on social and basic needs or environmental protection. Degrowth is politically infeasible Because of the endowment effect, people would be unlikely to vote for politicians who propose lowering their levels of GDP per capita, especially in certain countries, at least if it is to fight climate change. A 2022 poll found that only 1% of USA voters listed climate change as the most crucial challenge. And politicians, being generally subject to a status quo bias, would be reluctant to propose such a radical policy. As proponents acknowledge “political parties that have put forward degrowth ideas have received limited support in elections.” Degrowth is expensive Degrowth is not only politically infeasible because voters would not give up their incomes but also because it is a costly way to tackle the ecological crisis. It has been calculated that if the world shrinks GDP per capita by 10% (around US$7,000 billion), it will reduce carbon emissions by about 3.3 gigatons, meaning a cost of US$2,100 per ton of emissions. A recent study published in Nature put the social cost of carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) at US$185 per ton of emissions. Degrowthers want us to pay more than ten times the price. Degrowth policies are disappointing A recent inventory of degrowth policies identified 530 proposals associated with the movement. This proliferation is because the degrowth movement is “multi-faceted". It has become a rally-cry for anyone with a societal and environmental grievance, whether against capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, or utilitarianism. Because of the confusion this proliferation creates, a recent paper prioritized these into an “Iceberg model of degrowth policy proposals." At the top of the iceberg, prominent policies are universal basic income, work-time reductions, job guarantees, maximum income caps, non-for-profit cooperation, eco-villages, and housing cooperatives. None of these are novel and most are, or have already been, implemented - most extensively in market economies. Furthermore, there is no attempt to link these policy proposals to decoupling - how many carbon emissions would they eliminate? How fast? No evidence is provided. Degrowth is irresponsible The lack of evidence on the carbon reduction that the iceberg model of policies will achieve - and achieve soon, as the matter is pressing - is a concern. We would not imagine subjecting human populations to potentially dangerous experimental drugs without rigorously testing their efficacy. Why embrace the "medicine" prescribed by the degrowth movement? Olivier Simar-Casanova described this ethical and moral problem with degrowth clearly: “Global warming is a serious issue, and claiming to respond to it with solutions of uncertain carbon efficiency, which we do not know how to implement in practice, is irresponsible.” The dangers of shackling economies without any evidence as to the likely outcome are that it would leave the world much more exposed and vulnerable to shocks, make the adjustment to a zero-carbon-emitting economy more costly, and raise the risk of conflict by turning the economy into a zero-sum game. Degrowth is hypocritical Degrowth is no solution to the ecological crisis because it is, at its roots, hypocritical. As one commentator put it: “It is one thing to advocate the end of economic growth if you have no actual fear of poverty. If you are struggling to keep yourself warm and fed, on the other hand, the idea of self-denial – still less of shrinking the economy – will have rather less appeal. Degrowth is a middle–class luxury, an indulgence to be conducted from the comfort of your sofa with its electronic foot-raiser […] People who express disgust with consumerism have a tendency to disapprove of other people’s while overlooking their own.” Conclusion Neither degrowth nor the more mainstream green growth approach offer viable solutions for the ecological crisis. Worse, a recent editorial in Nature magazine pointed out that the disagreement between degrowth and green growth “is impeding action. It’s time for researchers to end their debate. The world needs them to focus on the greater goals of stopping catastrophic environmental destruction and improving well-being.” This is a distraction that cannot be afforded because GDP growth and population growth are, in any case, in decline. We do not need a degrowth experiment to slow it down. We live in the Great Stagnation. Society is gradually ossifying, and with it, its supply of innovative science and ideas, which remain, however remotely, our only chance of avoiding the premature curtailment of humanity’s potential.

Building on the theory of effective demand and modern money theory (MMT), Post Keynesians have proposed two alternative paths to full employment. The first and most common approach relies on fiscal policy to fill the demand gap. The second approach calls for direct job creation through an employer of last resort or job guarantee program (JG). Neither policy was designed to address environmental concerns and indeed both promote growth. However, when compared, it is clear that the JG offers advantages over demand management policy with respect to both employment and the environment.

The demand gap approach seeks a handle on employment via the manipulation of aggregate demand. When aggregate demand in the private sector is insufficient for full employment, fiscal policy can be enacted to boost demand (Arestis and Sawyer 2004) & (2003).The three essential goals of the demand gap approach are: (1) increasing aggregate demand (2) stimulating private investment and (3) increasing productive capacity (P. Tcherneva 2008). This approach suffers from two obvious weaknesses. On the employment front, it is indirect. If the goal is to increase employment, why not hire workers directly?9 On the environmental front, the flaw of the demand gap approach is that aims to achieve full employment through economic growth. As Tcherneva notes, “this is a pro-investment progrowth policy” (ibid.).

