> Is degrowth incompatible with improved middle class and poor living standards if the rich didn't take so much?

No, but it's antithetical to everything we think and believe for Capital to not take its profits before everyone else.

Do not violate liquidity preference thou foul spendthrift.

The rich don’t take much. The vast majority of their wealth is paper. A billionaire who jet sets around and has five homes and a staff might at most consume the resources of a few hundred middle class Americans.

You might approach the footprint of a medium sized town if you built your own orbital lair and lived like a cyberpunk oligarch in space. Maybe.

Of course for some resources there is little difference at all. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos don’t eat much more than you do.

Money is not physical. Start redistributing physical stuff and you’ll find that soaking the rich barely makes a dent.

This is why you should ensure that the medium of exchange does not get stuck with people who don't need it. They block the economy for everyone else, preventing us from helping ourselves.

It is not stuck. The billionaires are not hoarding all the dollars. They have stock in their companies, which is worth varying amounts of dollars. Them owning stock does not deprive you of any dollars.

Them owning real estate keeps the real estate off the market, thereby increasing the price for everyone else.

Which can be easily resolved by taking building regulations from NIMBYs and giving them to YIMBYs and letting people build build more or less anything anywhere. 1000 billionaires having 5000 houses have no effect in comparison with hundreds of thousands of houses not built because of regulations.

Real estate is not the medium of exchange. And the answer there is to build more real estate and have high taxes on any property that isn't a primary residence.

There's "rich people" buying houses, which are investment funds that buy property to rent - that is still availalbe on the market and isn't decreasing the supply of housing.

Rich people buying homes for personal use can't have an appreciable effect on pricing. You couldn't afford a billionaire's eighth home in whatever city even if it were available for sale anyway.

i dont think the cause of housing shortage is billionaires with their 3 vacation homes. there's just not enough of them to make a difference.