People seem to be willing to trade some level of security for some level of luxury. This is why people take out the largest mortgage they possibly can given their income, and spend money they don't have on cars (which they will take a long time to pay off).

These revealed preferences are hard to deny, and it would be quite presumptuous to impose a different trade-off on a plurality/majority of the populace.

Those preferences are greatly shaped by inequality and status consumption. Change the institutional backdrop (which degrowth policy aims to do) and the preferences change. Robert Frank's work is great on much luxury consumption is contagious despite wildly inefficient because it is a relative status game. This Q & A is an intro https://behavioralscientist.org/putting-peer-pressure-to-wor...

What choice do people have? It doesn't make sense to trade anything for security because that security is non-existent anyway.

Losing your job & health benefits for much of the middle class would be a death sentence regardless if they bought a 35k car or a 10k beater.

Strongly disagree, being able to accumulate enough money to cover the bumps of life can be the difference between stringing along a middle class existence and everything working out and going broke.

$25K is peanuts if anything even mildly serious happens.

If you are insured, $25k is plenty and cover 99% of situations.

Of course - the hypothetical emergency fund is great. The problem is the required amounts are rapidly growing.

An emergency fund of 10k barely covers the 8k average deductible for a family. Ignoring things like rent, food, etc, all rapidly increasing.

To have a worthwhile emergency fund is too costly for most americans. Might as well finance a car - it won't matter.

Security (or risk) is not a Boolean (even though it may seem so psychologically), but a probability (or set of probabilities for different outcomes).

"I could die tomorrow, so it doesn't matter what I do today." is not a healthy way of thinking.

Spending less, eating healthy, learning useful stuff, exercising more and building good social relations with your family, community and professional contacts are all factors that improve the likelihood of positive outcomes.

You could still die (or end up broke and sick) tomorrow. There could even be nuclear war, for all I know. Or you could rent a Ferrari, spend a week drinking, gambling and whoring in Las Vegas, and end up meeting a person at the poker table that will make you rich, but the probability is low. (Unless you're already rich or famous.)

If you live humbly and healthily from you're 20 to you're 50, you may already have saved up enough buffer that from then on, you work because you want to, not because you have to (even on a median salary). If you go on until you're 70, you probably have enough for one more generation to have a jump start on the same level of safety, if they follow your example.

Though in my experience, families who follow such values over multiple generations are already wealthy, and often quite rich. Living with dignity well within their means, and not flaunting wealth in public, are some of the main hallmarks of "old money".

25k saved (the difference in price between the cars) is more than most people have in savings. It would at least delay the fall of the guillotine long enough to find another job.

Or it can be eaten up by one emergency room trip and three days of intensive care.

Quite a few countries have solved this problem.

Unless you can't work, have to retrain, your work is dependent on not driving a beater, driving one of these is not banned due to environmental concerns... then it would delay nothing. Ultimately you will incur maintenance costs.

The trade-off between non-existent luxury is most visible in Europe. We get small flats, mostly. The choice is between way too small inconvenient flat, inconvenient location that forces hours of commute or being already rich.

The flats these days are much less luxurious than older post-war ones, and way smaller. Then again families were even twice as big and multigenerational, but flats were even 5 times bigger. The better furnishings these days slightly help but not enough.

Then again, there tends to be public transport that works, except in USA. So maybe you could get away with a bicycle commute if your health allows it. Not quite yet in most cities though.

A death sentence? Very few middle class people are at death's door and require constant medical intervention.

> I'd trade most (though maybe not all) of the great meals I've ever had for the guarantee I'd never go hungry.

I wouldn’t — and there’s been times I was quite hungry while homeless.

Moreover, your fear doesn’t give you the right to impose that choice on me.

>Moreover, your fear doesn’t give you the right to impose that choice on me.

You will have to explain how reducing growth dependence reduces agency. If anything, one could argue that there is no such thing as agency with growth dependence.

> You will have to explain how reducing growth dependence reduces agency.

Your process of “reducing growth dependence” is fundamentally you stifling and regimenting growth.

You don’t have a fundamental right to moderate my growth, against my wishes — but I do have a fundamental right to seek growth.

> You don’t have a fundamental right to moderate my growth, against my wishes — but I do have a fundamental right to seek growth.

No, neither is a fundamental right. Because both growth and degrowth as a national policy (or global international policy) has immense consequences on the opportunities and outcomes in peoples lives. Both stifle and regiment the lives and actions of people in a myriad of ways (climate change is a massive externality for everyone!), so anti-stifling arguments have no traction. The only arguments that can do real work will have to concern policy consequences: which policy yields better life outcomes in terms of health, wellbeing, longevity and so on.

Growth or degrowth are not national policies but individual ones. You cannot prevent someone with growth mindset from doing actions leading to growth. And at the same time, nobody is preventing people with degrowth mindset to practice what they preach.