If the pursuit of corporate profits led to the paradox now posed by climate change, then the same precept applies if global leaders want to reach net-zero. That’s a cornerstone of the proposed securities rules — requiring companies to disclose their climate-related market risks.

Roger Ballentine explained the logic, a climate capitalist who is the president of Green Strategies Inc. Cheap fossil fuels have powered the globe’s remarkable economic growth. But times have changed, and now is the moment to align profit-seekers with climate-friendly businesses. The market will reward companies that embrace the challenge, while those that do not will get sidelined.

“Saving the planet” can mean many things in practice, but one goal pretty much everyone shares is stopping extinctions. Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, reported on scientists sounding the alarm about high extinction rates, and in the years that followed, the idea that we are in the midst of one of the planet’s greatest mass-extinction events has come to feel like a bedrock truth to many greenies. This framing can make extinction feel like a force too huge and powerful to avert. That’s just not true. As of today, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, the conservation status of 128,918 species has been assessed. Of those, 902 have gone extinct since the year 1500. This is absolutely too many. One is too many. But to cause an extinction event on the scale of those seen millions of years ago, in which more than 75 percent of species disappeared, we would have to lose all our threatened species within a century and then keep losing species at that same super-high rate for between 240 and 540 more years. In other words, the concept assumes that we won’t save anything, ever, and that hundreds of years into the future, we will still be as inept at protecting biodiversity as we are now. You might have also heard that we’ve lost something like 60 percent of wild animals since the 1970s? Surely this suggests that a lot more extinctions are imminent? In 2018, The Atlantic’s Ed Yong helpfully explained that this study actually looked at the average decline of a given population (not species) of wild animal. So severe declines in small populations disproportionately increase the average decline. More recently, a new analysis of the data showed that, indeed, the 60 percent average decline was driven by very severe crashes in a very small number of vertebrate populations. For example, one small population of Australian waterfall frogs declined 99.5 percent over two years. This decline became one data point, which was averaged with 14,000 others, many from stable or increasing populations. Really, less than 3 percent of vertebrate populations are crashing. Remove the most strongly declining populations, and the average would actually be growing slightly. This means that declines are not the rule everywhere. It means that the specific populations in crisis can be identified and helped. And we have the knowledge to save them, if we can marshal the will and resources.

