[mark_l_watson]

I am more or less with her on this, and not just because I like her writing (and her audio book narration of her treatment of “Lao-Tzu: Tao Te Ching” is beyond wonderful).

Where I differ a bit is that zero growth is not the solution, but rather slow and sustainable growth. What we have now is awful. In the US, you have close to zero percent loans from the Fed to outfits like Blackwater who can buy residential property and rent it for a few percent pure profit. Young people I know who want to buy a home don’t get close to zero percent loans from the Fed.

With both political parties fully supporting the elites it seems like all is lost, but I don’t think this is so: massive peaceful demonstrations are the only way to make progress. When peaceful Occupie Wall Street protestors were brutalized at scale, I think the whole world noticed, and this kind of peaceful mass protest is probably what the world elites fear the most.

EDIT: I just noticed that she was not calling for zero growth, rather for equitable sharing.

[jsty]

> outfits like Blackwater

Unless the mercenaries are back and diversifying into real estate, I think you might mean Blackstone?

[mark_l_watson]

Thank you! That is what I meant.

[MikeTaylor]

> When peaceful Occupie Wall Street protestors were brutalized at scale, I think the whole world noticed, and this kind of peaceful mass protest is probably what the world elites fear the most.

Yes, it was great how that incident ushered in a new age of shared economic prosperity and political rationality.

[mark_l_watson]

Mike, sarcasm aside, I really think that it helped. Have we seen as progress as we want? Of course not, but that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t try. Agree?

[Synaesthesia]

Absolutely. Being passive is exactly what people in power want us to do. It's not going to be an easy struggle.

[secondaryacct]

You simplify the problem. You're in power, they're in money. You dont want power that you already have, what you want is to win, and you'll do whatever it takes, even pretending you want to build a new world where "everyone" is equal, especially you.

Im not targeting you, mind you, but this idea that there are mysterious others in situation of power robbing us of our due.

There are no rule to life, nor any meaning. You go where you want and do what you want. Dont kid yourself into believing your ideal is shared in absolute by most people.

I just say that because you sound a bit like an idealist drinking his own koolaid :p

[jjj123]

Let’s also not kid ourselves that belief in the status quo is shared across a majority of people.

70% of people in the US support Medicare For All across all political lines [1], but leadership across both parties essentially ignored the proposal as some kind of radical pipe dream. Why is that? It’s simple, M4A costs money and would decimate the health insurance industry. Donors to both parties don’t want to pay more in taxes or see their investments drop, so it’s off the table. If we had something resembling democracy, we would have single payer healthcare by now.

What we have now is a minority of powerful (moneyed) people who are making decisions for everyone based on their own incentives. What people like myself want is a more democratic distribution of this power.

So it’s not necessarily that activists want to force some communist utopia on everyone, but we want to change the system so that we (the people) can actually decide for ourselves what we want.

[1] https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/494602-pol...

[babyblueblanket]

My understanding is that this is significantly more controversial if it involves removing private or employer-provided healthcare. A "public option" is something the current president, Biden, supported. And he's the president, so obviously not a pipe dream.

[indigochill]

I think the question behind the sarcasm is really "Did Occupy Wall Street actually do anything?" Sure, it made the news, but was there any actual lasting progress from it at all? Admittedly I didn't follow it closely so I don't feel qualified to answer that.

For my part, I don't believe protests (in the US) accomplish anything. They could if it was possible to apply pressure on our politicians, but the question there is is politics the actual determining factor for whether a politician gets elects? Some would argue it's really money (my personal argument is it's name recognition achieved primarily through clever media usage, as seen with FDR on radio, Kennedy on TV, Obama on social media, and Trump on outrage media, but money's always a key component of that). If that's the case, then politics doesn't actually matter, it's all about amassing enough money to get your preferred politician into office.

[dzdt]

In the long run zero growth is the only possible asymptotic besides decline. Our world is finite; we are close to or over ecological limits already. Economic growth by improved efficiency or technological advancement is still possible, but there are fundamental limits there as well.

So whether or not one calls for zero growth, we should plan for an eventual situation of zero growth and structure our society so this is a good outcome.

[marcus_holmes]

Not all increases in economic growth are at consequence of ecological exploitation. Some economic growth happens while also reducing ecological impact. These two things are not that tightly bound, especially in developed knowledge-based economies.

The problem with zero growth is that we would also need to have zero population growth. There are two ways of achieving this: the nice one, where we get everyone out of poverty and people naturally stop having so many kids because they're not poor any more, or the nasty one where we impose limits on how many kids people can have. The nice solution would definitely require lots of economic growth to lift all of us out of poverty (without reducing the living standards of the people currently having no kids to the point that they start having kids again). The nasty solution has only been tried by China so far, wasn't that successful, and has lead to all sorts of demographic problems for them.

We do have a problem with income inequality which should be a lot easier to fix than stopping growth.

[goatlover]

> So whether or not one calls for zero growth, we should plan for an eventual situation of zero growth and structure our society so this is a good outcome.

But how far in the future is this? Our light cone is finite, but it has a vast amount of energy and matter. Maybe we don't get much father than the solar system, but that's still a lot more resources than the Earth. Just the sun itself is an enormous ball of energy we're barely making use of. Sure, a Type 3 civilization might find it difficult to grow much beyond it's galaxy, but it would take a while to get to that level. We don't really know where civilization might end up in the long term.

[lcam84]

She may be calling for zero growth or even degrowth. In her first blog post, where she fill a questionnaire [1]

"Question 13: “What will improve the quality of life for the future generations of your family?”—with boxes to rank importance from 1 to 10. The first choice is “Improved educational opportunities”—fair enough, Harvard being in the education business. I gave it a 10. The second is “Economic stability and growth for the U.S.” That stymied me totally. What a marvelous example of capitalist thinking, or nonthinking: to consider growth and stability as the same thing! I finally wrote in the margin, “You can’t have both,” and didn’t check a box."

[1] https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/in-your-spare-time

[banannaise]

> When peaceful Occupie Wall Street protestors were brutalized at scale, I think the whole world noticed

And within a short time, everything was back to business as usual. Then in 2020, Black Lives Matter protestors were brutalized at scale. The whole world took notice, the police kept beating the shit out of people, a lot of lip service was paid, and nothing changed.

I'm not advocating for a violent revolution here, but what about meekly letting the state beat the shit out of you seems to be working?