> Growth or degrowth are not national policies but individual ones

Degrowth as used in the OP article is about macro level policy. For example solar panel subsidies, taxing coal and investments in public transportation.

Individual actions performed in the name of "growth mindset" (whatever that means) can like any other actions be stopped, and likely will be stopped if they cause harm to others.

Can you name any country successful in stopping people with a mindset that they want to grow, mainly financially, or into power?

In capitalism, these are entrepreneurs. In democracy, these are politicians. In autocracy, these are dictators, army generals. In theocracy, these are pharaos, etc. In nature, these are alpha wolves.

Even people proposing degrowth, if they're going to achieve their goal, will have to be power hungry, alpha wolves (no matter how they will market themselves), not that different from people I describe. And they will have to fight constantly. There is no way how to stop need for getting better, getting more, competing, winning...

I don't know what kind of absurd logic you are following but you seem to hate the ability to choose between having degrowth, zero growth and some growth on the individual level. Your preconceived notions of growth force it upon every single individual one, in the current economic system there is no choice, you are going to follow the authoritarian "growthers" or you are going to be a laughing stock. You are actively arguing for reducing the agency of everyone, the ability for everyone to decide for themselves what they want.

>Your process of “reducing growth dependence” is fundamentally you stifling and regimenting growth.

Growth dependence is an economic force that forces people to growth their economic activity or see a depression or recession and lose their job, the threat of grow dependence makes people unable to make rational decisions, instead of thinking about their own needs people produce useless widgets and manipulate others into buying them because of a fear of losing the rigged competition. What people value isn't their productive output anymore, what they consider to be the source of their prosperity is that they are employed at all and the moment growth stops, employers are going to pile up less work onto fewer people, leaving some of them unemployed. We grow the economy to its maximum output because of full employment, so that everyone can work their 40 hours, this means we have to come up with increasingly pointless economic activity just to maintain this growth farce. In the long run this wastage of resources will shrink overall growth because long term resources are being allocated to short term needs that don't even exist and are just there to keep the economy going for one more year. If economic activity was mostly about food production, housing and other basic human needs, there wouldn't be much growth necessary to have a high standard of living, simply building longer lasting structures reduces the need for growth. Meanwhile growth dependence demands that we build houses that last 40 years and then tear them down, so that we can build them again. The idea that this is good for economic growth in the long run is laughable. The essence of growth dependence boils down to this after all: growing next quarter is really important, growing more overall over the next ten years is less important. So growth dependence isn't even an outcome, it is a dependence to make the same stupid decision over and over again. Think about it this way, over the next 10 years your economy is growing 8 times at 2% and two years at -3%. A growth dependent system will have to fake growth through inflation even in a short term degrowth environment for a single year. Inefficiencies will result in less overall growth. Meanwhile in an economy without growth dependence it doesn't matter if the economy grows or not because people get to decide how much growth they want. They don't have to fear unemployment or some other disadvantage.

>You don’t have a fundamental right to moderate my growth, against my wishes — but I do have a fundamental right to seek growth.

Maybe it is too difficult for you to grasp these very simple terms.

My position: Abolishing growth dependence means every single economic actor gets to decide whether they want less growth(even negative growth), no growth or more growth.

Your position: Giving everyone the choice to not pick growth is bad. You must pick growth because I said so.

> Your position: Giving everyone the choice to not pick growth is bad. You must pick growth because I said so.

This isn’t even close to what I said — in fact, it’s the complete opposite.

You can re-read my original comment, which is about others forcing their choices onto me.

> your fear doesn’t give you the right to impose that choice on me.

That's entirely up for discussion. Civilization has imposed a lot of choices on you that you may not like.

In the same sense any rights are “entirely up for discussion”.

Is that your point? — that because we had slavery, slavery is “entirely up for discussion”?

No, in a different sense, because the right to not have other people's choices imposed on you is a made-up right. The rights you have were decided upon by people who aren't you, and imposed on you.

I'm theoretically sympathetic to your wanting to opt out of public services, but it's too onerous to have to maintain lists of houses not to put out if they're on fire.

> because the right to not have other people's choices imposed on you is a made-up right

I agree with this statement. Actually, I consider this more of a principle than a right. Society should aim to minimize the degree to which it imposes the will of the government on the citizens, not fundamentally because freedom is an a priori right, but because it leads to a more peaceful society.

A society where the citizens do not tolerate would be tyrants that want to excessively dictate how people live, tends to be (EDIT) more stable, innovative or economically competitive over time.

Citizens of a freedom-loving society may not all understand this from first principles. Even if most believe they have such a right somewhat dogmatically, it may still have the same outcome.

Dogmatism may come with the downside of seeing people with different opinions as evil, though, and may sometimes lead to needless conflict.

I'm less sympathetic: I wouldn't want to live next to a house that has opted out of sewage service.

