What Is Degrowth? Interview with Giorgos Kallis

[@aniruddhad871]

Extremely informative within 30 mins. Lots to unpack! Thank you for doing this interview.

[@vegitamate]

Fantastic interview! Your questions were sharp really engaged listeners. Thank you for this!

[@DrDanONeill]

Many thanks -- glad you enjoyed it!

[@MetabolismofCities]

Great you're doing interviews as well! Thank you for bringing ecological economics on KZbin with all your videos! Nice interview with Giorgos, the roles were reversed since your last video together.

[@DrDanONeill]

Yes, it was fun to put Giorgos in the hot seat this time :)

[@EnvironmentalCoffeehouse]

I enjoyed this immensely. The information was really helpful. Thank you so much!

[@elenaponomareva7751]

I like that episode with Giorgos in relax and highly informative mode same time, great work done

[@rajeshingle6224]

I watched this interview and ideas of Degrowth first time. I think this is required in Developed countries a lot where production is huge with machinery and dumped later in warehouses. I guess in most of the South Global societies people are stil dependent on Nature, preserved with family-clan community values. Interesting and we need to build a public -oriented campaign to reach out the policy makers too! Good!

[@Charlestve]

Brilliant discussion and insight on Degrowth. Dr. Kallis

[@larskirk6268]

Μπράβο Γιώργο! Great interview!

[@magsmbj1]

In Melanesia land is part of our identity and culture. Inalienable for thousands of years and seen as the most important thing. We had replacement population - 2 children as a norm. There were plants that women drank contraceptive. Men practiced abstinence. A high diversity of languages and cultures in a small area. Never over population mass war and genocide for land, labour and capital in a colonial mindset. Not to say we didn't have conflict, just not wars in the same manner as Europeans. Stones marked boundaries agreed by tribes/village groups rather than lines drawn on a map to show where land was taken by force. We had money, trade, savings, seinorage and attrition rates.. inflation wasn't really a thing. Also governance structures that ensured equity including intergenerational equity rather than concentration of wealth and the emergency of a ruling class. We exchanged and nurtured the natural world including allocation of resources for nature and protect the commons including moving villages to limit population, soil degradation and avoid pressure on fishing and hunting grounds. Planted trees where every part was used - clothing, food, brooms, housing materials and pith left for insects and mushrooms a diet respectful of the local and unique ecosystems from which we evolved. People had differentiated roles and worked together. That all changed with colonialism. Religion and capitalism have eroded all of that. The indigenous economic system debased and corrupted, people forced to plant monocultures and taxed at gun point by colonial police - "for their own good", while they were paid modern slavery wages.. as system that continued past independence. Political independence but not economic independence. Including laws and a constitutional monarchy that propagate a colonial system. I think savage is someone that sees people and the natural world as a commodity to be exploited or degraded or dead. People now have large families and are alienated off their land and often pushed onto someone else's land. In a world that needs land, labour and capital... often all they have is labour including their children. It seems now the environment is treated like a dump. Garden of Eden inching closer to hell. It is like forgot that exchange has happened for millennia between people and nature. Instead we have money as a token of exchange and forget that value creation is beyond just human value as decided by capital 'owners' . The capitalist system is a system to maximise returns to capital or capitalism anywhere in the world constrained only by enforceable laws which can be corrupted and people are incentivized to accumulate and hoard capital and often at the expense to others. It's un-natural. I feel like I'm mourning every day with what I see around me.

[@magsmbj1]

Thankyou. So many ideas I agree with and have been trying to articulate - which you did wonderfully.

[@AdrianvanWijk]

The science of economics is founded on political ideologies 10:45. The Idea that you need ~3% growth every year is funded through central planing money manipulation which is a political ideology. Main stream economics is predicated on the idea of centrally planed economic growth. Economists who would disagree are marginalized and have no hope of catching the attention of politicians.

[@DrDanONeill]

Coincidentally, next week's video is on the monetary system. Central Banks have less influence on the money supply than many people realise.

[@clumsydad7158]

law and economics are the paradigmatic powers, they reify reality for the powerful ... anything is possible, but not in a world divided by nationalism and racism. the implicit destruction of trust in such a broken world prevents productive, healthy futures

[@icyvision9]

It’s a forward planning market where the monetary policy and central planning predicts the future then the market adapts to those predictions in a speculative way. We’ve moved so far into the credit theory of money but the banking system manipulates this privilege.

[@trussowv]

4:09

[@Loriendel]

depense is my existence. thanks for justifying it Giorgos Kallis!

[@clumsydad7158]

we need all new indicators, that focus on actual local productivity, social investment, human expression, sustainable, and all those "real things" that effect people and QOL.

[@WaaDoku]

0:11 What do you mean by "social equity"?

[@amberdean8996]

Who wrote the volumes on depense? Thanks in advance!

[@blacknwhitehound]

This is interesting. The only but .. and it’s a big but is getting most consumers to say hey I don’t want this ..

[@valeriemoore2762]

He is describing a world based on a higher consciousness and awareness.

[@anthonymorris5084]

He is describing socialism.

[@janrydenbonmot]

It seems degrowth is a good idea with a really bad name. Sorry to be blunt. The intuitive understanding of the word degrowth is, at least to my mind, a slowly shrinking economy. So, to most people, it will sound like a system where they are getting less and less. Thats a hard sell.

