OPINION: Economic growth is good for your health - "there is a strong positive correlation between the wealth of nations and the life expectancy of their populations... In addition to the statistical observation that citizens of richer countries generally live longer, the data also supports the fact that the more a given economy grows, the more likely its citizens’ life expectancy will rise. A good way of illustrating this is to observe the trajectories of the two Koreas following their separation in 1945. In 1950, the first post-partition year for which life expectancy data exist, North Koreans could expect to live to be 49.22 years old, while South Koreans could expect to live 46.62 years. At the time, North Korea, having a more industrial economy, was richer than South Korea, which remained a largely agricultural economy. Although the North Korean regime is renowned for its lack of transparency, it is estimated that before the 1960s, its GDP per capita was anywhere from 30% to 50% higher than South Korea’s. Today, South Koreans can expect to live to be 82.77 years old, whereas the life expectancy of North Koreans is 71.96 years... One study of the matter found that between 1986 and 2000, 40% of the life expectancy gains in the 52 countries examined were directly related to the development and marketing of new drugs. Other studies looking specifically at the wealthiest countries find that the development of new drugs is responsible for a non-negligible portion of the reduction in mortality risks after the age of 65. The resources needed to discover and develop new drugs, to test them and bring them to market, are very substantial. It is no surprise, then, that the most prosperous societies in the world are the ones that really have the means to do so, and therefore are the ones that spend the most money on pharmaceutical research and development."
Of course, the de-growth crowd will just blame capitalism
How stalling growth hurts the planet - "Degrowthism may seem like the only reasonable response to the climate challenges we face, but the experience of enforced economic shrinking during the pandemic indicates the pain would outweigh the benefits — especially for the world's poorest... The very real human pain of 2020 — and the political fallout it created — should be taken as a warning sign to degrowthers.
A new Pew Research Center analysis found the ranks of the global middle income — those who live on $10.01 to $20 a day — fell by 54 million in 2020 compared to the number projected before the pandemic, while the number of global poor rose by 131 million. And while carbon emissions did fall significantly in 2020, it came at a high cost. One analysis estimated that each ton of CO2 reduced due to pandemic-related degrowth will have an implied cost to the economy of more than $1,500. That's "an order of magnitude greater than the most costly of 'technofixes'" like direct capture of carbon from the air, as Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute wrote last year...
The strongest argument around degrowth is one rooted in a goal that its own advocates strive for: global equity... we tend to focus on the huge and growing wealth gap between the ultrarich and the middle class and poor in rich countries like the U.S. But a much bigger gap exists between even the relatively less well-off in the developed world and most of humanity... For all the environmental pressure growth has created, in recent decades, both rich and poor countries have been able to continue to grow while reducing many pollutants through more efficiency and cleaner energy."
Of course, the left wing "solution" is to destroy capitalism. Then everyone will be equally miserable
Economic growth is an unnecessary evil, Jacinda Ardern is right to deprioritise it (2019)
New Zealand slips into its second recession in 18 months (2024) - "New Zealand has entered its second recession in 18 months after the latest round of GDP figures confirmed its economy contracted in the last quarter of 2023."