> the right to not have other people's choices imposed on you is a made-up right

You just said the right to not be a slave is a made-up right.

> it's too onerous to have to maintain lists of houses not to put out if they're on fire

So don’t? — but you’re losing me at the point you go from “I save money by not tracking exceptions” to “I have the right to make you participate because I want your money”.

If you consider obeying the law equivalent to slavery, then I absolutely am saying that. The law is other people's choices imposed upon you.

Sure — as is slavery.

Which is my point: you’re not differentiating between the two, while asserting that you don’t have the same rights in one case.

Slavery was also the law.

> Is that your point? — that because we had slavery, slavery is “entirely up for discussion”?

That discussion has been settled in the West, at least for now. In many places, the discussion is still ongoing, and in fact, they are an estimated 40 million slaves (or similarly bonded people) on Earth today, or about 10x as many as in the US South in 1860.

I find it a bit funny that in an increasingly atheistic society, some Christian values are held even more axiomatically than ever before, and racism is particular

Statues of American founders get torn down due to some link to it. Imagine if everything around the world with some link to forced labor would be given the same treatment. We would have to remove almost every ancient monument or statue from Italy, Greece, Egypt, the Middle East, India, China, former Aztec and Inka peoples, just to mention a few.

Also most ancient works of writing, from all over the globe would have to be given introduction with warning that the author may have owned slaves or benefitted from slave labor.

I'm not American. I did not grow up with the legacy of American slavery. By no means do I endorse slavery, but when reading about Aristotle's ideas about slavery, I'm able to imagine a world where slavery is seen as normal. In many cases, those who lost some war would end up as slaves. But typically, that would go both ways. Whichever side won would enslave the other.

I have trouble seeing almost every inhabitant of classical Europe, the Middle East or North Africa as evil just because they either did own slaves, or would have owned slaves had they been able to.

Just like I have trouble seeing a Lion or Hyena as evil for eating a Zebra. (Ok, maybe I can see the Hyena as evil, mainly because they're ugly ;)

Yes, you're completely right.

However, I believe that their lack of security is due to their lack of power, and that their lack of power is due to their lack of wealth, their loans and that they do not own the companies in which they work.

Consequently I see wealth and power as effectively the same and become moderately unhappy when I see policies that will in any way reduce the wealth or power of ordinary people.

So, while I used the word 'conditions' I actually meant their state of subjugation.

> The conditions of the middle-class are actually too luxurious.

That's not for you to decide. The market can and does apply proper growth slowing pressure by itself.

> Everybody in the world can't have a suburban lawn.

That's just a different version of "think of the poor who can't eat". Countries and cultures aren't the same. Suburbia only exists due to improper distribution of business centers and housing bubbles. Overpopulated mega-cities don't have to exist with proper distribution of work and living space. Majority of countries are uninhabited and undeveloped.

> What the middle-class (and the poor) don't have is security.

Most developed countries are have welfare. Our poor live better and longer than kings from a century ago.

> They live in a state of fear that the entire bottom will drop out of their lives if they get fired, or have a heart attack, or any of a million things.

Firing is necessary to keep efficiency and competition.

> Supplying security to people is actually cheaper that what we do now, just as socialized health care is far cheaper than an ad hoc privatized patchwork.

Who will "supply security"? People who work and who are getting paid so they buy stuff. Who pays and produce their stuff? Other people who need to work. The demand for "security" will only keep increasing due to comfort. There's a reason Bill Clinton was elected on a platform to reform the welfare system.

> We don't need more growth, we need more humanity.

And flowers and unicorns too.

> Most developed countries are have welfare. Our poor live better and longer than kings from a century ago.

This is always a dubious comparison to me. Why are you poor people worried about the continued lack of atonomy you experience due to a lack of ownership in modern society? The state will give you penecilin. The duke of dorkingshire might have looked like he was doing well but he did have gout to contend with.

And yet the upper classes aren’t exactly leading the way.

Free market health care is far cheaper than socialized health care.

Some studies suggest that a single-payer system (thus socialized) is more cost-effective than the current free market in the USA: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo....

Also, social benefits like protection against medical bankruptcy, universal coverage, and others are known to have a net positive impact.

The current medical system in the US is not remotely free market.

I'm not sure there's an advanced "free market" bealthcare system in the world we can use to even make that comparison.

The free market produces goods and services at less cost for everything else, why would health care be any different?

Because healthcare as a service does not come even close to satisfy the conditions required for perfect competition.

Without going too much in detail, the "customers" cannot have perfect information regarding the treatment or course of action that's most convenient for them at a given moment, and they cannot freely decide when (or often whether) to make use of the service or not—"It's probably best I get appendicitis now that I can afford it rather than wait until next year".

The free market does not require perfect competition nor perfect information at all. Imperfect information, for example, is called "risk", and risk is factored into every price.