[@kirkhall6169]

Yep, that's a hard sell but it's reality. There has been much discussion about the word Degrowth. The Degrowth movement already exists - under that name. There is no time for re-branding. Degrowth has been used at Degrowth conferences in various countries for about 12 years. Books have that title. Countless academic papers have that title. There are some gentle names that people use instead of Degrowth. The trouble with gentle names is that they skirt around the issue and don’t achieve much. People have been using “sustainable” for many years but it has become meaningless - and all our environmental issue just get worse. If a patient has cancer there is no point telling him he has some variance in his cell structure and there might be the need to have some therapy at his earliest convenience. He needs to be told to attend at the cancer clinic ASAP. People hang on to all sorts of false hope: renewables, EVs, if I just reuse my plastic bags it will all be alright, I just need to buy those sustainable products. And politicians and big business are happy to lead them astray. Some organisations use Post-Growth. I prefer Degrowth for a number of reasons. It's quite hard hitting. It implies a process that can happen now. To me Post-Growth sounds like a situation that might occur in the future. There is no avoiding the fact that we need a massive social change. Jobs will need to go in fashion, tourism, retailing, advertising, finance, industrial agriculture, etc.

[@nicholasmills6489]

They’re not selling it. They’re imposing it. Net zero. Low supplies. Low food levels. Covid restrictions and lockdown. The upcoming recession. By make petrol more expensive we travel less. Benefits to welfare support to redistribute. Very dangerous.

[@oooouuuuuyyy]

@@kirkhall6169 very well said

[@philippegentillon1121]

Marxism would be a better name

[@TheBurdenOfHope]

@@kirkhall6169you’re smart. Thank you for sharing. I’m FASCINATED by this topic. I view this topic through my passion/lens for biology and historic biology. Humans are a species like any other on this planet, and this type of crisis is rarely something that can be turned around.

[@vsotofrances]

No degrowth but full collapse are possible within the current monetary system. Good luck.

[@kellanhills1972]

Who gives you the right to tell me what makes me happy or what gives my life value. Pursuit of happiness is individual. Liberty or death.

[@SF2036]

We barely make enough money to pay our bills private and public. Where is the money for universal basic income supposed to come from in countries in a bad fiscal situation?

[@coweatsman]

Kallis could do with more familiarity with physical sciences, thermodynamics, ecology and evolutionary psychology.

[@mynameisjoejeans]

he has a degree in chemistry, masters in environmental engineering, PhD in environmental studies, post doctoral fellowship in energy and resources - I'd say his understanding is solid.

[@markschuette3770]

the only way to do that is to design an economy that makes the wrong path (subsidized cheap dirt energy and other forms of pollution) expensive.

[@grantbartley483]

I think communism failed catastrophically because its centralisation of power inevitably lead to authoritarianism. How would the degrowth revolution be co-ordinated except through centres of power?

[@canadada640]

... even after this interview, I just don't see how required innovation & for-profit start-ups will dovetail to a 'progressive' socialist agenda ...

[@wdlts]

He's basically saying intellectuals can slowly brainwash people to think and behave differently and eventually vote for the "good" politcal party. 😂

[@blacknwhitehound]

Wonder who that is

[@wdlts]

Interview was good until he said "why do we need to measure everything?"

[@asopopilosopo4158]

It's plain communism.

[@asopopilosopo4158]

Degrowth is just another word for depopulation.

[@kellanhills1972]

Degrowth means lack of technological advances, lack of medical advances and economic mimic depression. It means making everyone poor and controlling it by a large totalitarian bureaucracy. Degrowth means the eventual extinction of the human species. What we need is more rapid growth. More rapid growth means greater technological advances to solve our problems and give us colonies on the moon and mars and in space. Rapid growth means humanity will flourish and survive.

[@GiperMining]

While I've become somewhat sceptical of degrowth in the end of this series. Infinite growth just is not possible and I'm talking not millions of years but thousands or even hundreds of years. There is limit of how much energy we can capture

[@sharonholmshaw6541]

Socialism

[@ronmartin1375]

Sounds bad.

[@lautaroparada950]

Thank you so much; this nonsense is being tested in real-time in Chile.

[@nicholasmills6489]

Tested everywhere in the post Covid world.

[@philippegentillon1121]

Just pure ideology

[@solarhappy]

More academic willy waffle. How about advocating for an electricity grid reliability of 99% (instead of 99.999%). Suddenly a lot of electricity producing plants, transmission lines will not be needed and we will start adapting to not having 3 or 4 days a year without power. But then he did say he wants degrowth without destroying lifestyle? - good luck with that.

[@mrweasel]

Not hard to imagine. It isn't just about the absolute cash in the system, it is about how that money is distributed. So many ways our economy invests money in the wrong areas. For instance, the recent inflating costs of a corrupt track and trace system, or those billions invested in Trident nuclear warheads or the redundant HS2 projects. So much of what exists could already be reallocated to much more benefit to the broader public. So yeah, much more could be done for the majority with less. On the flip, degrowth requires a better sharing economy to make it work. For instance, even while private materialism has definitely increased over the last five decades, the quality of many public spaces and institutions, have gotten worse. Rebalancing that is absolutely not just about having a higher GDP. A lot of it could come allocating funds better, operating institutions differently and power decentralisation and broadening participation in decision making and responsibility.

[@tinoyb9294]

What is degrowth? A pipe dream.

[@nicholasmills6489]

It’s being implemented as we speak. The global recession. The reduced supply of products. Reduced air travel. Reduced availability of cars and other transport. Strikes from unions or shorter working week. They’re after a complete transformation of our capitalist system. The green agenda and anti capitalism go hand in hand.

[@PerkpopperDotcom-qu3hk]

He said “to say economics has no ideology is its ideology”