Comment by notarobot123
Comment by notarobot123 10 months ago
> among 115 definitions analysed there is a consistent idea, which is that degrowth is “a downscaling of production and consumption to reduce ecological footprints planned democratically in a way that is equitable while securing wellbeing”. Even within that, there is a lot to unpack.
The article doesn't unpack any of this and just points to the lack of consensus on any one unifying theory or set of policy recommendations.
Yeah.
I'd read TFA, and toyed with writing a critique / response to it. Fundamentally I find the methodology of meta-analysis in this circumstance to be rather badly flawed.
I'm reminded of the quote attributed to Einstein that there was a letter circulated with the signatures of many scientists claiming Einstein's own theory was wrong. Had that been the case, he replied, one would have been enough.
<https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/3485>
That doesn't entirely fit the circumstances of the FT article, but to critique a concept on the basis of a wide range of publications tends to muddle rather than clarify the issue. Given a wide range of authors, some are most assuredly going to make poor arguments, poorly substantiate them, or simply be piling on to some bandwagon or another. Rather than critiquing the literature at large, it's sufficient, as with Einstein, to address the strongest cases.
I suspect an availability heuristic in that meta-analysis and textual analysis are easier to produce. Cutting to the crux of a fallacious or mistaken argument or belief is harder work.
I'd be more impressed with a clear statement of what (if any) consensus or most widely-accepted claims or arguments are made, and what if any counterarguments have been made to those. I'm aware of a set of authors who've made compelling cases: Herman Daly, Howard Odum, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Robert Underwood (R.U.) Ayres, Steve Keen, William Ophuls, and Vaclav Smil most particularly. For virtually all of them, the argument against sustained growth is that economic growth of the past several centuries has been highly predicated on a vast one-time input of fossil fuels (and numerous associated advances), and that the withdrawal of that energy source even with other potential substitutes (solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, biomass, hydroelectric, for the most part) will require some reduction of total material wealth.
There are counteraguments. I've spent a good part of the past decade or two looking into those. Ophuls in particular has tracked many of those down in his books, particularly Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, originally published in 1977 and revised in 1992. Among its other strengths, Ophuls does a deep and broad read of the literature, including the most widely touted of the cornucopians (Julian Simon and Herman Kahn most notably). The bibliography is worth publication in its own right.
What's struck me most of the cornucopian counterarguments is that most seem to 1) have only occurred to economists and similar proponents after the notion of limits itself had been proposed, 2) the arguments for them are long on assertion and short on both facts and causal mechanisms grounded in scientific principles, and 3) most of the discussion seems strongly rhetorical rather than dialectical. A weakness I'd extend to the FT piece here.
That's still not the full justice I'd prefer to apply here, but it'll have to do for now. I'd be happy to respond to questions or rebuttals.