Abandoning whole towns sounds like an understatement, if we are talking about places outside the UK. Plenty of places in Australia and the United States will become effectively uninsurable, due to climate change, if they haven't become it already. There's a town called Lismore in Northern NSW - the bulk of which got flooded out in 2022. The town never recovered, I gather.
Yes, indeed, we are deeply in climate change debt. But at least we have the opportunity to repay the debt in heavily inflated coin. Thanks to technology, renewable capacity is cheaper to install than fossil tech. Repayment still requires will, but the means are readily available.
(Of course, this is only from a rich and middle-income country perspective. I don't see how the Iraqis can afford the massive number of heat pumps needed to sustain human life there over the next two or three decades. Or the Bangladeshis with sea level rise.)
The value of degrowth fundamentally turns on whether you think the economy is made of atoms. If it is, then you can't have growth forever unless you also have a plan to "get those damn atoms out of our economy."
And Abundance has always struck me as a form of warmed over neoliberalism. The solution to our problems isn't that we need to politically decide to buy things like housing or transit collectively. The solution is to cut regulations. I am not even opposed to cutting regulations, I just don't think it is a good substitute for public spending.
Climate mitigation highlights the limitations of the balance sheet/debt analogy. Mitigation is not zero sum. The build up of CO2 is deeply problematic but the solutions are mostly productivity positive. We need low and then zero carbon abundant energy, (much) more land efficient food production and, the means to draw down and sequester the carbon in the atmosphere. The abundant clean energy bit is the critical component. The Abundo's insight: it is difficult to see this scenario play out in a degrowth or scarcity environment.
The way I interpret the abundance agenda is that we should not create unnecessary obstacles for making productive investments in housing, a smart grid, wind/solar/nuclear energy, high speed rail, vaccines, or pharmaceuticals. Too often rules and procedures designed to ensure fairness, impartiality, and public input have too often become impediments to action without actually producing meaningful participation or public confidence.
I do understand that there is rarely unanimity on many questions. Is a wind mill a bird killing blight on the skyline or a source of clean energy? Is NYC repossessing a beautiful public garden or creating needed housing? These are genuine social choice issues that Klein and Thompson elide, but I don’t think most “abundance” wonks are advocating a party now, pay later strategy.
To freely indulge in some ad hominem reasoning, the biggest reason to be suspect of the abundance crew is the company they keep. Plainly, much of (at least the US) is in need of huge civic development- the libraries keep closing and rural schools losing days and all the New Deal edifices are still doing yeoman service but sure could use some paint. It stands to reason that re-running the New Deal/Great Society and vacuuming up enough oligarch money to keep their workers from lining them up against the wall and buying the things that make a culture feel inclusive and plentiful is overdue by 30 years.
But, as I noted elsewhere on the 'stack, the biggest champions are the usual PMC types that insist they have no politics save common sense but keep being the eleventh person at the proverbial ten-Nazi dinner party. They heard 'get out of the way of making things' and went 'that's right, the biggest thing stopping me from making a new website with ads is a single digit hike in the capital gains rate' and the nothingburger of it all was revealed.
Wellll ... I kind of think that's unfair, because some of the company they keep is me, and Jenn Pahlka and Steve Teles. In many ways it's almost definitional that Abundance is distinguished from boring old libertarianism by having some understanding of the concept of stake capacity
The correction that is due is real estate values imo. Will hurt and tricky to pull off. Ramping up lvt with lots of urban building will help, but even if you fix opening with a magic wand, still got inflation/supply chain/labour issues to worry about
While it is true that much of the wealth is air, and consists of financial numbers in computers, the whole concept of degrowth is also. We have seen much of degrowth politics the last 30 years with an acceleration after the financial crisis, and it is called austerity.
I see no difference between degrowth and austerity. Both are a kind of economic anorexy, you are not permitted to do things because you "can't afford it", but doing nothing is not saving, it is waste. Waste of time, waste of energy, waste of talent.
Economics this days deal with numbers, not with real resources. Only exchange values, not user values. Exchange values can be punctured with bad effects only for the extremely wealthy, provided you do it in the financial sector. Cutting user values usually hits the poorer 80 percent badly.
