The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less: The degrowth movement wants to shrink the economy to address climate change, and create lives with less stuff, less work, and better well-being.

It's not that radical, we lived with less than this for tens of thousands of years before the industrial revolution.

This sounds nice for someone in a developed country who has all they need, and is only satisfying their wants. But for most of the world, economic development is a necessity and a lifesaver. Child mortality is reduced, life expectancy and education level increased, child labor decreased, as a country's economy grows. This is not a fringe right-wing idea. This is the very real effect of economic growth in developing countries, i.e. most of the world.

Degrowthers often seem to forget that applying their ideas will literally kill millions in developing countries, by preventing the economic developments that would have saved them.

FWIW, I am not a fan of unbridled capitalism either but think that it is important to consider science in important matters like this and not just go with gut feeling. That applies to both fascism and degrowth.
- I think a more fair take is that we need growth in underdeveloped places and degrowth in highly developed places. It's less about changing the total economic output and more about changing how that output is distributed.
- Degrowth addresses that, contrary to your opinion. Degrowth in the global north provides the space for the global south to properly develop, something that has been systematically denied to them in many places by western powers through unequal exchange and neocolonialism.
- It seems like the choice is to die from the environmental issues or die from poor health care? There is no way anyone survives with the current state of things.
Its often includes with a more holistic approach to restructuring society. Degrowth is only a part of the puzzle a lot of radicals are advocating for in order to combat climate change. A lot of proponents of degrowth also call for a solarpunk style of city planning, decentralized/libertarian (real libertarian) politics and plenty more

The article is, in my opinion, purposely mischaracterizing the degrowth movement. I would say degrowth is more a natural reaction to the excesses of capitalism than movement about addressing climate change.

I'm a pretty big degrowth advocate and I approach it first from a climate change standpoint, however capitalism is clearly the primary driver behind climate change, so I rarely see the point in making a distinction. But I'm happy to coordinate with those who approach it primarily from an economic standpoint, too.
Isn't the former very naturally part of the latter though ? And doesn't the article also raise that point as well? Fundamentally it's an idea that often gets interpreted through both those lenses because it could help with both conflicts, which is also what by definition is it's purposely trying to accomplish, the first explicitly and the second is implicit in

... within planetary boundaries.

This connection I think should be embraced because climate change is more attractive as a topic to most people than critiques of capitalism but obviously one leads naturally into the other. Saying that degrowth aims to address climate change is more just a description of partial content rather than a mischaracterization and the body of the article tries reasonably to explain other parts as well, less work and better well being are right there in the title, both not a dishonest description of other parts of the philosophy.

After all no one that accepts degrowth as a concept would answer the question "Should we degrow to combat climate change ?" with a "No" All answers would be "yes and ..." or "yes but ..."

At the end of the day Vice writing will never be perfect but nowadays for genpop media outlets it tries much harder than most to paint an honest picture of the world, and calling this article a mischaracterization seems to me a little harsh, if you've never heard of it the article certainly could honestly teach and spark interest for a this "new" way of thinking, and you need just one word to google to get more rigorous explanation if you wanted it.

How about we do two things

Like how about we work less and we immediately and totally nationalize energy and agriculture haha just a thought haha (fireflies are going extinct haha)

Way ahead of you, energy has already been nationalized here for a long time.
- Where?
nationalize ... agriculture

🚨LAND REFORM ALERT🚨

🚨LAND REFORM ALERT🚨

🚨LAND REFORM ALERT🚨

Do not worry, the CIA is contracting death squads to secure democracy in your country as we speak.

This will go the same way the "Green New Deal" did. It will scare the ruling class, the ruling class will send its media minions to demonize it, and nothing will change. doomer

no actually, you forgot the final step of "loudly and blindly double down"
- You mean like destroying new light bulbs and rolling coal to trigger the wokes?
But, muh IPhone 32 ?
- But the phone is 5% lighter this time!
  