At the heart of the flawed mental model that I believe is responsible for our collective failure to address climate change and resource depletion is an apparently unshakeable conviction that any future for human civilization must include the continuation of economic growth. According to this belief, growth is the engine of the current world order and, without it, the system will collapse and human progress will end. This model has several core principles embedded in it. Here are just a few of them: Economic growth has allowed us to expand our human population to eight billion, a clear sign of success. Capitalism is the best and most equitable way to drive economic growth. It balances market forces of supply and demand and allocates resources in the most efficient, and therefore just, manner possible. Economic growth within a capitalist framework is best measured by increases in Gross Domestic Product or GDP. Economic growth is necessary to meet constantly increasing consumer demand for goods and services. Growth fuels demand, demand requires growth. Economic growth produces human happiness, more growth produces more happiness. Supply scarcity does occur, but it triggers self-correcting responses: investments to find additional supplies and inventions to create substitutes for depleted resources. (source) This system is a perpetual motion machine that can and will continue to produce positive outcomes indefinitely. I am not going to debate the empirical accuracy of these principles here. All are demonstrably false, as others have cogently shown (source, source), including here on Medium (source, source, source). The question I am interested in is not why they’re false, but why the world’s elites appear to be doubling down on them when they are known to be false. I believe this is because of the inherent nature of deeply-embedded mental models. In this case, the mental model underlying the faith in economic growth is not only embedded in decades (centuries?) of economic thought, it is also enshrined in the practices, legal frameworks, and institutions that power the global economic system today. This is why an often-repeated quote rings as true today as it ever has: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” (source, p. 1) Adherence to the gospel of economic growth permeates many of the most popular climate change mitigation and adaptation scenarios in circulation today. Indeed, although the IPCC started issuing climate change reports in 2000, it was not until 2022 — and then only after numerous calls by climate scientists (source, source, source) — that a self-described Low Energy Demand (LED) scenario was added to the portfolio of models (source, Table 1.1, p. 174). Why do we cling so desperately to the idea that civilization cannot survive without economic growth? There are most likely two reasons why the world’s political and economic elites cannot acknowledge that we have entered an era in which economic growth must inevitably come to an end with the depletion of fossil fuels. First, our political leaders can’t give up on the idea of growth because, without growth, the only way they can respond to climate change and resource depletion is by radically decreasing human resource consumption, primarily in the global North. This is seen as politically unfeasible and career suicide for any politician who might suggest it.¹ So no political leader, with the possible exception of the Secretary-General of the UN (who is not the leader of a sovereign nation), is willing to talk about it. One consequence of this reticence among our political leadership is that the general public knows much less about resource depletion than it does about climate change. This is likely to leave the world’s population dangerously unprepared for understanding the shortages and scarcities that are already beginning to appear, as climate change disrupts food production, manufacturing, and distribution channels around the world (source). The second reason our political and economic leaders can’t give up on the idea of economic growth is because, without growth, capitalism has no solution to the problem of persistent economic inequality, both within and between nations. Defenders of capitalism like to point out that “economic growth has lifted billions of people out of poverty” (source). This assertion may be technically correct (although there is strong evidence it is not), but it masks a deeper fact: the rate at which growth has contributed to reducing poverty at the bottom of the income ladder is minuscule compared to the rate at which growth has concentrated income and wealth among the world’s most wealthy. According to one recent report on global inequality: “Some countries have reduced the numbers of people living in extreme poverty. But economic gaps have continued to grow as the very richest amass unprecedented levels of wealth. Among industrial nations, the United States is by far the most top-heavy, with much greater shares of national wealth and income going to the richest 1 percent than any other country.” Increasing inequality is a feature, not a bug, of modern capitalism (source). As French economist Thomas Piketty has shown, because return on capital historically grows faster than return on labor, capitalist accumulation inevitably increases the gap between rich and poor. As long as the whole system continues to produce growth, the needs of those at the bottom can presumably be met without sacrificing any of the wealth of those at the top. But without growth, the economic pie becomes fixed and any gains at the bottom must come out of the shares of those at the top, most likely through much-feared and highly-resisted wealth taxes. Or so it is believed by our political and economic elites, which gives them a compelling second reason to reject imagining a world without growth. As one commentator has put it: “economists and policymakers often regard growth as a substitute for equality: it is politically easier to grow total income and expect that enough will trickle down to improve the lives of ordinary people than it is to distribute existing income more fairly, as this requires an attack on the interests of the dominant class.” (source, p. 57) Capitalism is not a system for maximizing abundance or human wellbeing, it is a system for maximizing capital accumulation. This leads to a kind of abundance, but only for some, the small minority of capitalists at the top of the global economy. Ultimately, these people are so deeply invested — both financially and cognitively — in the system that nurtures them that they seem unable to even imagine a world in which it no longer operates. So, why do we cling so desperately to the idea that civilization cannot survive without economic growth? The short answer is: because capitalism cannot survive without economic growth, capitalists cannot survive without capitalism, and the modern neoliberal order cannot survive without capitalists. QED, civilization — as we know it today — cannot survive without economic growth. Ironically, that’s something pretty much everyone can agree on.