"One of the key motivating factors behind the Abundance Agenda is that the politics of scarcity are incredibly bad right now. The main reason why we need policies capable of delivering economic growth is that without it, a lot of voters seem to develop a really unattractive and dangerous mean streak."
Here in the US, angry voters will support policies that hurt them provided they hurt the people they hate more. This is why poor social conservatives vote against social welfare--"I don't want THEM to have it." If degrowth/austerity policies policies were primarily targeting the very rich and their obviously frivolous luxuries, they would be a lot more popular.
(The problem of course is that actually targeting the very rich means believing they aren't stupid enough to use their incredible power and wealth to take revenge on the system itself, which is obviously a nonstarter in 2026.)
Something I read years ago: the politics of voting against social welfare actually make sense to poor social conservatives. The ones who actually vote tend to be employed, if precariously (and often in government jobs like school superintendent, the richest irony of all). They are surrounded by people who are quite obviously chiseling the system for whatever they can get: meth addicts, bar fighters, low-level drug dealers. West Virginia is a trivial example, but there are many. Their rage often stems from a sense of being the last "decent" person in a town sliding into hell. "Why do I even bother?" is the most corrosive sentiment a public can have.
My understanding of things like the IPCC forecasts is that they predict that rich country GDP will continue increasing, even as we have to abandon towns and build enormous sea walls, even if the world doesn't hit net zero anytime soon. But the consequences of this debt for eg South Asia or the Sahel are going to be bad. And the politics of that trade are much worse.
Nature governs and man resides within it. Entropy seems to be a state that cannot be reached until the final curtain, so that 'Net Zero" will be the end note. Nero famously fiddled and so do predictors with insufficuent relationships. Variables make life interesting as do one's opinions.
Abandoning whole towns sounds like an understatement, if we are talking about places outside the UK. Plenty of places in Australia and the United States will become effectively uninsurable, due to climate change, if they haven't become it already. There's a town called Lismore in Northern NSW - the bulk of which got flooded out in 2022. The town never recovered, I gather.
Yes, indeed, we are deeply in climate change debt. But at least we have the opportunity to repay the debt in heavily inflated coin. Thanks to technology, renewable capacity is cheaper to install than fossil tech. Repayment still requires will, but the means are readily available.
(Of course, this is only from a rich and middle-income country perspective. I don't see how the Iraqis can afford the massive number of heat pumps needed to sustain human life there over the next two or three decades. Or the Bangladeshis with sea level rise.)
The value of degrowth fundamentally turns on whether you think the economy is made of atoms. If it is, then you can't have growth forever unless you also have a plan to "get those damn atoms out of our economy."
And Abundance has always struck me as a form of warmed over neoliberalism. The solution to our problems isn't that we need to politically decide to buy things like housing or transit collectively. The solution is to cut regulations. I am not even opposed to cutting regulations, I just don't think it is a good substitute for public spending.
One of the problems I have with Abundance is it hand waves away a the type of debts referenced in this article.
I liked "prosperity without growth" when it came out in 2009. And at the time it resonated. https://timjackson.org.uk/ecological-economics/pwg/
Climate mitigation highlights the limitations of the balance sheet/debt analogy. Mitigation is not zero sum. The build up of CO2 is deeply problematic but the solutions are mostly productivity positive. We need low and then zero carbon abundant energy, (much) more land efficient food production and, the means to draw down and sequester the carbon in the atmosphere. The abundant clean energy bit is the critical component. The Abundo's insight: it is difficult to see this scenario play out in a degrowth or scarcity environment.
The way I interpret the abundance agenda is that we should not create unnecessary obstacles for making productive investments in housing, a smart grid, wind/solar/nuclear energy, high speed rail, vaccines, or pharmaceuticals. Too often rules and procedures designed to ensure fairness, impartiality, and public input have too often become impediments to action without actually producing meaningful participation or public confidence.
I do understand that there is rarely unanimity on many questions. Is a wind mill a bird killing blight on the skyline or a source of clean energy? Is NYC repossessing a beautiful public garden or creating needed housing? These are genuine social choice issues that Klein and Thompson elide, but I don’t think most “abundance” wonks are advocating a party now, pay later strategy.
https://bobm858524.substack.com/p/camel-or-centaur?r=bi9a&utm_medium=ios
We are growing a carbon-value economy inside the rotting carcass of the old beast.