Why Degrowth Is the Worst Idea on the Planet | WIRED - "For half a century, we've been told that we had to embrace degrowth in order to save our planet. We haven't listened. Around the world, human populations and economies have continued to grow at rates that are virtually unprecedented in the history of our species. Over that same span, an unexpected and encouraging pattern has emerged: The world's richest countries have learned how to reduce their footprint on Earth. They're polluting less, using less land and water, consuming smaller amounts of important natural resources, and doing better in many other ways. Some of these trends are also now visible in less affluent countries. However, many in the degrowth movement seem to have trouble taking yes for an answer. The claims I just made are widely resisted or ignored. Some say they’ve been debunked... Some voices in the conversation about the environment seem wedded to the idea that degrowth is necessary, and they are unwilling or unable to walk away from it, no matter the evidence... The evidence is overwhelming that rich countries cleaned up their air pollution much more than they outsourced it. For one, a great deal of air pollution comes from highway vehicles and power plants, and rich countries haven’t outsourced driving and generating electricity to low-income ones. In fact, high-income countries haven't even offshored most of their industry. The US and UK both manufacture more than they did 50 years ago (at least until the Covid-19 pandemic sharply reduced output), and Germany has been a net exporter since 2000 while continuing to drive down air pollution. The rest of the world has been exporting its manufacturing pollution to Germany (to use degrowthers’ phrasing), yet Germans are breathing cleaner air than they were 20 years ago. Rich countries have reduced their air pollution not by embracing degrowth or offshoring, but instead by enacting and enforcing smart regulation. As economists Joseph Shapiro and Reed Walker concluded in a 2018 study about the US, “changes in environmental regulation, rather than changes in productivity and trade, account for most of the emissions reductions.” Research about the cleanup of US waters also concludes that well-designed and enforced regulations have successfully reduced pollution. It is true that the US and other rich countries now import lots of products from China and other nations with higher pollution levels. But if there were no international trade at all, and rich countries had to rely exclusively on their domestic industries to make everything they consume, they’d still have much cleaner air and water than they did 50 years ago. As a 2004 Advances in Economic Analysis and Policy study summarized: “We find no evidence that domestic production of pollution-intensive goods in the US is being replaced by imports from overseas.” The rich world’s success at decoupling growth from pollution is an inconvenient fact for degrowthers. Even more inconvenient is China's recent success at doing the same... China's progress with air pollution is heartening, but it's not surprising to most economists. It's a clear example of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) in action... It's not surprising that today's degrowth advocates rarely discuss the large reductions in air and water pollution that have accompanied higher prosperity in so many places around the world. Instead, degrowthers now focus heavily on one kind of pollution: greenhouse gas emissions. The claims made are familiar ones: that any apparent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in rich countries are due to offshoring rather than actual decarbonization. Thanks to the Global Carbon Project, we can see if this is the case. GCP has calculated “consumption-based emissions” for many countries going back to 1990, taking into account imports and exports, yielding the greenhouse gas emissions embodied in all the goods and services consumed in each country each year. For several of the world's richest countries, including Germany, Italy, France, the UK, and the US, graphs of consumption-based carbon emissions follow the familiar EKC. The US, for example, has reduced its total (not per capita) consumption-based CO2 emissions by more than 13 percent since 2007. These reductions are not mainly due to enhanced regulation. Instead, they've come about because of a combination of tech progress and market forces. Solar and wind power have become much cheaper in recent years and have displaced coal for electricity generation. Natural gas, which when burned emits fewer greenhouse gases per unit of energy than does coal (even after taking methane leakage into account), has also become much cheaper and more abundant in the US as a result of the fracking revolution. To ensure that these greenhouse gas declines continue to spread and accelerate, we should apply the lessons we've learned from previous pollution reduction success... Tech progress and price pressure aren't just leading to the demise of coal. They're also causing us to exploit the planet less in many other important ways, even as growth continues. In other words, EKCs are not just about pollution any more. A good place to start examining this broad phenomenon of getting more from less is US agriculture, where we have decades of data on both outputs—crop tonnage—and the key inputs of cropland, water, and fertilizer... Forest products provide another clear example of dematerialization in the US. Total annual domestic consumption of paper and paperboard peaked in 1999, and of timber in 2002. Both totals have since declined by more than 20 percent... For reasons that I don't understand well, and that I understand less the more evidence I look at, degrowthers want to make us turn around and start walking back down the path, away from higher prosperity. Their vision seems to be one of a centrally planned, ever-deepening recession throughout the rich world for the sake of the environment. Thanks to Covid-19, we have an inkling of how this would feel... ob losses, business closures, mortgage defaults, and other hardships and uncertainties. And it would have them without end—after all, growth can't be allowed to restart. Corporate and government revenue would decrease permanently, and therefore so would innovation and R&D. How many of us would be willing to accept all of this in exchange for somewhat less pollution and resource use? To sharpen the question, how many of us would be willing to accept this recession if it wasn’t necessary—if it were clear that we could get environmental improvements while continuing to grow and prosper?"
