The abundant consumerism wrecks peoples lifestyles. I don't see the need to jump through hoops to support planned obsolescence consuming of widgets and eating so much food obesity becomes the major health concern.
The growth worship need to stop.
It’s easy to write that from the comfort of a western nation with reliable electricity where bellies are full and most household chores are done by machine.
The rest of the world very much would like that same standard of living (food, physical comfort and safety), and for that - they need affordable energy.
However, much of the abundance in western nations, need the cheap production of those countries. Trading wheat for Rolex clocks might be a bad deal for them (hyperbolic point, I know).
E.g. countries like Nigeria have a simultaneous obesity and malnutrition (low bmi) problem.
I am not claiming I know what needs to be done.
More concerning is the actual lack of explicit definition, appologies for the trick question. There isnt a great metric to measure growth, some will point to GDP, or unemployment, but the former can be manipulated by increasing government spending (more on that later), and the latter doesnt account for the qualitative aspects like whether someone started as a business owner and now work at starbucks.
You could point at the stock market, but again this isnt a great measure. Wealthy people have a higher fraction of their wealth in the stock market, and benefit disproportionately to the less wealthy. Moreover, the stockmarket goes up for reasons that dont have anything to do with production. When interest rates go down the stock market goes up (generally), at first this might make sense, businesses can better afford the resources they need; except, at any given price point there are only so many resources available, all you have done is increased demand and driven up prices. The same occurs with government stimulus, you are giving people more receipts for wealth, you havent created the actual wealth though. ---------- Lastly, and most importantly, there is the mechanics of our monetary system. It would be nice if there was a thing we called money, and that money had some kind of value based on available goods and services. This is not accurate though, we have "legal tender" or "currency", which can be used to settle debts.
The distinction is important, because it necessarily implies that debt cant be paid back, and here is the crux. Every dollar in the economy was created through debt, like when you took out a home loan, or when the government takes on debt; that debt has an interest rate, and new dollars cant be created except through more debt. If debts were to all be repaid, there would be zero dollars left in the economy, and there would still be debt left to pay.
The only, and I mean only, way to prevent this from causing a cascading default, is to continuously add more dollars (and debt!) into the system, prolonging the pains of inflation and delaying the date of reckoning for an ever shorter period of time.
So how do you respond to your money being devalued constantly? The answer for many is, "follow the money" and blow it on a new car. Very few investments will ever beat the actual rate of inflation, so a dollar saved is a dollar wasted.
Well, is that entirely unreasonable?
In actuality, the biggest issue is the amount of pollution we emitted, not growth per se.
- underfunding of journalism
- climate change
- chemicals like PFAs
- demographics
- social media
...
Anyway, whoever they are seem to have limited interest in energy security. Much like someone who has no interest in food security, that is going to change at some point. The anti-nuclear lobby has done terrible things and should be ashamed of the position they've put us in. We'd be so much better positioned if they had been rational instead of panicked.
It is trivial to make people better off when the energy supply is growing. It is much harder (or impossible) to improve lifestyles at an industrial scale when it is shrinking.