this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
42 points (95.7% liked)
Degrowth
782 readers
1 users here now
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.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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?).
I disagree that we should try to replace GDP with one metric. The world is too complicated for that. What we should do instead is look at multiple metrics and have targets for each of those metrics. Doughnut economics is a pretty decent framework for that. It uses consumption limits in form of cliamte change, chemical pollution, biodiversity, land use, water consumption and so forth on one hand and on the other site targets like food security, life expectancy, equality(GINI, but also race and gender), energy, water access and so forth. This is much better as it can be much more easily adapted to changing dangers and the situation. Water is for example much less of a problem for a country like Norway, then for say Iraq. So they would focus on different metrics.
I didn't mean to imply that GDP should be replaced with another single metric, and I totally agree that doing so just perpetuates the cycle. Instead, my argument is that GDP should no longer be used as a metric of success, because its use has been bastardized. When "the economy" is doing better because more transactions are being made while class inequality is worsening and standards of living are dropping, then the measurement used is flawed.
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!