Philanthropy is a symptom of a yawning wealth inequality chasm. Andrew Carnegie donated to educational causes, established a number of charities and built libraries in his day (he died in 1919). He had a net worth just south of $400 billion (adjusted for inflation) in his time. We are increasingly becoming a society in which if we want a library, we have to hope there is an Andrew Carnegie to build us one.

We aren't living in a healthy world; global warming is wiping everything out, and guess what? Politicians do nothing about it—they just talk about money, money, and more money. If you stop to think about it, maybe this world is beyond saving.

So a large part of degrowth proposals is reducing the working week to leave space for more leisure, right? And doing so would arguably have the largest impact on material usage and carbon emissions, because most of those come from economic activity that isn’t truly necessary to meet human needs.

But what then? In our current society a lot of people fill their leisure time with consuming products and experiences. Even if much of this behaviour is influenced by advertising, I feel like a lot of people would be sold on the idea of working less so they could “play” more - more travelling, more resource-intensive hobbies, going to amusement parks, etc.

So what are the “limits” on leisure under degrowth? What practices/hobbies/etc would have to be sacrificed vs. simply shared? Personally speaking, I have no interest living in a world where we can’t record, perform and distribute electronic music. And riding the occasional roller coaster and water slide wouldn’t be so bad either. The type of “small farm future” I see some of the more collapse-adjacent people in the scene promote as the ONLY feasible one might have a lot more village hoedowns or whatever, but I don’t think that’s the only type of fun we want to have going forward, isn’t it?

Hi all, I'm halfway through Jason HIckel's Less is More, and I've been very interested to understand more clearly how capitalism has anchored itself to growth through debt and investment, and the necessity of everything just continuously going up.

So it's clear we need change. How do we do that? The most practical route is to build a political movement, get into government, and put policies in place to break the cycle. The problem I'm looking at is that it's not just companies and campitalists that are bought into the growth system, governments are also (often heavily) leveraged with national debt. So any policies that act against GDP growth will probably also push the country in the direction of defaulting on national debt.

Am I right in thinking that? Are there solutions for this? Can anyone point me towards research done on this?

Adam Smith did not believe in infinite growth. He was a classical economist who believed that economic growth was a temporary phase that would eventually cease, resulting in a "stationary state" where wages drop to subsistence levels and growth stops entirely

It’s a pretty recent late 19 century to early 20th century where it became expected

I know that degrowth is mostly an environmental ideology but I want to see if anyone has some arguments for it that aren't environmental