The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less: The degrowth movement wants to shrink the economy to address climate change, and create lives with less stuff, less work, and better well-being.
The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less: The degrowth movement wants to shrink the economy to address climate change, and create lives with less stuff, less work, and better well-being.
The degrowth movement wants to intentionally shrink the economy to address climate change, and create lives with less stuff, less work, and better well-being. But is it a utopian fantasy?
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How would business work? Currently a business's purpose by law is to make money. How would you enforce a different goal without going full centralized economy?
And how is trying to add less value more effective than internalizing externalized costs? For example, co2 is an externalized cost, one companies don't need to pay for right now, it's external to them. If we made them pay for it to fund carbon capture at 1 ton removed for every 1 ton emitted, they would decrease their emissions and the rest would be removed. You could do something similar for other ecological issues as well. What's the benefit of degroth over internalizing costs?
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I was confusing an obligation to shareholders with an obligation to profit. So if a share holder majority want maximized profit, I think the company needs to do it.
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But the shareholders can replace members who are not acting what they perceive to be their best interest, right? It seems like eventually the company will conform to what the share holders want.
It seems like if a CEO publicly said they were shrinking the company to benefit the environment, they'd be replaced by the shareholders pretty quickly.
But the shareholders can replace members who are not acting what they perceive to be their best interest, right?
Yes but you make it sound like they're ordering a sandwich. Removing a CEO is a big deal and can have huge repercussions. You need to make sure the reasons are good enough, and "we didn't make quite as much money" is not enough to move most boards.
It seems like if a CEO publicly said they were shrinking the company to benefit the environment, they’d be replaced by the shareholders pretty quickly.
That completely depends on the company and how they're doing it.
"In 2014, the United States Supreme Court voiced its position in no uncertain terms. In Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., the Supreme Court stated that “Modern corporate law does not require for profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else”.
https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
@Chetzemoka @inasaba @JohnDClay
The issue isn't law. It's base greed.
Hmm interesting. Thank you!
They do have an obligation to what their share holders want though don't they?
Maybe part of degrowth would be fewer public companies beholden to shareholders.
Private companies are still beholden to their owners. Would the alternative be government ownership?
Co-op structures could work too.
In co-ops the employees have a controlling interest, right? So a majority of them would still need to want to shrink the company. That might be easier to convince them than investors though.
True, it would still need to be based off the cooperative ideas. There was an awesome forestry co-op in the 70-90's called the Hoedad's that had an interesting model and had each section ran as separate crews with even different pay structures and even philosophical structures. They did tree replanting and brush cutting and many other activities but each sub group bid contacts independently but we're part of the workers cooperative collectively.
If the shareholders want the corporation to blatantly violate the law, they don't do that. They don't have to do everything that shareholders want. Shareholders are perfectly free to sell their shares, if they don't like what a company is doing, or to vote out members of the board, if they don't like the way the company is being managed. The idea that corporations have no other choice is a myth perpetuated to maintain the status quo
Please think of the companies! Won't anyone think of the poor profit motive?!
Is degroth individual or government driven? If it's individual, I'm all for it. If it's government, I think there are more effective ways of helping the environment than telling businesses to not make money.
Yes individual actions are the best and most effective way to deal with collective problems.
Obviously companies making money has no impact on the environment either
Any cost that you try to internalize will just be passed on to the consumer.
Remember, you said it in your comment, "... a business's purpose by law is to make money." The business doesn't pay the cost, the worker pays the cost.
Your example of carbon capture is great, a "business" starts up doing carbon capture. They make their money by selling carbon credits to other businesses, NOT to clean up their act and stop polluting but to "offset" their carbon emissions. If my business produces more pollution, I just buy more credits and pass on the cost to the consumers or freeze employee raises or fire chunks of the workforce to cover the increase in business costs without to reduce the chance that it will hurt profits.
Like, if I poop in your kitchen sink every day, but I buy "poop free kitchen sink credits" to offset that I poop in your kitchen sink every day that says "somewhere else there is a kitchen sink free of poop that will cancel out that I've pooped in this sink today," ... I'm still pooping in your kitchen sink.
Any cost that you try to internalize will just be passed on to the consumer.
That's fine. The government can give subsidies for low income people or subsidize some products directly.
The poop in the sink example isn't applicable to carbon emissions. Co2 dilutes very quickly, so it's all essentially going into one big reservoir. The equivalent then is for everyone to be pooping in one big pile. I don't care in that case whether you don't poop in the pile or you pay someone else to take one poop's worth of poop out of the pile somewhere else. The pile stays the same size. The overall quantity is what matters for co2.