Ultimately, the proposal for degrowth as proposed by the Degrowth movement turns out, much like that of green growth, not to be a solution. Most importantly, degrowth has been criticised that its proposal to reduce the GDP of advanced economies will have no significant impact on reducing the world’s Material Footprint (MF), or carbon emissions, significantly enough to avoid an ecological overshoot. This is because most (63%) of current carbon emissions come from developing countries - where it will only continue to increase in the foreseeable future. The 2022 Emissions Gap Report notes UNEP (2022, p. 67) that “virtually the entire future increase in global primary energy demand is expected to occur in these [developing] economies.” And after the GDP of rich economies are downsized - say by a significant 40%, there would still remain a footprint of 60% and 60% of their economies to de-carbonise (Hickel and Hallegatte, 2022). van den Bergh (2011, p.885) concluded that “Even if we would manage to ‘scale the economy down’ to 50% [....] we still only would have reduced the size of the environmental problems by half. But this is by far insufficient for most environmental problems.” It is clearly insufficient to halt the growth in material footprints and carbon emissions and not reduce these “tout court.” Phillips (2019) uses the example of the successful reduction in the hole in the ozone layer to illustrate the shortcoming of the Degrowth proposal, explaining that: “we embraced degrowth with respect to ozone depletion by attempting to arrest growth in, say, the number of fridges in the world—or even reduce the total number—instead of regulation to enforce technology-switching, disaster would have befallen us. Saying ”this many fridges and no more” would only have arrested the growth in emissions, not emissions tout court” (Phillips, 2019). Moreover, even if the GDP growth of all countries, not only that of the developed countries, could be curtailed, it may still not be effective to reduce carbon emissions and MF sufficiently to achieve climate goals. This can easily be seen using the so-called IPAT identity, used to gauge the drivers of the environmental impact of the economy (Bretschger, 2021; Stijn, 2021). The IPAT identity decomposes the environmental impact (I) of an economy into the consequences of population (P), affluence (A) and technology (T) (Holdren, 1993). It can be written as follows (where a ‘hat’ over a variable indicates a rate of change): I = Pˆ + Aˆ P + Tˆ A (1) If affluence (A) - say measured in GDP - is reduced as per degrowthers’ proposal, it will lead to a reduction in impact (I ). This is the basis of degrowth. However, if Pˆ continues to grow, and if technological innovation (Tˆ) declines or remain slow, then the reduction in impact caused by GDP degrowth would be offset. The important point to note is that both of these offset mechanism are more likely to apply at lower levels of GDP. Furthermore, if reduced GDP lead to a reduction in technological innovation in the richer countries, the environmental impact may be even worse. Holdren (1993, p.5) shows in this regard that “a change for the worse in the technology of production is more serious environmentally if it occurs in a populous, affluent society than if it occurs in a small, poor one” - which are the type of the societies that the Degrowth movement want to downsize. Worse even, not only is downsizing the economies of rich countries not likely to be effective, but it may worsen ecological overshoot in several ways. “degrowth might turn out to be dirty” (van den Bergh, 2011, p.882). One is that countries will have less resources to invest in climate change mitigation and adaptation technologies, and hence they will be more vulnerable to the impacts of ecological deterioration (Phillips, 2019). A second is that firms may substitute more expensive cleaner production techniques for cheaper, but more polluting, technologies. Third, government revenues will drop - an inevitable consequence of economic shrinkage. Governments would not be able to borrow further to spend on social and basic needs or environmental protection. They would need to repay their existing debt - in the EU, the rule that government debt cannot exceed 60% of GDP implies that, if GDP declined, debt would also need to fall (Stijn, 2021). Fourth, poorer households in (degrowthed) rich countries are likely to revert to deforestation30 and environmental destruction - as they did during the 2021/2022 winters in Europe when faced with rising energy prices following the Ukraine war (Moloney, 2022; Rankin, 2021; Kauppi et al., 2006). A further shortcoming of degrowth is that if one considers degrowth as a method to decreasing carbon emissions, it is a much more expensive method than any currently comparable technological investments as green growth is pushing for. According to calculations by Jakob and Edenhofer (2014) if the world shrinks GDP per capita by 10% (around US$7,000 billion), it will reduce carbon emissions by about 3.3 gigatons, meaning a cost of US$ 2,100 per ton of emissions. In comparison, the social cost of carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) has been estimated at US$ 185 per ton of emissions (Rennert et al., 2022). In additionn to being likely ineffective, to worsen the environmental challenge, and a very expensive way to reduce carbon emissions, degrowth may disproportionately hurt the poorest of the poor - and make global inequality worse. One mechanism through which this could occur is that degrowth in the Global North will severely curtail development in the Global South because of the intertwined nature of the global economy (and there is no time for the Global South to successfully “decouple” if at all that is possible). The COVID-19 crisis emphasized this inter-dependency - poverty rose more sharply in the Global South than the Global North - and indicated how difficult it would be for the Global South to decouple from the Global North. Hence it may be indeed the case that, ”the degrowth people are living a fantasy where they assume that if you bake a smaller cake, then for some reason, the poorest will get a bigger share of it [. . . .] that has never happened in history” (Horowitz, 2022).Ultimately, degrowth will make global inequality worse because it will be the poor will pay the price, and not the rich, who has the means and connections to find shelter31 - and who has arguably the most wasteful consumption. Hence, “Degrowth is, in essence, a form of ecological austerity for working-class people” (Chambers, 2021). Finally, in the words of Stijn (2021) degrowth is not only ineffective, likely to worsen the environment, very expensive and a form of austerity for the working class, but redundant: “Economic degrowth is not necessary, because it targets the wrong enemy. GDP is not the enemy; environmental impact is the enemy. Environmental scientists are able to determine upper bounds on environmental impacts such as pollution. For example, climatologists have determined the carbon budget: how much greenhouse gases can still be emitted that keep the atmospheric temperature increase below 1,5°C. But GDP is measured in dollars, a totally different quantity than kg CO2. Hence, none of the economic degrowthers are able to say what is the upper bound or true limit on affluence. There are no scientific studies that estimate the maximum level of GDP that is still permissible.”

