From Degrowth to Superabundance
The human being has the gift and the curse of imagination. Unlike other animals, we can imagine different futures and attempt to realize them. We have always had both a dream lifting our vision to the horizon and a nightmare pulling us down into a fearful crouch. Hell or heaven, zero or infinity, deprivation or abundance: a tremendous decision to be burdened with, a responsibility we alone bear. As a species, we are the adults in the room. We are the only self-aware creatures, so we effectively decide the fate of every other being in the world.
As we have increasingly mastered our environment, this burden has gotten heavier. We have an impulse, a natural habit to tinker and make things work better. In the last few centuries, we’ve developed that habit into a steady engine of material progress through continual technological progress. That’s huge. Finally, we know how to survive on an indifferent planet. Now we can take a breath and think beyond the next meal and getting through the next night.
But that big step out of perpetual fear and hunger creates a new problem. How do you thrive when you have the basics taken care of? Our worldviews and beliefs are very crude compared to the rest of our technology. Our ways of thinking about what we should do at the highest, most zoomed-out level are lagging behind. We are bumbling, swinging wildly from no-brakes growth to no-gas (literally) stagnation without being able to think clearly about either approach.
We may now be approaching a wiser path. A way to balance growth, safety, and stability. We progressed rapidly without much worry about side effects for a couple of centuries. Then in the last half-century, we suddenly realized that there were severe side effects and that we had “enough” wealth, at least in the wealthiest parts of the world. So, in the rich world, we have slowed down, and now we have largely forgotten our past dreams of a much more technologically advanced, abundant world.
We traded dynamism and engagement in materially improving our world for safety and comfort. The implicit assumption in America is that we have built enough in the physical world, and now we can endlessly fight over the distribution of the wealth we have. It sucks. Nobody is hopeful about the world. We hardly think about how things could be much better in the future. We focus much more on the partisan battle of the day on Twitter.
Maybe it’s a subtle and non-obvious thing to figure out how to thrive in the modern, high-tech age. How to go forward in these unprecedented circumstances. Maybe we need to face the problem head-on. We need to think our way to a working worldview from first principles.
Here’s the situation. We are a special kind of animal that is very intelligent and imaginative. This grants us superpowers when compared to all other creatures. We literally gave ourselves wings and shot ourselves into space and back. We can do just about anything, which leads to the question of what we should do.
We need things to do. We need challenging, constructive projects to work on every day. The clearer the impact of those projects, the better. We need to feel that we are valuable, that there is a point in what we are doing, and that it is all leading somewhere better. We need hope for the future. We need to have a reason to get out of bed in the morning and work every day. We need community. We need a network of close, supportive relationships to go through life’s challenges and glories with.
Taking all that together, a good life would be one where you worked on constructive, meaningful projects alongside people you care about. Where these projects were aligned with a grand, hopeful vision you shared with the people around you. So you felt you were building a beautiful future with people you love and enjoying the journey.
Now let’s put that picture next to the two competing visions of the future: degrowth and abundance. The degrowth doctrine is a vision of less. This apparently appeals to some people, but it’s hard to imagine it appeals to the majority. People like having stuff, nice stuff, lots of stuff. They just do. So a future of less is not hopeful to the average person, though it may be to some small number of people.
Degrowth aims to take away from people who have “too much”. “There is a need to…reduce the purchasing power of the rich,” according to this piece in Nature. So it pits people against each other in an effort to reduce humanity’s overall wealth. So people will fight against each other while working on the ultimate goal of reducing living standards. This is not a positive, hopeful vision. This is a promise of hell.
At the opposite extreme is a vision of abundance, laid out here by Naval Ravikant:
…imagine if everybody had the knowledge of a good software engineer and a good hardware engineer. If you could go out there, and you could build robots, and computers, and bridges, and program them. Let’s say every human knew how to do that.
What do you think society would look like in 20 years? My guess is what would happen is we would build robots, machines, software and hardware to do everything. We would all be living in massive abundance.
We would essentially be retired, in the sense that none of us would have to work for any of the basics. We’d even have robotic nurses. We’d have machine driven hospitals. We’d have self-driving cars. We’d have farms that are 100% automated. We’d have clean energy.
At that point, we could use technology breakthroughs to get everything that we wanted. If anyone is still working at that point, they’re working as a form of expressing their creativity. They’re working because it’s in them to contribute, and to build and design things.
The contrast with degrowth is sharp. There is no aim of reducing anyone’s living standards, only of making everyone rich. Degrowth aims to eliminate wealth, while someone like Naval aims to eliminate poverty. There is no race to the bottom as people fight for the scraps of an ever-shrinking pie. It is a cornucopian vision of ever-expanding human knowledge and wealth. It is a grand, unifying, positive project appealing to the eternal human dream of abundance instead of the eternal human nightmare of scarcity and collapse.
One can hope that the easier it becomes for people to learn about the world and different visions for it, the more the cornucopian vision will outcompete the degrowth vision. There is already a growing global community of material progress enthusiasts represented by the abundance agenda and the progress studies movement. Let’s shoot for the moon and leave deprivation behind once and for all.