this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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Degrowth
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Discussions about degrowth and all sorts of related topics. This includes UBI, economic democracy, the economics of green technologies, enviromental legislation and many more intressting economic topics.
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Metrics is one problem. However UBI solves another very real problem. When you shrink GDP, you reduce the material wealth available of the group. UBI makes sure everybody has a certain minimal standard of material wellbeing, so cutting GDP does not hurt the poor, but only the rich. This is one of the differences between degrowing an economy and a recession.
Oh yeah, I'm not against UBI, with or without degrowth.
Now, the way I see it, the article starts with explaining why degrowth is necessary (sustainability), then focuses on what's necessary to make degrowth practical (UBI). But degrowth as policy is only viable if we can measure its success, and GDP is not going to do that. So we need a new performance metric IMO, something like economic equilibrium (see what I did there?).
There's heaps, CO2, ecological health, happiness, life satisfaction, health, wealth equality just off the top of my head. Makes sense to use some combined and probably iterated (perhaps (direct) democratically) metric, one of the reasons we're in this mess is oversimplification to just money as a metric.
Yes, that's exactly what I mean!