Week 3: Degrowth: Lecture Flashcards
What is the feminist reasoning against GDP & Growth
- GDP does not include unpaid work: care work or housework
What is the Ecological reasoning against GDP & Growth
- Resources are finite
- no decoupling
What is the cultural reasoning against GDP & Growth
- Produces alienating ways of working
- leads to disconnecting with nature and others
what are some different movements advocating for degrowth?
- Peasant agriculture
- Commons
- Environmental justice movements
- Slow Food/Science/Cities
- Deglobalisation
What is the easterlin paradox?
Up until certain point increases in income also increase happiness, but after that point the increase stagnates, and the two are not related anymore
What are the critiques to degrowth
- the term is discouraging/provocative
- term puts emphasis on the wrong idea: a growth is agnostic to growth for example
- Romanticing pre-capitalist societies, poverty and decline
- Against peoples preferences
- Not clear what (material, GDP, energy, capital?)/ how to degrow
- but what about population growth?
What is degrowth not?
- a recession
- only an econommic theory
- a goal in itself
- ## always about reducing gdp
What is the feasbility critique to degrowth ?
Can we maintain the welfare state without growth?
* > no growth means Austerity policies; lack of funding for social institutions/security
* Increasing relative costs of welfare; aging population
* Needs/desires tend to expand
* Political opposition to transformation
What are the central elements to degrowth?
1: Quality of life:
-Shift to simplicity
-focus on self-substistence
2: Global Justice:
-fair share use of use of natural resources
-fair share of right to pollute
-redestribution of material and financial wealth
3: Carrying capacity
-reduce overconsumption
what are the steps to go towards a degrowth economy ?
1: Reduction of environmental patterns
- trade barriers
- regional economy
- new consumption patterns
- reduction in capital use
2: Redistibution of wealth
- universal basic income
- pricing externalities
3: Transition from
materialistic to
convivial and
participatory
society
- reducing working hours
- promote frugal lifestyles
- decentralise democratic institutions
What is the A-Growth perspective?
A= agnostic.
- ignoring GDP as an indicator
- focusing on policies improving environmental, social, and economic outcomes
Why might A-Growth be more politically feasible than Degrowth?
More accetable within the current political and economic system: A-Growth does not explicitly call for economic downscaling.