You might have a point though for externalities like resource extraction or habitat destruction. That's harder to quantity if the degradation of one area can be offset by the improvement of another. That's a much more variable exchange, so it'd be more difficult to work trades on those. But governments have been able to mostly figure it out for things like national forests, logging, and hydraulic fluid spills. So I don't think it's impossible.
pass on the cost to the consumers or freeze employee raises or fire chunks of the workforce to cover the increase in business costs without to reduce the chance that it will hurt profits.
Exec's don't have that much headroom left to squeeze out of customers and workers. If they raise prices or lower wages too much, their product or jobs will be uncompetitive with companies that emit less co2 and thus need to pay less to offset it. It will be cheaper in most cases to decrease emissions instead of paying for offsets.
Exec's don't have that much headroom left to squeeze out of customers and workers. If they raise prices or lower wages too much, their product or jobs will be uncompetitive with companies that emit less co2 and thus need to pay less to offset it.
How many different gas stations do you see during your daily travels? Are the prices all over the place or are they the same? What are the price differences between different manufacturers of the same type of TV? They're all pretty much the same with one or two very high end or very low end models being the exception. There won't be much price competition because that hurts businesses, if one of your business peers raises their prices you are now under pressure to RAISE your prices so that you're not loosing potential profits.
I'm pretty sure that manufacturing any particular type of thing or extracting any particular type of resource will produce the same amount of environmental degradation regardless of which company's name is on the paperwork. Exxon doesn't have some special way to extract oil that is better for the envrioment than the one ConocoPhillips uses. So there won't be any competition that way.
It will be cheaper in most cases to decrease emissions instead of paying for offsets.
If the emissions are directly correlated to the thing they are selling, then no. Decreasing emissions means a company is pumping less oil or making less iPhones or selling less gasoline. This gives a company's competitors who aren't decreasing their production a way to capture its market share because somebody else will still have product to sell to meet the demand.
If the emissions are directly correlated to the thing they are selling, then no.
It's never directly correlated. You can always transport by ship instead of plane or use more local resources or use less material. There's always efficiency that can be squeezed out of a system, and a company that doesn't pursue cost efficiency in that area will fall behind. But right now there's no reason to do so.
Are the prices all over the place or are they the same?
Gas or the food things?
Often the prices are all the same because the higher cost ones have gone out of business or adapted to the lower cost method. Price fixing (which is what you're describing) is hard to do when there is a lot of competition, since any one company can disrupt the whole thing and make more money because of it. But it is more likely were competition is scarce. In duopolies or similarly few players, they can price fix more easily. That's why I am in favor of nationalizing industries like that, or at least they need more oversight.
That's fine. The government can give subsidies for low income people or subsidize some products directly.
Why should we give money to rich parasites that contribute nothing when we could just nationalize their "business" and run it at a loss? Why must everything have a profit motive?
Because a profit motive does much better for efficiency. Government run things are not known for their efficiency and innovation.
Plus the government is very inefficient deciding how to delegate resources. Democracy isn't able to get a lot of information from everyone about their exact priorities and desires without extreme expenditure. But people can show how much they value some services over others by how much they're willing to pay, doing prioritisation automatically.
I would be in favor of nationalizing some industries where free market forces don't work, for example healthcare or Internet. But free markets with profit motives are very efficient.
And I claim that they can be moral if the external costs of immorality are internalized. Make a business pay exorbitantly for being bad, and they'll stop being bad.
Do you have any actual proof that the profit motive has any positive links to innovation, or are you just taking it for granted? The first cell phone was invented in the USSR, and Frederick Banting sold the patent for insulin for $1, to name two counter-examples. What innovations have come from the profit motive?
Likewise, I doubt the claims of market efficiency. 10% of Americans were food insecure in 2021. Hundreds of thousands are homeless. To me, this is a drastic failing of resource allocation in the richest country on earth. When push came to shove during WWII, even the US ran their war industry as a command economy because corporate graft could not be tolerated in an existential crisis. Socialist countries consistently outperform similar capitalist nations; compare Cuba to any other Caribbean nation (or even China to India; while I assume we would disagree about what China's doing, I think we would agree that it's more government-directed than US-style "free-market capitalism").
I'm curious what would justify whether something should be nationalized to you. Surely it's not just to do with profitability, as you give healthcare as an example. Is it to do with how essential something is? If it's the latter, then surely that would justify the nationalization of food, decommodification of housing, etc.
To your point of "regulate businesses to ensure good behavior", surely you must realize the reason we don't already have those regulations are that private businesses bribe politicians to prevent such regulations.
I'm curious what would justify whether something should be nationalized to you.
It would be whether there can be sufficient competition to prevent anti competitive behavior. Healthcare inherently has less competition since you shouldn't be deciding what treatments you get, the doctors should. But you can also get less competition due to extreme barriers to entry, such as trains, mobile networks or internet.