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The constant need for growth really bothers me. I live in a rural area. People move here because it’s natural and quiet and cost of living is low. Then they complain that there is no Target and no Chik Fila and not enough jobs. The board of supervisors is full of developers. Once they finish building out the county we will be just like every other suburban hell.
Not just the constant need for that sort of growth. In our late-stage capitalist society, companies are expected to make more profit than last year every single year. As if that is somehow sustainable.
Exactly, that is a ridiculous, anti-consumer and anti-environment standard.
Apple has made record profits of $X billion dollars this quarter. However, that is only $3 billion more than last year same quarter.
You’re right, Greg. One has to wonder: will Apple be bankrupt next year?
Working for a Fortune 500 and hearing executives talk is surreal. They straight up say things like “if you’re not growing, you’re failing”. No thought at all as to how that’s supposed to work in the long run. The post-pandemic surge in profits doesn’t help; companies that usually don’t get 15-20% profit margins suddenly saw that, and the expectation of shareholders is that they can keep doing that forever. That’s insane.
Conversely, I’m also active in my local makerspace. We’ve grown massively in less than 10 years, and deliberately stopped taking new members for a few months because our volunteers were getting burned out. When we reopened, we kept the new member signups intentionally limited so certain areas (woodshop, mainly) would be able to absorb turnover without driving the trainers too hard. We still have net growth, but way slower than we were before. We’re far from failing, and the MBAs running Fortune 500s can go fuck themselves.
And then they will leave for a more idyllic life in the country because it’s so noisy.
I’m pretty sure the large open field behind my house, which used to be full of trees, is going to be turned into another gated neighborhood full of cookie cutter houses. And I just know someone is going to be close to my back yard, and they are going to whine about my wife’s chickens, especially since one of them is a rooster.
So they will piss and moan and try to make us get rid of the rooster. And then they will probably get a small dog that yaps all night.
Pasco County Florida by any chance?
No, not FL. Judging by driving around the US it’s happening all over. Walmarts and apartments and McDonalds everywhere you go. Many are fairly new and right next to rural land. No sidewalks or public transportation, just sprawl into rural areas.
The constant need for growth won’t go away. As long as the population grows, economic output needs to grow. All those people need food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, random crap, work, etc.
Yes, in the Western World a lot of it is a distribution problem, but even if we solved that you still can’t expect the rest of the world to just settle for lower standards of living than Europe and North America. They won’t. And they shouldn’t.
Destroy capitalism.
Got it.
Capitalism has one positive, and that’s the notion of competition leading to the best outcome as they try to win over consumers.
We’ve lost that though with how unfettered it’s become in general. Companies merge and conspire, eliminating competition.
Public universities and research actually produce the most amount of innovation. Another one of capitalisms lies
There’s a difference between lab bench research and discoveries and then actually making them into usable products on a mass scale. That’s a big part of where engineering comes into focus, on that scale up. There’s a lot of research that proves impractical in reality because the synthesis of a material is really finicky or the purification of it is exceedingly difficult.
That said, I actually agree that private industry shouldn’t be part of this space. Companies shouldn’t be sponsoring research and picking winners like this. We need something analogous to national labs that’s focused solely on the scale up of discoveries – taking something discovered in a university or national lab and making it usable for the everyday person. And from there companies can get licenses from the government to offer the technology to consumers and make their own innovations, all of which must be reported to the government.
… So I think I’ve just convinced myself that you’re right and I agree with you, actually.
You said it better than I ever could
Billionares:
“Fuck more!”
How can we expect those lines to keep going up without a steady supply of fresh recruits for the grinder.
I’d bet at a certain point of societal development economic growth is linked with many positives. Unfortunately, we probably adopted it as our only metric and the min/max’ers have taken it to its most extreme. Now when we look at the data we are way outside the range where it’s a useful indicator. Our targets are too high and we need to monitor other indicators of prosperity.
The wealthy have certainly reinforced growth as the ultimate metric.
So far as it represents human toil, yeah, it’s good. It’s not that anymore, though.
“Lol. Um, what.”
- capitalists
Economic growth is fine to a point. Problem is measuring economic growth through the arbitrary price of a small group of companies using a market system designed for gambling rather than long-term investing. Better is to base it on the amount of goods exchanged across all levels of society. When the top has all the money and increases their stock prices by buying and selling their own stocks, and the rest can’t afford to participate in the economy beyond necessities, that’s not a good economy.
Unpopular opinion: If we ended fossil fuel use immediately a lot of people would die and the entire economy would collapse. People would starve because stores wouldn’t be stocked. People would freeze to death because they wouldn’t be able to heat their homes. Looting and violence would soon follow.
The only people who would likely be ok are the ultra wealthy.
Change takes time and right now there are no alternatives that can immediately absorb the extra load from cutting off fossil fuels.
I don’t think anyone is seriously advocating for stopping fossil fuels cold turkey.
The truly unpopular opinion is the one you’re pretending is popular, people aren’t advocating for immediate replacement without building up green energy and replacing it entirely.
You realize that people need money to actually fucking feed themselves and put a roof over their head, right?
Continuous growth is not a requirement for that.
Growth and stability of necessities aren’t mutually required.
You can have controlled or even negative growth and plenty of food and necessities.
Imagine it this way: what if we made it completely illegal to make party favors and other single-use items with no benefit? Growth would lower, but food production isn’t hurt in the slightest, and other jobs can exist.
I hate this elitist sentiment. 😒
Strong “i got mine so fuck you” type of mentality.
It’s too late for sentiments, my friend. We are not the winners of this game, but we might all be losers if we don’t reduce our habits of reckless consumption.
Yes, i have the same sentiment. I have been calling for everyone to accept higher taxes for years. Garnish wages, let the extreme wealth gap grow wider. If everyone is poor then we dont have to worry about what shiny thing to buy as long as we can get that dog meat on the table.
you kids need to eat more acid.
SO TRUE! My malnutrition living in central america has stunted my growth but if I lived on the plentiful acid you provide then some day my progeny can grow big and strong like yourself.
staying fed has always been a problem in central and south america. you can’t grow big crops without wiping out large swaths of rain forest. stop cutting down rain forests. stop following catholic traditions that encourage large families. ya’ll should be having way less kids. the ecosystem just can’t support large populations. you’d be better off going back to living in small units dependent on hunting and fishing.
sorry bro. that’s just how life works. you really don’t want what america has. cherish what you have.
A degrowth society has to be an equitable society. Otherwise your criticism is entirely valid.
We are going to have a degrowth system regardless of any policy decisions, as the current growth system is burning through critical resources and destroying the environment. We can either plan for this, or we can have an unplanned existential civilizational crisis.
Degrowth for the west, let the rest of the world suffer yeaaaaaa. Everyone knows only the west matters anyways.
We need equalization, which means drastic cuts for the west and massive leaps for the developing world.
financial equality is so much more important than a living planet /s