When you hate capitalism more than you love the planet
After the Pandemic: Hope and… | The Breakthrough Institute - "In contrast to the techno-optimism of ecomodernists and even many more traditional environmentalists, a very vocal and online minority has long insisted that the only way to tackle climate change and other major environmental challenges is to not only slow economic growth but end it, cutting global consumption deeply in order to avoid ecological catastrophe. Degrowth has no constituency to speak of in the real world and most of its proponents, being modern, western, educated elites, continue to consume at levels completely incompatible with the levels of consumption they advocate. But the notion has an outsized footprint in academia, in scholarly publications, and in the environmental media. 2020 was, it turns out, probably the biggest experiment in degrowth ever attempted... while many of us came to better appreciate these simpler joys, few of us appear to have much desire to limit our futures in these ways. Around the world, citizens only acquiesced to the COVID shutdowns thanks to extremely generous relief packages, including cash payments, bonus unemployment insurance, and support for restaurants and other businesses whose commerce has been interrupted by the pandemic. These benefits provided the average American household with over $5000 of extra income this year. And even with unprecedented trillions spent on these relief programs, we think it is fair to say that neither mandated nor voluntary restrictions on travel and consumption have proven particularly sustainable... And all that for, in the end, not a particularly large environmental benefit, achieved at enormous cost... As BTI’s Zeke Hausfather calculated this past spring, the implied cost per ton of carbon reduced due to degrowth associated with the COVID pandemic will exceed $1500 per ton of CO2, an order of magnitude greater than the most costly of “technofixes.” The simpler life and end of hyper-consumerism that degrowthers imagine may be desirable for them. But it does not appear so for the billions in the global middle class who appear by all accounts extremely eager to return to restaurants, airports, and hotels. And it is certainly not an option for the billions more of our global neighbors who depend on subsistence agriculture for meager wages amid insufficient infrastructure and opportunity. If 2020 has established anything, it is that the only way to mitigate the negative environmental externalities produced by global economic growth is through it. A richer world is both more resilient to the impacts of climate change and better able to invest in the advanced technologies and modern infrastructures necessary to mitigate it."
Roo Barker | Facebook - "On some level the iPhones new Clean Energy Charging feature is a good thing, not because it will make a difference for the environment, it won't, but because for the first time it partially exposes some pro-degrowther teens to the less convenient life they advocate for"
Degrowth in the Age of Dickens - "John Stuart Mill... argued that the need for economic growth in the richest countries had run its course. “It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object,” he concluded. His was far from the last suggestion that more output from greater industrialization would do little to improve quality of life. But perhaps the very antiquity of the idea should stand as a warning to those of principle and liberality who have come to a similar conclusion since then. Would modern proponents of degrowth agree that the United Kingdom’s productivity could be dialed back 170 years with minimal costs to the country’s quality of life?... Dark, satanic mills loomed over fetid and diseased slums housing the miserable inspiration for Dickens’s novels of proletarian despair and Marx’s prophecy of inevitable revolution... for all of Mill’s fears regarding “every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up,” the amount of land used for farming has declined since the 19th century... For all its recent rise, inequality in the UK is still considerably lower than it was a century and a half ago, so that greater income has been more equitably distributed. It is worth comparing Mill’s view of sufficient output to guarantee a good life to developing-country incomes today. He suggested that, fairly distributed, the UK’s productivity in 1850 would have been sufficient for its population. That productivity generated a per capita income of $2,858 (measured in purchasing power parity in 2011 dollars). In 2016, Bangladesh had an income of $3,250. That Asian developing country performs considerably better than late 19th century Britain on measures of quality of life, including education and health — for example, it sees a life expectancy of 72 years. But still, it would be a fairly radical position today to argue that all Bangladesh needs to achieve a comfortably high standard of living is greater equality and that it should adopt a zero-growth target. A perfectly distributed income would leave each person in Bangladesh living on about $4 a day, according to the World Bank’s PovcalNet tool. That compares with a poverty line in modern Britain of about $25/day... Mill was hardly the first (and far from the last) to suggest that well-being required equality far more than greater productivity, or indeed that greater productivity overall was a positive evil. Rousseau’s writings had pointed strongly in the same direction a century before. Mill’s contemporary, Karl Marx, imagined life after the revolution, where work was carried out for joy rather than the necessity of consumption: “fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind.” And Marx predicted that revolution was imminent in European countries undergoing industrialization, suggesting that he, too, saw