It turns out that dollars spent on the forests--think thinning, which is stewardship, which is gardening, which is testosterone-restrained logging.
EV+ in Ton(ne)s Avoided CO2. Scales and replicates.
Amazon ready, and I don't mean the Sears Roebuck of the internet.
Abundance in the Amazon, as well as in the Plumas Sierra.
I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay!
To freely indulge in some ad hominem reasoning, the biggest reason to be suspect of the abundance crew is the company they keep. Plainly, much of (at least the US) is in need of huge civic development- the libraries keep closing and rural schools losing days and all the New Deal edifices are still doing yeoman service but sure could use some paint. It stands to reason that re-running the New Deal/Great Society and vacuuming up enough oligarch money to keep their workers from lining them up against the wall and buying the things that make a culture feel inclusive and plentiful is overdue by 30 years.
But, as I noted elsewhere on the 'stack, the biggest champions are the usual PMC types that insist they have no politics save common sense but keep being the eleventh person at the proverbial ten-Nazi dinner party. They heard 'get out of the way of making things' and went 'that's right, the biggest thing stopping me from making a new website with ads is a single digit hike in the capital gains rate' and the nothingburger of it all was revealed.
Wellll ... I kind of think that's unfair, because some of the company they keep is me, and Jenn Pahlka and Steve Teles. In many ways it's almost definitional that Abundance is distinguished from boring old libertarianism by having some understanding of the concept of stake capacity
As the world ages, it can become quite difficult to convince someone who will probably be dead in 25 years to worry much about 2055.
The correction that is due is real estate values imo. Will hurt and tricky to pull off. Ramping up lvt with lots of urban building will help, but even if you fix opening with a magic wand, still got inflation/supply chain/labour issues to worry about
While it is true that much of the wealth is air, and consists of financial numbers in computers, the whole concept of degrowth is also. We have seen much of degrowth politics the last 30 years with an acceleration after the financial crisis, and it is called austerity.
I see no difference between degrowth and austerity. Both are a kind of economic anorexy, you are not permitted to do things because you "can't afford it", but doing nothing is not saving, it is waste. Waste of time, waste of energy, waste of talent.
Economics this days deal with numbers, not with real resources. Only exchange values, not user values. Exchange values can be punctured with bad effects only for the extremely wealthy, provided you do it in the financial sector. Cutting user values usually hits the poorer 80 percent badly.
"One of the key motivating factors behind the Abundance Agenda is that the politics of scarcity are incredibly bad right now. The main reason why we need policies capable of delivering economic growth is that without it, a lot of voters seem to develop a really unattractive and dangerous mean streak."
Here in the US, angry voters will support policies that hurt them provided they hurt the people they hate more. This is why poor social conservatives vote against social welfare--"I don't want THEM to have it." If degrowth/austerity policies policies were primarily targeting the very rich and their obviously frivolous luxuries, they would be a lot more popular.
(The problem of course is that actually targeting the very rich means believing they aren't stupid enough to use their incredible power and wealth to take revenge on the system itself, which is obviously a nonstarter in 2026.)
Something I read years ago: the politics of voting against social welfare actually make sense to poor social conservatives. The ones who actually vote tend to be employed, if precariously (and often in government jobs like school superintendent, the richest irony of all). They are surrounded by people who are quite obviously chiseling the system for whatever they can get: meth addicts, bar fighters, low-level drug dealers. West Virginia is a trivial example, but there are many. Their rage often stems from a sense of being the last "decent" person in a town sliding into hell. "Why do I even bother?" is the most corrosive sentiment a public can have.
My understanding of things like the IPCC forecasts is that they predict that rich country GDP will continue increasing, even as we have to abandon towns and build enormous sea walls, even if the world doesn't hit net zero anytime soon. But the consequences of this debt for eg South Asia or the Sahel are going to be bad. And the politics of that trade are much worse.
Nature governs and man resides within it. Entropy seems to be a state that cannot be reached until the final curtain, so that 'Net Zero" will be the end note. Nero famously fiddled and so do predictors with insufficuent relationships. Variables make life interesting as do one's opinions.