Torres’s arguments often rely on conflation of what can be dubbed “reasonable” and “unreasonable” speculation. For example, to assume that (post)humans will one day colonize and perhaps terraform Mars is a reasonable speculation; to assume that (post)humans will one day develop “weapons that could destroy entire galaxies” (p. 82) is an unreasonable speculation. There are no indications whatsoever that the latter is physically possible. For instance, the binding energy of the stellar subsystem of the Milky Way is about –6 ´ 1050 J; if “destruction of the Galaxy” means unbinding all its stars, this would imply the hyperweapon capable of releasing at least that much energy, equivalent to completely converting more than 3,000 Solar-mass stars into usable energy (as per E = mc2 ).3 This is significantly more than the output of the most energetic known natural processes, including supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and the most violent QSOs; even more importantly, we cannot envision – if our current astrophysics is correct and there is no bulk antimatter anywhere in the universe – the kind of energy-releasing process necessary for this task. Even if our distant posthuman descendants manage to discover and control such a process, the timescale for such a destruction would of necessity be measured in multiples of 107 or 108 years, which sounds a bit unreasonable in the tactical sense. And even if a military operation spanning 100,000,000 years or so could be palatable to a hypothetical future immortals, its efficiency would be doubtful, since not only would the adversary have enough time to prepare, but the unbinding might not automatically mean the destruction of adversary’s material and industrial capacities. (And similar objections could be posed to other construals of “destruction”, e.g., attempting to collapse all baryonic matter into the central supermassive black hole.)

The former paper was produced by Aaron Berliner from the University of California, Berkeley, and Chris McKay from the Space Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center. In their paper, the two researchers present a timeline for the terraforming of Mars that includes a Warming Phase and an Oxygenation Phase, as well as all the necessary steps that would precede and follow. As they state in their paper's Introduction: "Terraforming Mars can be divided into two phases. The first phase is warming the planet from the present average surface temperature of -60° C to a value close to Earth's average temperature to +15° C, and recreating a thick CO² atmosphere. This warming phase is relatively easy and quick, and could take ~100 years. The second phase is producing levels of O² in the atmosphere that would allow humans and other large mammals to breath normally. This oxygenation phase is relatively difficult and would take 100,000 years or more, unless one postulates a technological breakthrough." Before these can begin, Berliner and McKay acknowledge that certain "pre-terraforming" steps need to be taken. These include investigating Mars' environment to determine the levels of water on the surface, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and in ice form in the polar regions, and the amount of nitrates in Martian soil. As they explain, all of these are key to the practicality of making a biosphere on Mars. So far, the available evidence points towards all three elements existing in abundance on Mars. While most of Mars water is currently in the form of ice in the polar regions and polar caps, there is enough there to support a water cycle – complete with clouds, rain, rivers and lakes. Meanwhile, some estimates claim that there is enough CO² in ice form in the polar regions to create an atmosphere equal to the sea level pressure on Earth. Nitrogen is a also fundamental requirement for life and necessary constituent of a breathable atmosphere, and recent data by the Curiosity Rover indicate that nitrates account for ~0.03% by mass of the soil on Mars, which is encouraging for terraforming. On top of that, scientists will need to tackle certain ethical questions related to how terraforming could impact Mars. For instance, if there is currently any life on Mars (or life that could be revived), this would present an undeniable ethical dilemma for human colonists – especially if this life is related to life on Earth. As they explain: "If Martian life is related to Earth life – possibly due to meteorite exchange – then the situation is familiar, and issues of what other types of Earth life to introduce and when must be addressed. However, if Martian life in unrelated to Earth life and clearly represents a second genesis of life, then significant technical and ethical issues are raised." To break Phase One – "The Warming Phase" – down succinctly, the authors address an issue familiar to us today. Essentially, we are altering our own climate here on Earth by introducing CO² and "super greenhouse gases" to the atmosphere, which is increasing Earth's average temperature at a rate of many degrees centigrade per century. And whereas this has been unintentional on Earth, on Mars it could be re-purposed to deliberately warm the environment. "The timescale for warming Mars after a focused effort of super greenhouse gas production is short, only 100 years or so," they claim. "If all the solar incident on Mars were to be captured with 100% efficiency, then Mars would warm to Earth-like temperatures in about 10 years. However, the efficiency of the greenhouse effect is plausibly about 10%, thus the time it would take to warm Mars would be ~100 years." Once this thick atmosphere has been created, the next step involves converting it into something breathable for humans – where O² levels would be the equivalent of about 13% of sea level air pressure here on Earth and CO² levels would be less than 1%. This phase, known as the "Oxygenation Phase", would take considerably longer. Once again, they turn towards a terrestrial example to show how such a process could work. Here on Earth, they claim, the high levels of oxygen gas (O²) and low levels of CO² are due to photosynthesis. These reactions rely on the sun's energy to convert water and carbon dioxide into biomass – which is represented by the equation H²O + CO² = CH²O + O². As they illustrate, this process would take between 100,000 and 170,000 years: "If all the sunlight incident on Mars was harnessed with 100% efficiency to perform this chemical transformation it would take only 17 years to produce high levels of O². However, the likely efficiency of any process that can transform H²O and CO² into biomass and O² is much less than 100%. The only example we have of a process that can globally alter the CO² and O² of an entire plant is global biology. On Earth the efficiency of the global biosphere in using sunlight to produced biomass and O2 is 0.01%. Thus the timescale for producing an O² rich atmosphere on Mars is 10,000 x 17 years, or ~ 170,000 years." However, they make allowances for synthetic biology and other biotechnologies, which they claim could increase the efficiency and reduce the timescale to a solid 100,000 years. In addition, if human beings could utilize natural photosynthesis (which has a comparatively high efficiency of 5%) over the entire planet – i.e. planting foliage all over Mars – then the timescale could be reduced to even a few centuries. Finally, they outline the steps that need to be taken to get the ball rolling. These steps include adapting current and future robotic missions to assess Martian resources, mathematical and computer models that could examine the processes involved, an initiative to create synthetic organisms for Mars, a means to test terraforming techniques in a limited environment, and a planetary agreement that would establish restrictions and protections. Quoting Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Red Mars Trilogy, (the seminal work of science fiction about terraforming Mars) they issue a call to action. Addressing how long the process of terraforming Mars will take, they assert that we "might as well start now".