little need for far higher productivity to bring on a utopia for workers. Across the Atlantic, Henry David Thoreau spent two years living his dream of a simpler life in a cabin by Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts just as Mill was drafting his Principles. John Maynard Keynes, writing 80 years after Mill on the subject of Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, suggested that, as long as population was controlled, “there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed.” Indeed, his worry was that there would be too little to do... In that fear, he was joined by a succession of economists... In the UK, E.J. Mishan spent the 1960s warning that economic growth produced nothing but discontent. (In 1960, the UK’s income per capita was about the same as Egypt’s today.) Across the Atlantic, J. K. Galbraith’s Affluent Society, published in 1958, suggested that demand for necessities was already well met for most Americans and, with redistribution, could easily be met for all. (He wrote this at a time when one third of the country still went to the toilet in an outhouse and washing machines were a rarity.)... Both those who saw doom from greater production and those who saw present consumption as increasingly frivolous perhaps lacked imagination. It is far easier to imagine the environmental crises that will emerge if we continue on our current path than the solutions that might allow for both continued prosperity and sustainability. After all, some of those solutions have not been invented, and more have not been implemented. Similarly, prophets of the robot-led jobs apocalypse miss the fact that new technologies create whole new products and services, which in turn create new types of employment. These are hard to predict precisely because they haven’t been invented yet. We have well-paid app designers and cybersecurity experts whose job descriptions would have been meaningless to Keynes. There is an entire cable channel, DOGTV, with producers, show-runners, vets, and many others involved in creating content for dogs (and humans) to enjoy. Neither Mill nor Marx could have imagined such employment... the coronavirus crisis has amply demonstrated that collapsing the economy is woefully insufficient to meet environmental targets, including lower greenhouse gas emissions, even as it has crashed incomes and significantly increased self-reported misery. Economic growth may not reliably and sustainably increase subjective well-being, but apparently, contraction can achieve the reverse... “Why was Mill wrong then, but I am right now?”"
Mythinformed on X: "Listen to what “DeGrowth” activists say is necessary their own words - "“A 95% energy reduction in the United States” “The construction of an eco-socialist state” “A worker led revolution”"
When you want to destroy the economy, tank living standards and introduce communism
Opinion: Canada is no longer one of the richest nations on Earth. Country after country is passing us by - The Globe and Mail - "If you took a poll, I suspect you would find most Canadians still think of us as one of the richest countries on Earth: maybe fifth or sixth. And at one time we were. As late as 1981, Canada ranked sixth among OECD countries in GDP per capita, behind only Switzerland, Luxembourg, Norway, the United States and Denmark. But we’re not any more. As of 2022 we were 15th. Over the 40-odd years in between, Canada’s per capita GDP grew more slowly than that of 22 other OECD members. Countries that used to be poorer than us – Ireland, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden, Iceland, Australia, Germany, Belgium, Finland – are now richer than we are... Even this somewhat overstates our position. Canadians work more hours, on average, than people in other countries. Measured in output per hour worked – which is what we mean by labour productivity – we ranked 18th in 2022, having posted the slowest rate of productivity growth in the OECD since 1981, but for Switzerland. Given our performance in 2023, I don’t think we should be surprised to find we have since dropped out of the top 20. Again, the contrast with the United States is striking: Up to about 2000, labour productivity in the two countries grew at roughly comparable rates. Since then, U.S. productivity has grown nearly three times as fast. It is a dismal prospect. When an economy ceases to grow, it isn’t only living standards that suffer. It’s everything they represent. A society that cannot look forward to a future of rising living standards is one that is deprived of one of the primary motive forces of human behaviour – hope. Without the universal lubricant of growth, all of the divisions within a society – between the classes, between the generations, between sexes and races and (this is Canada, after all) regions – are likely to be more inflamed... What makes this especially galling is that it is almost never talked about in our politics. Party leaders hammer away at each other over growth in the short term, though they can do very little to alter it. But long-term growth barely rates a mention. Yet this is the sort of growth that governments can do something about. For all the fruitless debates about macroeconomic stabilization policy, and which form of stimulus, fiscal or monetary, is least ineffective at raising growth in the short term, the long-term growth trajectory of an economy really is responsive to policy... Since around 2000, while business investment in residential structures has roughly doubled as a percentage of GDP, investment in machinery and equipment has roughly halved. Could this go some way to explain why our relative productivity growth fell off so sharply after then? Have we been so busy capitalizing on rising housing prices that we neglected to invest in the sorts of things that make it possible to afford a house?"