Besides, why would you think socialist medicine would provide perfect information?

> Besides, why would you think socialist medicine would provide perfect information?

Where have I come even close to suggesting it would? Perfect information, to the extent it can be possible, is a requirement for a market to be efficient. What you call "socialist medicine" is by definition not a market, so perfect information is a moot point.

What universal healthcare can provide is the adequate incentives for providing early diagnosis, promoting preventative medicine, and giving safe and effective treatment. Where are the incentives for early diagnosis and prevention in free market healthcare?

Furthermore, pure free market healthcare provides an intrinsic incentive to extract abusive profit from a customer whose life or wellbeing are on the line, and who does not have the knowledge to decide whether they really need this expensive procedure they are being offered. This already happens to an extent under the current U.S. model. There's no reason to assume it wouldn't be even worse under a completely free market.

> Perfect information, to the extent it can be possible, is a requirement for a market to be efficient

This is simply not true, as I said, risk factors into every price.

> Where are the incentives for early diagnosis and prevention in free market healthcare?

Don't you feel any incentive to take care of yourself with early diagnosis and prevention?

> pure free market healthcare provides an intrinsic incentive to extract abusive profit from a customer whose life or wellbeing are on the line

Just like if you're hungry. But food in a free market is cheap and plentiful.

> who does not have the knowledge to decide whether they really need this expensive procedure they are being offered.

The beauty of the free market is the consumer gets to decide who to trust.

> There's no reason to assume it wouldn't be even worse under a completely free market.

The US had a free market in health care up to the 1960s, and there's no evidence of the dark predictions you make for it.

The unregulated free market mostly produces goods and services at less cost for the producer, which huge external costs to everything else.

Do you have a proof for such a statement? AFAIK most of negative externalities are either negligible or easy to be sued for. Or a responsibility of informed customer.

Of course, there's that ultimate hammer of greenhouse gases everybody is using daily, but besides these it is hard to confirm this. And these have also many positive externalities (access to plastics, cheap energy) that cannot be ignored, otherwise we would live in carbon-zero economy already.

Really? Why then are communist countries the most polluted?

Do you actually have anything to say, or are you just going to avoid having to form coherent arguments by saying “what about communism” to anyone who replies to you.

If the claim is "huge external costs", since those are not quantified, then it's fair to ask "compared to what".

So I compared it to communism.

If you have something else to compare it to, feel free.

It's not an either-or situation. In the UK we have a socialised health care system with a private health care system available to those that want it. I guess it's a question of how much you care about the plight of people at the bottom of society and how much you see it as a sort of civic duty to increase their access to high quality health care regardless of their life outcomes (low income).

I'm lucky that I don't rely on our national health service for everything but I still gladly pay towards it's running so others can use it. Of all the things the government taxes me for directly or indirectly payments towards the national health care service ranks very low on the list of annoyances.

Free health care is very, very expensive.

So? Governments spend obscene amounts of money on all sorts of things, it's just a case of placing it in your list of priorities.

Because health is quite literally priceless.

So is food. But every country that tried socialist food production reaped famine.

Yes, but food isn't magic and medicine to most people is.

Here take this pill and boom life extension is on a different level than this is my carrot and even though I have 100's you can't have any.

The first will lead to bankruptcy the second to riots.

> Yes, but food isn't magic and medicine to most people is.

The most bizarre argument I've encountered yet.

Maybe because often when you need it you can't take the time to shop around like you can with TV and cars.

Very little of health care is delivered through a trip to the emergency room.

Research suggest that nearly half is delivered by emergency departments. So even if it was half of that, your statement would still be an outright lie. What is your source that it is very little?

That does not seem to match up with current reality. At least not if the US is to be the example for free market health care. Looking at the stats it is by far the most expensive compared with pretty much any socialized health care in the world (and with worse outcomes): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health...

The US medical system is not remotely free market. Obamacare, for example.

How would you know? We have examples of good socialised health care and terrible everything else.

Health care expenses tracked inflation until the late 1960s, when it started dramatically outpacing inflation. The 1960s saw a massive influx of the government into health care. The pace of medical cost increases hasn't slowed down since. Every new government intervention makes it worse.

Proof?

The American health care system before the 1960s. And also:

"How American Health Care Killed My Father"

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...

compares the free market section of the health care system with the rest of it.

OK, but... the 1960s were literally 60 years ago. The world looks very different, and so does healthcare. Is it really comparable?

Is economics different from the 1960s?

I was alluding to the progress in medical tech, and the corresponding rise in the cost of specialised medical equipment. While we developed fancy tools like accurate MRI machines that let us treat patients better, they also cost more to buy. My intuition tells me that in the 1960s, treating people was cheaper because we just didn't have any machinery to spend more money on.

Read the article, where Lasik surgery got cheaper and cheaper while MRIs got more and more expensive.