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   Sally Strange (sallystrange@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Friday, 07-Feb-2025 06:02:19 JST Sally Strange

   in reply to

   "You just want everyone to be poor and miserable!" is what capitalism apologists say (with zero sense of irony). Nope, they're either uninformed or lying--and I seriously urge you to go with "lying" as the default, in order to reduce the potential for mischief by bad actors.

   "Empirical research points therefore to an important conundrum. On the one hand, high-income countries achieve high levels of human wellbeing but significantly overshoot their fair share of planetary boundaries. The level of resource use of these high-income countries cannot be universalised. On the other hand, despite a decline in the amount of energy required to achieve human development goals, modelling decent living standards for all within planetary boundaries shows that, under existing conditions, there is very little room for excess or for inequality.
   This research has led to a shift of attention towards alternative provisioning systems and the types of distributional dynamics that could radically change current relationships between resource use and human wellbeing... A recent review of industrial transformation models and scenarios found that combined supply-side and demand-side measures could reduce current economy-wide material use by 56%, energy use by 40–60%, and greenhouse gas emissions by 70% to net zero."

   #degrowth #equality

   https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(24)00310-3/fulltext

   • Embed this notice
     Sally Strange (sallystrange@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Friday, 07-Feb-2025 06:02:20 JST Sally Strange

     Growth as a goal for societies is basically brand new.

     "Historians and social scientists have sought to explain the origins of the political hegemony of growth: the dominance of the pursuit of GDP growth as a political objective. Growth might not be an economic imperative in the abstract, this literature suggests, but rather a political imperative, locked in by power relations, institutions, and accounting systems geared towards its pursuit. The contemporary preoccupation with GDP first emerged as a response to the need of governments to manage economic production during the Great Depression and the Second World War, whereas growth-targeting became entrenched during the Cold War, linked to the arms race between the two blocs. An iterative process between accounting and targeting, and the institutions geared towards the measurement and pursuit of GDP, gradually made growth appear as a natural and unquestionable objective. But the success of growth, as a political objective, stems from its function, which was to appease and deflect distributional conflict, becoming a core factor of state legitimacy and political stability."

     Btw basically every sentence in this has citations, in case you want to read MORE. I'm taking the citation numbers out to make for easier reading.

     #Degrowth #history #WWII #ColdWar #Growth #EconomicGrowth @histodons

     https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(24)00310-3/fulltext

     carl marks repeated this.