  ... and will be replaced in a year

Protip: if you want your movement to gain any political traction, don't call it the degrowth movement

What would you call it? Its kinda like the "defund police" thing. If they called it "reallocate police resources" opposition to the movement would just use the stronger "defund police" language as a cudgel to smear it. It's best to own it and educate
Pro tip: any one telling you the problem with your movement is the optics, doesn't actually care about the objectives of thst movement
- I care very much for this objective, I just think you'll never convince the dumber people with a name they'd immediately perceive as very negative
Defund Wall St.
why? it's exactly what it is.
- Because the average person is too dumb
- For political reasons.
One Shrinky Dinky movement coming up just for you 😘

In order to slow the economy down and not wreak havoc, he said, we have to reconfigure our ideas about the entire economic system.

This is how degrowthers envision the process: After a reduction in material and energy consumption, which will constrict the economy, there should also be a redistribution of existing wealth, and a transition from a materialistic society to one in which the values are based on simpler lifestyles and unpaid work and activities.

Sounds good to me. It is a fair point that the basic operation of our society depends on continual growth, but redistribution seems like it would be an effective way of mitigating those problems degrowth might cause. We have more than enough resources to keep everyone alive, we just have to use them.

I'd rather just do the full communism now path, where once every man, woman and child has all their needs and many of their wants met, there isn't a desire to chase the next fashion craze, or buy the next iphone or "keep up with the jones'" as it were because the Jones' have the same stuff you do, but maybe they spend their ample leisure time exercising, you spend your time gardening.
- The only way that will work is if you have a violent dictatorship. Welcome Stalin back basically.
  
  I see more future in putting laws in place that severely limits what companies can do. Companies cannot grow beyond 1000 people. Tax any wealth thing heavily. Tax negatively for the poor, tax a little for those with a little and more for those that are better off. Taxes go up and up once you are richer and Once your income and or networth reaches a certain level, tax 100%.
  
  Institute 3-4 work day weeks
  
  Institute universal income
  
  Out extreme limits on advertising and marketing. Those two are the real evils of mankind.
  
  Require news outlets be paid for by the government and be required to be neutral and factual
  
  With changes like that we can remain a (serverely limited) capitalist system that pays for the very nice social system below that doesn't focus in money anymore
there should also be a redistribution of existing wealth

there should also be unicorns farting rainbows.
- expropriate their purse or their person. It's their choice.
Yeah, good luck with that. Won't happen. Do you really believe that the 1% will give up it's riches? Do you really believe that the politicians, you know, the guys with money, will decide on redistribution?

Good luck.
- the politicians, you know, the guys with money
  
  There is overlap, but ultimately it's not a monolith. Anyone can be a politician and politicians succeed or fail on people voting for them. What are the rich gonna do with ownership of all the land and all the companies and all the resources anyway? Effectively enslave everybody? Wait for us to starve so they can keep playing number-go-up in secure enclaves while the world burns around them?
  
  You mention universal income in another comment. If you do it right, that's redistribution. You give people the means to keep living, every other problem gets less intense. I think there's a good chance that when things get bad enough, even hardcore capitalists will go for it because it's a way for capitalism to continue existing in a form that isn't a dead useless husk. IMO a much better option than pulling for a civil war hoping the result will be a socialist utopia and not just evil warlords doing evil warlord stuff.

You don't need to wait, you can start this now on your own. Is it easy? F*ck no. Can it be done? Yes, and once you are used to it, it's a great way to live.

Hell yes it's a great way to live.

If we implement government policies that incentivize simple living, and tax wasteful living exponentially, it's going to benefit individuals.

Wealthy people will be better off from having most of their wealth taxed because they'll have a more enjoyable simple lifestyle.
For real. It's the same with food.

Not that I eat healthy... Because I'm practically underweight so I'll generally eat anything. But after eating organic for awhile in the past I definitely favor fresh healthy over junk food. Regular Americanized food just tastes fake to me.

Same with my room/home... It's so much easier when you only have less to take care of.
And you'll be a better person for it. There's nothing like putting theory into practice. Even if you don't make a difference to anyone else, you'll make a difference for yourself.

Degrowth is such a fucking stupid idea. What we need is socialism. The demonic oligarchs that run the world are never going to prioritize reducing climate change. They've made that clear over the last century. There's too much profit to be made.

