[CapstanRoller]

Degrowth is about structuring the economy to meet the needs of humans instead of the needs of spreadsheets. Our current economic motivation can be best described as 'line go up' where we make an enormous pile of shiny stuff but kill everyone in the process.

Supporting the status quo is itself a firm and irreversible decision about the fate of current and future humans: there is no place for them on dead planet, and corpses have no "standard of living" at all.

[BjoernKW]

> Degrowth is about structuring the economy to meet the needs of humans instead of the needs of spreadsheets.

What does that mean exactly? How is the economy to be structured to meet human needs according to Degrowth and who gets to define what those needs are?

The Degrowth movement - and I'm merely paraphrasing from the Wikipedia article here - rejects the idea of economic growth. Without economic growth either the number of human beings has to remain stagnant (at best; more likely that number would have to be reduced to make such a system sustainable) or the overall standard of living would have to be lowered.

Merely redistributing wealth doesn't cut it either, because without growth there can be no further creation of wealth. Hence, such a redistribution would be a one-off event and at least in the long run most people would still be worse off than with economic growth.

The fallacy of Degrowth and similar Malthusian ideas (such as the Club of Rome's similarly named "Limits to Growth") is to assume that growth is a zero-sum game, in which inevitable someone - or society (or the environment) - has to lose for somebody else to win.

While thermodynamically the resources on planet Earth - and ultimately the universe - of course are finite, for all pragmatic intents and purposes they are not.

Given continued technological progress and ensuing paradigm shifts, it is entirely possible to sustainably live on this planet under the premise of both economic and population growth as history since the time of Thomas Malthus himself has proven time and again.

[CapstanRoller]

>How is the economy to be structured to meet human needs according to Degrowth and who gets to define what those needs are?

Humans, collectively, instead of a few fancy lads obsessed about how Line Must Go Up while the rest of us drown in poison.

>Without economic growth either the number of human beings has to remain stagnant (at best; more likely that number would have to be reduced to make such a system sustainable) or the overall standard of living would have to be lowered.

Human beings are currently yoked to the economy. That is to say, we are already mere human resources: feedstock for a machine that seems to exist for its own sake and only serves our needs as a byproduct, allowing us to reproduce so that we may all have the 'freedom' of being consumed. We cannot opt out of this arrangement.

You conjure up fears of a vague dystopia (god forbid we "stagnate" aka exist in a steady state!) while ignoring the actually-existing nightmare all around us.

Fretting over the ability of hypothetical future humans to buy plastic junk while choking on petrochemical fumes is bizarre, to say the least, given the rapidly decreasing chances of the planet being able to sustain complex civilization at all.

>While thermodynamically the resources on planet Earth - and ultimately the universe - of course are finite, for all pragmatic intents and purposes they are not.

You're right. We can pump all the oil and dig up all the coal then burn it to release enormous amounts of energy and enough waste products to kill us several times over. But why?

>Merely redistributing wealth doesn't cut it either, because without growth there can be no further creation of wealth.

What is wealth, and why do we create it?

Is wealth a Juicero in every home? Mountains of Funko Pops, fields of crossover SUVs, an endless grid of office buildings?

>Given continued technological progress and ensuing paradigm shifts

This is neoliberal word salad.

>it is entirely possible to sustainably live on this planet under the premise of both economic and population growth

What is the purpose of an economy? Is to make spreadsheets happy and to reproduce itself, or do you accept the radical notion that economies exist to serve humans? If it's the latter, then our economic machine is obviously unfit for purpose — it is the Orphan Crusher [0] on a global scale.

Yes, we can expand this Orphan Crusher and generate even more orphans to crush. We could capture all the energy of our sun and dedicate it to making and crushing orphans. We could crush orphans on an intergalactic scale, transmuting half the matter in the universe into orphans and the other half into the machine which crushes them. But why?

[0] https://twitter.com/pookleblinky/status/1309325764739858432