So... I had a green-marxist mate in college. Everyone should have one. Great chat at summer bbqs. I believe he has since run for state office in Victoria, at some point. He introduced me to the anti-growth stance, emphasising historical relationships between consumption, wealth & growth to resource depletion, pollution, ecosystem destruction & such.

The arguments made by this article did occur to me. Consumption != tonnage. "Economic Growth" is very abstract, an abundance of pricy yoga lessons is not environmentally destructive.

The communist's retort to the retort also followed this blog's reasoning: "Yeah but all that C02, pollution and destruction stuff does equal growth IRL. Maybe past trends aren't the final say, but Why TF do you expect next decade (2005-2015) will be less filthy than the last?! Don't give me "could be's."" - ..We sip wine from a plastic cask thing that students drink.

My retort to that would have been:"Real life? Pfff! Pfff, I say. How exactly do you expect economic reverse gear to play out IRL. Poverty makes for some real political nastiness?!

From here unto "politics" and away we go... just like this blog, which is quite a good rendering of the debate IMO. Well written.

Abstract, vast concepts like "growth," "consumption," "politics," "earth" and such Grand Abstractions make these debates both impossible and unavoidable. Everything seems to come into it and lead to it. I've changed my opinions here many times over the years.

I was getting a circa-2005 econ education att. Peak monetarism, conservative ascendance and perhaps the neoliberal highpoint. I was also studying philosophy, so had the ways, means and student bumminess to look into old marxist and hegelian retorts to pose this communist dude at our next drinking session. It's always fun to ambush a believer with their own unread sacred texts... It's good headology, so says the witch.

I don't remember what came of that ATT, but these days Hegelian swinginess tends to frame a lot of my thoughts on such grand questions. Maybe the damned communist did manage to sneak some of his religion into me, in a roundabout way.

Marx & early communists were actually pretty awed by technology, growth and such. The promise of abundance and changeful times was one of the things that enabled radically different thinking about the future. The future would not be like the past, or present. You might be surprised to hear that communists were kind of right about a lot of "peak capitalism" concepts. A lot of markets did peak, margins and even market size did whittle to nothing. "Politics" dictates much, at this point. Monopolies or "structured markets," in modern parlance dictate much, at this point. Textile markets went through it. Coal. Fishing. Arguably cars.

"Peak capitalism-ish" dynamics played prominently in the economies of the late 1800s and this lasted generations. They're not always the biggest economic happening everywhere & at all times, but they usually appear multiple times on a top 10 list of major issues.

To bring this ramble back to the start.... Aggregation is an abstraction, a necessary one to reason about these questions. "Growth" of "Stuff" is abstract. It leaks. But, it also holds water. Ignoring the leak caused Keynes, as well as most economists of his day (1920s) to expect extreme abundance soon... famously, a 15 hr, men-only workweek by the 1980s.

Neither communists nor liberals really accounted for the difference between how "growth" would impact simple manufactured goods like spoons, microwaves & calories relative and housing or personal transport. Some became much more abundant than the others. Back then, a lot of people had basic housing with little or no furniture & possessions. Today, a poverty predicament will often be "no housing, furniture gets dumped." Abundance works in mysterious ways, and scarcity hounds us still.

We certainly need to degrow our negatives. We also, IMO just as certainly, need to grow the stuff we need more of. We need to avoid getting so stuck in frames that we can't see out of them. Some questions are hard, like transport. Hard, but not impossible and there are real options.

Some, we stopped thinking clearly about long ago. Housing is often less abundant than 100 years ago. Yes, our standards for "decent housing" have risen. But that is far from abundance. In other areas we're far from sustainability.