Robert Colvile has a very interesting CAPX piece on the politics and the morality of economic growth.
The morality of growth
One of the most striking phrases to enter the political lexicon in recent years is ‘degrowth’. This is the idea that capitalism and its obsession with growth are a cancer on the planet.
When you talk to environmental activists, they insist that ‘degrowth’ isn’t about making people poorer. It’s just, according to the movement’s official website, about reducing ‘the material size of the global economy’. We should, they argue, ‘prioritise social and ecological wellbeing instead of corporate profits, over-production and excess consumption’.
This is, to me, one of the most purely wicked ideas that humanity has come up with in recent years. It is a call for others to have less, coming from those who already have so much – and who have mostly never known anything but the extraordinary comforts of our modern world.
The piece is not short but well worth reading, particularly now we have in the UK, a ludicrously named Secretary of State for Levelling Up.
In his excellent book The Complacent Class, the US economist Tyler Cowen makes the argument that the professional classes in the US have pulled the drawbridge up behind them. He shows that Americans are less entrepreneurial, less mobile, less inventive than they once were. America, he argues, has erected a caste system in which some have high-status, high-paid, high-productivity jobs and many do not – with little prospect of moving between the two. In which rich people go to good schools and poor people go to bad ones. In which planning restrictions exclude ambitious workers from the richest and most productive cities, sacrificing almost 10% of America’s GDP in the process.
Much of this will sound extremely familiar to British ears, too. Indeed, these problems are arguably far worse in the UK – at least if our economic performance compared to America’s is anything to go by.
One of the most striking phrases to enter the political lexicon in recent years is ‘degrowth’. This is the idea that capitalism and its obsession with growth are a cancer on the planet.
When you talk to environmental activists, they insist that ‘degrowth’ isn’t about making people poorer. It’s just, according to the movement’s official website, about reducing ‘the material size of the global economy’. We should, they argue, ‘prioritise social and ecological wellbeing instead of corporate profits, over-production and excess consumption’.
This is, to me, one of the most purely wicked ideas that humanity has come up with in recent years. It is a call for others to have less, coming from those who already have so much – and who have mostly never known anything but the extraordinary comforts of our modern world.
The piece is not short but well worth reading, particularly now we have in the UK, a ludicrously named Secretary of State for Levelling Up.
In his excellent book The Complacent Class, the US economist Tyler Cowen makes the argument that the professional classes in the US have pulled the drawbridge up behind them. He shows that Americans are less entrepreneurial, less mobile, less inventive than they once were. America, he argues, has erected a caste system in which some have high-status, high-paid, high-productivity jobs and many do not – with little prospect of moving between the two. In which rich people go to good schools and poor people go to bad ones. In which planning restrictions exclude ambitious workers from the richest and most productive cities, sacrificing almost 10% of America’s GDP in the process.
Much of this will sound extremely familiar to British ears, too. Indeed, these problems are arguably far worse in the UK – at least if our economic performance compared to America’s is anything to go by.
6 comments:
Blimey! I'll need another go at that one. Not only because it's long, but also because it's full of excellent ideas.
I'm reminded of lots of middle class ethical types I know. They say we have to cut back on consumption. But I don't see any of them doing it except unwillingly (spending less on fuel, maybe) and they still enjoy foreign holidays. But of course, long-haul flights to Thailand to go on retreat in a Buddhist monastery only produce unicorn farts, whereas chavs going to Benidorm totally trashes the planet with greenhouse gases. And when a couple of hundred million Africans want to go to Thailand as well, they will have lower their sights for the good of the planet.
Not that we're racist or anything; perish the thought.
Are we in the hands of idiots or psychos?
Having been a child during and just after WW2 and being one of a family of 6,I have experienced shortages and lack of both money and resources.My parents sacrificed a lot to enable their children to better themselves and unfortunately my father did not live long enough to see all of settled down and beginning to prosper.There is no way I will allow anyone to remove or curtail the prosperity my family has achieved. They will have to prise it from my cold dead hands and cost them dearly in the process.
The die is indeed caste on the new caste system.
@James Higham
"Are we in the hands of idiots or psychos?"
There's a perfectly good argument that our main political parties (even Reform) pay only lip service to ideology, having accepted that an amorphous leftish competence is the consensus. See https://dailysceptic.org/2023/01/16/the-end-of-ideology/.
Now the logic suggests that leaves the field open for 'concerned individuals' and organisations to pursue their own ideologies completely outside the consequences of failure or democratic control.
So yes. We are in the hands of both idiots and psychos.
Sam - it's odd, because middle class ethical types can be pleasant people and easy to get on with, but amazingly hypocritical when it comes to political correctness. So much so, that it's hard to tell what goes off in their minds.
James - both I'd say.
John - I agree. I was born shortly after WW2, but I look back on the way we lived then and what has been achieved since and don't intend to see the family lose any of it.
DJ - I agree, it's both.
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