The degrowth people should be happy. But the left is complaining that capitalism has failed because incomes aren't growing
Mythinformed on X - "Listen to what “DeGrowth” activists say is necessary their own words: “A 95% energy reduction in the United States” “The construction of an eco-socialist state” “A worker led revolution”"
Meme - "There are no low energy, rich countries *GDP per capita vs Electricity consumption per capita*"
Serfing the planet - "Many of those in Glasgow at the moment pray at the altar of ‘de-growth’. They want to limit the consumption of the working and middle classes, undermine their jobs, raise their energy bills, and inhibit their ability to buy property or travel... With climate, as with many other issues, the upper classes are inflicting their own preferences on working- and middle-class people. As nonprofits, oligarchs and bureaucrats plot out the future, small business owners and the middle class, as one entrepreneur put it, are ‘not at the table – or even in the room’... The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has noted that, across the 36 wealthier countries, the uber-wealthy have taken an ever greater share of national GDP in recent decades, while the middle class ‘looks increasingly like a boat in rocky waters’... Experts are warning that one third of small businesses could shut down for good. Hundreds of thousands have already disappeared, including nearly half of all black-owned businesses. Overall, according to a report from May this year, roughly 37 per cent of all US small business owners can’t pay their rent... Already climate-oriented policies have underpinned efforts to block affordable homes being built on the periphery and force ever more density on urban areas... In the UK, the government’s Climate Change Committee is putting forward proposals that would make it impossible to sell single-family homes – including those built mere decades ago – that do not meet stringent energy standards... Analysts predict that soon most middle-class people will be ‘priced out’ of ownership in a ‘rentership society’, where homes, furniture and other necessities are turned into rental products offering endless cashflow to the oligarchs. All this fits what the Davos crowd calls the ‘great reset’, a top-down effort at refashioning capitalism and daily life along green lines. The goal is not just to turn potential owners into tenants but also to reduce all consumption in general, as part of a move to a ‘net zero’ future where cars will become rarer, miles will be taxed and only expensive electric cars will remain, largely only for the rich. The anti-middle class jihad also threatens the livelihoods of millions of working-class people, particularly those in well-paying manufacturing, construction and energy jobs. Green policies have already accelerated the de-industrialisation of countries such as the United Kingdom, and could undermine recent efforts to bring factories back from China. Those much heralded ‘green jobs’, so central to the climatista pitch, turn out to pay far less and are far less likely to be unionised. Many of them may end up in developing countries anyway."
The dangerous myth of degrowth | The Spectator - "Take a comment piece published late last year in the normally sober pages of the scientific journal Nature. Under the title ‘Degrowth Can Work’, it declared that: ‘Wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and wellbeing.’ The lead author was Jason Hickel, a visiting fellow at the LSE who on Newsnight in 2017 came up with the unusual theory that there are too many jobs in Britain. Humans, he said, are ‘overshooting our planet’s bio-capacity by 60 per cent’, and the only way to save ourselves is by ‘introducing a basic income and a shorter working week which would allow us to get rid of unnecessary jobs and redistribute labour’. Never mind the pain that follows every time GDP growth dips into the red. Never mind the despair created by falling real incomes. If we all worked less we would be far happier. Who gets to decide what is an ‘unnecessary job’, Hickel didn’t say. Many, I suspect, might well choose to nominate the LSE’s visiting professorship in International Inequalities as one of the jobs to go. Another of the Nature authors is Tim Jackson, who runs a green thinktank called the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity. Jackson has written a book called Prosperity Without Growth, and accused Rishi Sunak of pursuing a ‘fetish’ of growth. It is clear, he says, that ‘we’re already living in a post-growth world. And it’s time to take that challenge seriously. To focus on protecting wellbeing. To distribute wealth fairly. To invest in the care economy. To improve education’. That tax revenues from healthy businesses might be useful in improving education and the care system does not appear to enter his thinking. Then there is Bill McGuire, a volcanologist who’s now emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL. He has called for ‘the contraction of the global economy until it reaches a sustainable steady-state that fits with a level of greenhouse gas emissions compatible with keeping rising temperatures this side of the 1.5 degrees guardrail’. For McGuire, the government’s ambition for ‘green growth’ doesn’t cut it – no, to save the world we have to shrink the economy: less wealth, less stuff. Especially less stuff. In June, McGuire tweeted a photo of a container ship arriving at Felixstowe with what he said was 24,000 containers. His caption read: ‘More than anything, this image encapsulates everything that is wrong with our society.’ But how did he know what was inside all those containers? Was it all frivolous stuff like toys for Christmas crackers or might there have been, say, some PPE bound for NHS hospitals? Unless McGuire wears only locally sourced knitted underwear, my guess would be that something on that ship, or another like it, is found in his home. It would be easy to dismiss the ramblings of Marxist academics. After all, the idea of ‘degrowth’ has been around since the 1970s without obviously harming anyone. The term, it seems, was coined by the Austrian-French economist André Gorz in 1972, the era of E.F. Schumacher’s book Small Is Beautiful. Hickel has written the similarly themed Less Is More. Yet the idea that economic growth is an evil seems to have become a lot more mainstream of late – fed, inevitably, by climate hysteria... Turning off their domestic appliances became raised to a matter of religious observance. A woman from Inverness told the Guardian how she and her partner brought dinnertime forward to 4.30 and then sat with candles and wood-burning stove. They had even turned off the electric foot-raiser on their sofa. ‘If this can help prevent the National Grid using coal-fired power then we’ll feel like it was really worth it. Part of this for me is learning how to deprive myself of something,’ she said. There’s the point: it is one thing to advocate the end of economic growth if you have no actual fear of poverty. If you are struggling to keep yourself warm and fed, on the other hand, the idea of self-denial – still less of shrinking the economy – is going to have rather less appeal. Degrowth is a middle–class luxury, an indulgence to be conducted from the comfort of your sofa with its electronic foot-raiser. It revolves around matters of taste as much as the environment. People who express disgust with consumerism have a tendency to disapprove of other people’s while overlooking their own. Those who boast of buying less stuff are often not averse to the odd skiing holiday – as the holiday snaps of Extinction Rebellion activists have attested. Bizarrely, the idea of degrowth trips off the tongue of some of the very same people who on another day will complain the loudest when incomes fall. Former Green party leader Caroline Lucas denounced Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement as ‘ideologically driven Tory austerity’. The problem, evidently, is Tory austerity rather than the much better-flavoured Green party austerity, because Lucas doesn’t seem to be a great believer in people becoming better off. In 2021 she complained that ‘The endless pursuit of economic growth, as the lodestar of government policy, is what is driving the climate crisis’. If a shrinking economy does not amount to austerity, I don’t know what does. If you are a nurse, ambulance driver, driving examiner or a member of the many other groups who have been striking about the failure of your wages to keep pace with inflation, your enemy is not Hunt; it is the degrowthers... the traditional left, which seeks a fairer slice of the national cake for working people, has yet to collide head-on with those who want to reduce the size of the cake altogether... Liz Truss was ridiculed for talking about the ‘anti-growth coalition’. She certainly went over the top, making it out to include people who do favour economic growth, such as some of her former cabinet colleagues. Yet there really is an anti-growth tendency, whose ideas are filtering down into terribly well-meaning middle-class people. Anyone who thinks the Tories have been inflicting ‘austerity’ on the country for the past 13 years should be looking over their shoulder for the people who genuinely want to shrink the economy."
Of course, the left wing "solution" is redistribution. They don't consider themselves rich - but everyone richer than them is rich. Too bad if you look at a global scale, they are super rich and will have to be impoverished
‘Degrowth’ — Marxism is back for the modern age - "Foremost in Japan’s recent mainstreaming of Marx has been Kohei Saito, a thoroughly engaging philosopher who, from a book-lined study at the University of Tokyo, argues that degrowth is the only way to save society from a crisis of inequality and impending environmental doom. Growth did not make us happy. Frustration is rife. Reusable coffee flasks will not save us, he contends, sipping from one. Whether the Japanese public actually agrees with the thesis or not — and there is no reason to equate vast readership with widespread conviction — a great many are certainly curious about Saito’s framing of the issue. And that itself is intriguing in light of one of Japan’s less discussed generational divisions: the split between anyone older than about 50 and those under 35 — the latter being, arguably, the rich world’s first degrowthed cohort... Meat, SUVs and sports cars should be far more heavily taxed to offset the damage they do, he says. He also believes that, because it works so well at promoting endless unnecessary consumption, advertising should be heavily restricted — in particular the kind of giant LCD screens that loom over Tokyo, draining power Japan can ill-afford to waste. “We could eliminate advertising from society and nobody would suffer at all except the advertising industry,” he says."