Worker owned means of production is the only solution. Only then can we direct the productive forces toward solving the most immediate problems that humanity faces. We've created so much productivity, but we need to guide it in the direction of sustainability instead of the profit motive.

You're conflating two very different things. You can have an equitable system of worker owned coops that still has a growth mindset and destroys the ecosystem. You don't magically become sustainable when socialism becomes a thing. Growth itself when we're bound by the resources of a single planet a problem, period.
- China seems to be achieving this just fine and without the worker coop part even.
Degrowth could definitely only be accomplished under a socialist model where we aren't price gouged for food and housing. A life with less work and less disposable crap sounds really fucking good though.
- Agreed, but that's not what's being advocated for here.
Degrowth in absense of socialism is nonsense but it is necessary. Lazy socialism is the way.
- I agree. Once we have socialism, we can have degrowth. But none of these articles that come out about it are advocating for that. They're advocating that the working class take the hit for climate change via increased unemployment, poverty, and ultimately death.

"Turn on, tune in, drop out" 2.0

Yes, we'll save ourselves by resetting the clock and never undoing the conditions that led to where we are

From the narrowly focused aspect of clothing, what can we do? Repair. Repair your clothes. Don’t throw away a ripped shirt, don’t replace it with a flimsy new shirt made by underpaid workers. Sew it. Patch it. Check your library for books about mending, go to YouTube and seek out basic repair videos. A packet of needles, a thimble, a spool of black thread, and a spool of white thread will take care of the majority of repairs. What you can’t do yourself can be handled by your neighborhood laundry or dry cleaner.

Practice radical repairing. Mend your way to a better world.

That's one heck of an... accurate headline.

I'm doing my part.

B-B-B-But then multi-billionaires might have to settle for a few billion less!!! How will they survive?

I'm all about it. I've got my Corvette and just had the clutch replaced so I'm all about *downsizing for others now!

I'll downsize as well once I get my Bugatti and a private race track. Or two.

Good idea! Let's just replace workers with robots straight away and they can live work free!

That also means massive unemployment

Look around you. Are there things to be done? Parks to be cleaned? Old houses to be renovated? Run down areas of town? Are there any hungry children in nearby schools? If you answered yes to any of those, then there is work to be done.

Why, if there is work to be done, is it not getting done? What type of society undervalues such critical work such that you would look at the state of the work and think that there is not enough work for everyone to contribute.

There are plenty of jobs, there is infinite work, but the current value system doesn't incentivise this work that would improve everyone's life.

So two questions.

Why doesn't the current system value this work?

What would the world look like of that type of work was valued?

That in mind, given that you assume mass unemployment, which is questionable at best, reconsider why that would be. Who, or what, would be the cause?
That happens anyways so
There are a lot of BS jobs that don't create any value (real estate agents, advertising, ...) and a lot of work that is not getting done because nobody would pay for it, for example cleaning up the environment, worker shortage in hospitals and elder care.
That's actually a good thing, assuming that employment wasn't tied to surviving nor thriving.

How would business work? Currently a business's purpose by law is to make money. How would you enforce a different goal without going full centralized economy?

And how is trying to add less value more effective than internalizing externalized costs? For example, co2 is an externalized cost, one companies don't need to pay for right now, it's external to them. If we made them pay for it to fund carbon capture at 1 ton removed for every 1 ton emitted, they would decrease their emissions and the rest would be removed. You could do something similar for other ecological issues as well. What's the benefit of degroth over internalizing costs?

Please think of the companies! Won't anyone think of the poor profit motive?!
- Is degroth individual or government driven? If it's individual, I'm all for it. If it's government, I think there are more effective ways of helping the environment than telling businesses to not make money.
"In 2014, the United States Supreme Court voiced its position in no uncertain terms. In Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., the Supreme Court stated that “Modern corporate law does not require for profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else”.

https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
- @Chetzemoka @inasaba @JohnDClay
  
  The issue isn't law. It's base greed.
- Hmm interesting. Thank you!
  
  They do have an obligation to what their share holders want though don't they?
Any cost that you try to internalize will just be passed on to the consumer.

Remember, you said it in your comment, "... a business's purpose by law is to make money." The business doesn't pay the cost, the worker pays the cost.

