Today's novel economic concept to come across my desk: "degrowth."
If you watch the video at the second link, you'll learn that "there's no set script" for degrowth, but there are a lot of really bad ideas he's prepared to spitball. The problem is that none of them work with the laws of economics as I understand them. The first link wants to turn things like Airbnb into a sharing service that provides "the benefits of traditional employment." Nobody's stopping you from setting up such a service now. It just won't go anywhere, because it will provide the same service to the customer as Airbnb but at a higher price. Why shouldn't they prefer to contract the service for less?
Maybe you can make them feel guilty about it, but I doubt it.
I don't even know where to start with that. Orwell was so right.
ReplyDeleteThe "Small Is Beautiful" movement goes back at least to the 1980s, right? I thought it was pretty cool at the time. It still has a spot in my views, but now mostly in terms of the importance of living within one's income. The older I get, the more I look at philosophies in terms of how they govern my own behavior rather than how I fantasize about making them govern the behavior of other people.
ReplyDeleteImagine a world in which each of us found it right to help others spontaneously, but assumed that others would help us mostly if we reciprocated. If someone helped us spontaneously, we'd be pleased and grateful, not resentful that it took them so long to get around to it.