You use the phrase “the fourth wave of science.” Explain what this means and how it could one day make it possible to terraform Mars. We’ve had three waves of scientific innovation. The first wave, the Industrial Revolution, gave us the steam engine, the locomotive, and factories. The second wave was electricity and magnetism, whereby we had TV, internal combustion cars, a beginning of the space program. The third revolution is high tech: computers, lasers, the Internet. Now we have the fourth wave of innovation: artificial intelligence, biotech, and nanotech. That’s going to change the way we view Mars. Many people say Mars is cold and desolate, and there’s nothing to grow there. We can genetically modify plants and algae to thrive in the Martian atmosphere. But who’s going to do the heavy lifting? We all would like to see futuristic cities on Mars, but robots are going to become much more adapted to working in these harsh environments by the end of this century, so we expect to see robotic construction workers building the fantastic domed cities you see in science fiction novels.

In light of this, Yakolev presents what he considers to be the most likely prospects for humanity's exit to space between now and 2030. This will include the creation of the first space biospheres with artificial gravity, which will lead to key developments in terms of materials technology, life support-systems, and the robotic systems and infrastructure needed to install and service habitats in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). These habitats could be serviced thanks to the creation of robotic spacecraft that could harvest resources from nearby bodies – such as the Moon and Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). This concept would not only remove the need for planetary protections – i.e. worries about contaminating Mars' biosphere (assuming the presence of bacterial life), it would also allow human beings to become accustomed to space more gradually. As Yakovlev told Universe Today via email, the advantages to space habitats can be broken down into four points: "1. This is a universal way of mastering the infinite spaces of the Cosmos, both in the Solar System and outside it. We do not need surfaces for installing houses, but resources that robots will deliver from planets and satellites. 2. The possibility of creating a habitat as close as possible to the earth's cradle allows one to escape from the inevitable physical degradation under a different gravity. It is easier to create a protective magnetic field. "3. The transfer between worlds and sources of resources will not be a dangerous expedition, but a normal life. Is it good for sailors without their families? 4. The probability of death or degradation of [hu]mankind as a result of the global catastrophe is significantly reduced, as the colonization of the planets includes reconnaissance, delivery of goods, shuttle transport of people – and this is much longer than the construction of the biosphere in the Moon's orbit. Dr. Stephen William Hawking is right, a person does not have much time." And with space habitats in place, some very crucial research could begin, including medical and biologic research which would involve the first children born in space. It would also facilitate the development of reliable space shuttles and resource extraction technologies, which will come in handy for the settlement of other bodies – like the Moon, Mars, and even exoplanets. Ultimately, Yakolev thinks that space biospheres could also be accomplished within a reasonable timeframe – i.e. between 2030 and 2050 – which is simply not possible with terraforming. Citing the growing presence and power of the commercial space sector, Yakolev also believed a lot of the infrastructure that is necessary is already in place (or under development). "After we overcome the inertia of thinking +20 years, the experimental biosphere (like the settlement in Antarctica with watches), in 50 years the first generation of children born in the Cosmos will grow and the Earth will decrease, because it will enter the legends as a whole… As a result, terraforming will be canceled. And the subsequent conference will open the way for real exploration of the Cosmos. I'm proud to be on the same planet as Elon Reeve Musk. His missiles will be useful to lift designs for the first biosphere from the lunar factories. This is a close and direct way to conquer the Cosmos." With NASA scientists and entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Bas Landorp looking to colonize Mars in the near future, and other commercial aerospace companies developing LEO, the size and shape of humanity's future in space is difficult to predict. Perhaps we will jointly decide on a path that takes us to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Perhaps we will see our best efforts directed into near-Earth space. Or perhaps we will see ourselves going off in multiple directions at once. Whereas some groups will advocate creating space habitats in LEO (and later, elsewhere in the Solar System) that rely on artificial gravity and robotic spaceships mining asteroids for materials, others will focus on establishing outposts on planetary bodies, with the goal of turning them into "new Earths". Between them, we can expect that humans will begin developing a degree of "space expertise" in this century, which will certainly come in handy when we start pushing the boundaries of exploration and colonization even further.