Your example of carbon capture is great, a "business" starts up doing carbon capture. They make their money by selling carbon credits to other businesses, NOT to clean up their act and stop polluting but to "offset" their carbon emissions. If my business produces more pollution, I just buy more credits and pass on the cost to the consumers or freeze employee raises or fire chunks of the workforce to cover the increase in business costs without to reduce the chance that it will hurt profits.

Like, if I poop in your kitchen sink every day, but I buy "poop free kitchen sink credits" to offset that I poop in your kitchen sink every day that says "somewhere else there is a kitchen sink free of poop that will cancel out that I've pooped in this sink today," ... I'm still pooping in your kitchen sink.
- Any cost that you try to internalize will just be passed on to the consumer.
  
  That's fine. The government can give subsidies for low income people or subsidize some products directly.
  
  The poop in the sink example isn't applicable to carbon emissions. Co2 dilutes very quickly, so it's all essentially going into one big reservoir. The equivalent then is for everyone to be pooping in one big pile. I don't care in that case whether you don't poop in the pile or you pay someone else to take one poop's worth of poop out of the pile somewhere else. The pile stays the same size. The overall quantity is what matters for co2.
  
  You might have a point though for externalities like resource extraction or habitat destruction. That's harder to quantity if the degradation of one area can be offset by the improvement of another. That's a much more variable exchange, so it'd be more difficult to work trades on those. But governments have been able to mostly figure it out for things like national forests, logging, and hydraulic fluid spills. So I don't think it's impossible.
  
  pass on the cost to the consumers or freeze employee raises or fire chunks of the workforce to cover the increase in business costs without to reduce the chance that it will hurt profits.
  
  Exec's don't have that much headroom left to squeeze out of customers and workers. If they raise prices or lower wages too much, their product or jobs will be uncompetitive with companies that emit less co2 and thus need to pay less to offset it. It will be cheaper in most cases to decrease emissions instead of paying for offsets.

Eh, humans are hardwired to acquire stuff. This will never catch on. It'd be cool if it did. But it won't.

It won’t happen because the ones interested in keeping us convinced we’re hardwired to acquire stuff would not want it, and they’re the ones in control.

Ascetics exist. Minimalists exist. Fuck, Marie Kondo exists. The desire for stuff is not some immutable force like gravity. It’s just what we’ve been taught by the ones selling the stuff.
Humans are hard wired to take care of each other. You're mistaking human nature with materialism.

But hey, do you doomer.
- Humans are also hardwired to be adaptable and survive in many many circumstances. Materialism is one such circumstance. If this movement gains momentum and the world actually changes because of it humans will adapt again and survive.
  
  The problem is that survival in these circumstances seems to depend on the continuation of it for all those in it, which leads to heavy resistance to changing the circumstances we've adapted to. It requires us to look beyond what we know and work towards the greater good with little guarantee that this will work out for ourselves individually within our own lives even if we know it'll be good for everybody in the long term. Therefore, it goes against that innate survival instinct.
  
  I truly believe that the only way out of this dumpster fire of a world we live in depends on changing those "fundamentals" (big word, seeing how materialism is relatively recent to mankind and is only fundamental as long as the majority believes it is and keeps the charade going) but in the short term it means going against the instinct to persevere and stay in the rat race, because stepping out of the race to live by new rules while the rest is undecided or flat out decides to simply keep running is going to set you back within the confines of the "old rules".
I disagree that we're hardwired to acquire stuff. But even if we are, we're sentient beings who overcome a lot of things we're hardwired to do, so that is just one more thing we should be aware of about our own thinking.
naturalistic fallacy intensifies

Even if people were "hard wired" to do bad things, a system that encourages those bad things is a worse system.
This belongs in a capitalist propaganda bingo card
Macroeconomics student moment
Human nature is sculpted and shaped by the material conditions around you, it's not something immutable and forever the same.

If a society is built around endless accumulation then of course it would be considered only natural to most.

After all, if you were born and lived your whole life in a coal mine, you'd say it's human nature to cough.
Nope. That's just you.
Materialism could also in part be the result of a lack in other areas that humans are hardwired for. Community, emotional care, daydreaming, ...