As I write these words, suns are illuminating and heating empty rooms, unused energy is being flushed down black holes, and our great common endowment of negentropy is being irreversibly degraded into entropy on a cosmic scale. These are resources that an advanced civilization could have used to create value-structures, such as sentient beings living worthwhile lives. The rate of this loss boggles the mind. One recent paper speculates, using loose theoretical considerations based on the rate of increase of entropy, that the loss of potential human lives in our own galactic supercluster is at least ~10^46 per century of delayed colonization.[1] This estimate assumes that all the lost entropy could have been used for productive purposes, although no currently known technological mechanisms are even remotely capable of doing that. Since the estimate is meant to be a lower bound, this radically unconservative assumption is undesirable. We can, however, get a lower bound more straightforwardly by simply counting the number or stars in our galactic supercluster and multiplying this number with the amount of computing power that the resources of each star could be used to generate using technologies for whose feasibility a strong case has already been made. We can then divide this total with the estimated amount of computing power needed to simulate one human life. As a rough approximation, let us say the Virgo Supercluster contains 10^13 stars. One estimate of the computing power extractable from a star and with an associated planet-sized computational structure, using advanced molecular nanotechnology[2], is 10^42 operations per second.[3] A typical estimate of the human brain’s processing power is roughly 10^17 operations per second or less.[4] Not much more seems to be needed to simulate the relevant parts of the environment in sufficient detail to enable the simulated minds to have experiences indistinguishable from typical current human experiences.[5] Given these estimates, it follows that the potential for approximately 10^38 human lives is lost every century that colonization of our local supercluster is delayed; or equivalently, about 10^29 potential human lives per second. While this estimate is conservative in that it assumes only computational mechanisms whose implementation has been at least outlined in the literature, it is useful to have an even more conservative estimate that does not assume a non-biological instantiation of the potential persons. Suppose that about 10^10 biological humans could be sustained around an average star. Then the Virgo Supercluster could contain 10^23 biological humans. This corresponds to a loss of potential equal to about 10^14 potential human lives per second of delayed colonization. What matters for present purposes is not the exact numbers but the fact that they are huge. Even with the most conservative estimate, assuming a biological implementation of all persons, the potential for one hundred trillion potential human beings is lost for every second of postponement of colonization of our supercluster.[6]

The establishing documents for the Brookings Doha Center may be uncomfortable reading for advocates of academic freedom.

Inked in 2007, the deal between the storied Washington think tank and Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs laid out the financial terms under which Brookings established a groundbreaking outpost in the Persian Gulf. The fantastically rich, autocratic emirate would put up $5 million, bankrolling the groundbreaking research facility — but also got a notable degree of contractual prerogatives for a government over a proudly independent organization. The center’s director, the , would “engage in regular consultation with [the foreign ministry],” submitting an annual budget and “agenda for programs that will be developed by the Center.” Any changes would require the ministry’s OK. (The document was obtained from Qatar by a U.S. source; a Brookings spokesperson did not dispute its validity.)

This is true not just in the military field, but in every policy area that affects corporations’ bottom lines, as is suggested by the Times‘ reporting on the even more ubiquitous Brookings Institution promoting the JPMorgan bank’s image:

JPMorgan,  dated a month before the agreement was signed, said the pending donation to Brookings “deepens/extends relationships with important client base among business and civic leaders both in the US and abroad.”

The Top 10 Think Tanks by Amount Received from U.S. Government and Defense Contractors

RAND Corporation $1,029,100,000

Controversies Detractors of the proposal point to a number of potential risks having to do with the cost of the programme and its governance, the types of jobs it would create, its interaction with the private labour market, its influence on productivity, and the risk of inflation. o Inflationary: Without the risk of unemployment, workers would bargain up their wages leading to inflation. o Unaffordable: the government could not afford it. o Unmanageable: the size of the programme would require a problematic government bureaucracy. o Inefficient: being guaranteed a job whatever happens, participants would have no incentives to work hard. o Polarising: participants would be stigmatised as lesser workers. 7 o Nationalising: it is a hidden government takeover. o Crowding out: it would displace workers from the private to the public sector. o Skill problem: the community work that is most needed requires skills that unemployed people do not currently have. o Job fluctuations: its cyclical nature (expand in recessions and shrink in expansions) restrains the type of jobs that can be offered. o Make-work: participants are being paid to perform useless work.

The recent rise of populism has many potential causes, both cultural and economic. Growing evidence suggests that labor market disruptions due to globalization and technological progress as well as the crisis-driven spikes in unemployment have played a major role in the rise of populism in advanced economies. However, there is no evidence showing that populist policy agendas have a realistic shot at addressing such problems. Instead, standard progressive proposals such as stronger counter-cyclical fiscal policies to stabilize employment during recessions, fighting tax avoidance, strengthening social safety nets, and active labor market policies should be enacted.

Motivation

4. The role of artificial intelligence in the reproduction of capital Sustainable reproduction of the capitalist economy, without crises and imbalances, is an important task in today's time of the Great Recession, that is, an economy with its fundamental instability. The way out of this impasse may be a combination of state planning and a free market. At the same time, there are many concepts of organizing such planning, for example, subordinating the reproduction of the economy to an interbranch balance, organizations of institutes of indicative planning, etc. For a long time, it was believed that planning was impossible to organize due to the lack of computational capabilities of technology. Nowadays, with a sharp increase in computer performance, such an opportunity already exists. Combining these capacities with artificial intelligence, big data, you can remove many technical obstacles to the distortion of information for planning. To overcome the global crisis, it is necessary to create a proactive artificial intelligence system that develops a dynamic system of intersectoral balance, suggesting an effective relationship between planning entities. Construction of this system involves reflection of the effect of objective economic laws. These measures of introducing AI into the strategic planning system will allow developing crisis-free reproduction of the national economy, while a policy of quantitative easing or other incentive measures will lead to relative overaccumulation of capital in the real sector, inflation of financially speculative bubbles, etc.

AI is generally acknowledged to be an engine of productivity and growth. With its ability to process and analyse enormous volumes of data, it has the potential to boost the efficiency of business operations. The McKinsey Global Institute predicts that around 70% of companies will adopt at least one type of AI technology by 2030, and less than half of large companies may use the full range of AI technologies. Price Waterhouse Coopers predicts that AI could increase global GDP by 14% in 2030 (PwC 2017). Research into the impact of AI on the labour market has expanded recently. Acemoglu and Restrepo (2018) provide a theoretical framework to understand the impact of new technologies on the labour market. They decompose the effect of new technologies on labour into three broad effects: a displacement effect, a productivity effect and a reinstatement effect (new technologies can serve as a platform to create new tasks in many service industries, where labour has a comparative advantage relative to machines, boosting labour demand). Frank et al. (2019) classify current literature on the labour market implications of AI into two broad categories: a doomsayer’s perspective and an optimist’s perspective. Doomsayers believe that labour substitution by AI will harm employment. Frey and Osborne (2013) estimate that 47% of total US employment is at risk of losing jobs to automation over the next decade. Their research reveals that a substantial share of employment in service occupations – where most US job growth has occurred over the past decades – are highly susceptible to computerisation. Bowles (2014) uses Frey and Osborne’s (2013) framework to estimate that 54% of EU jobs are at risk of computerisation. Acemoglu and Restrepo (2017) provide a historical example of excessive automation negatively affecting the labour market due to weak productivity and reinstatement effects, finding that areas in the US most exposed to industrial automation in the 1990s and 2000s experienced large and robust negative effects on employment and wages. AI is also expected to have a disruptive effect on the composition of the labour market. Autor (2015) presented evidence that the labour market has become polarised over the last few decades towards low-skilled and high-skilled jobs and away from medium-skilled jobs, due to the advent of computers. However, he stated that this polarisation is likely to be reversed, as some low-and-medium skilled jobs are likely to be relatively resistant to automation, while some highly-skilled but relatively routine jobs may be automatable (potentially with technologies like AI). However, Petropoulos and Brekelmans (2020) concluded that unlike the computer and robotic revolution, the AI revolution is unlikely to cause job polarisation as it will affect alter low-skilled, middle-skilled and high-skilled jobs. Optimists believe that AI’s productivity and reinstatement effects will be more than enough to compensate for the substitution effect. Some opinion pieces project that AI and robotics will have created up to 90 million jobs by 2025, indicating a strong positive labour market impact. The World Economic Forum concluded in October 2020 that while AI would likely take away 85 million jobs globally by 2025, it would also generate 97 million new jobs in fields ranging from big data and machine learning to information security and digital marketing. Lawrence et al. (2017) argue that AI automation is unlikely to negatively impact the employment market due to its large positive spillover effects (reinstatement effect), which would counteract the negative direct effects of substitution in the labour market and can be seen as a Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’. They believe that automation is likely to transform, rather than eliminate, work. In contrast to other studies finding larger negative effects, Arntz et al. (2016) estimate that only 9% of jobs in the UK are susceptible to automation in the next decade. They argue that instead of substitution, transformation is more likely to occur, with 35% of jobs would change radically in the next two decades.

How Universal Basic Income Can Advance the United States’ China Strategy

The infrastructure bill is a good start, but the U.S. must go much further in “domestic renewal” to truly compete with China.