Don’t have prisoners all have the same preconditions?

With degrowth, in theory at least, growing poorer countries could get richer while degrowing richer countries would lose nothing.

Degrowth can only work when there is a demand side reduction. Investments into industry can really only directly affect the supply side. So as long as a degrowth movement can succeed to decouple demand from prices, there is not much one can do to change that on the supply side.

Address the population issue.

The most probable is war, disease, famine, instability, collapse, along with large migrations of people. This is likely plan A.

A global one child policy is another approach along with true costing of carbon and other depletion activities. Even better a true change in what people think. Women’s rights, education, and opportunity goes a long way as does birth control and abortion rights. I am not an optimist here.

I’ve never heard of the term degrowth before, but the way @[email protected] describes it, it sounds like a cool concept.

So look at the drug war, war on terrorism, money laundering sanctions, international tax evasion measures. The US and EU basically force the world to comply.

Imagine the EU and US are fully on board and say Australia decides no. What would happen to the Australian economy if they suddenly were barred from trading the dollar and euro. Australia is a big country and would be on the US/EU side. Imagine if Mexico or Croatia tried that. No chance.

Extreme? We did that to Russia during the Ukraine invasion.

This isn’t difficult. They just don’t care enough.

It seems like the framing of the prisoner’s dilemma is being used… a lot. But it’s kind of a fundamentally flawed outlook that completely negates individual autonomy.

Like, you’ve got this situation where two people are stripped of their power by some ostensible authority, and both options involve acknowledging that authority. Either you cooperate and give them the information they want or you don’t, yeah? It’s framed as the prisoner being powerless, and turned against the other prisoner due to this poorly strategic move.

But there are so many other options that preserve the autonomy of the prisoner. They could implicate someone completely unrelated, or otherwise give bad information. They could repeat the word ‘lawyer’ until a lawyer shows up. Hell, they could try to attack their captors or escape!

But none of these are put onto the table, because people buy into this authoritarian mindset without even realizing it. They see a prisoner and an authority and take that as fact from the get go.

So where’s the ‘authority’ in this scenario? Simply put, capitalism. The pressure to keep expanding and accept the status quo that we always have to get bigger and bigger. And as such, even the question of degrowth is being framed on that authority’s terms.

Yes, being less focused on wringing out every drop of profit will cause some business deals to move to countries that are still focused on that. But, like, the whole point is that we’re not focusing on all that commerce that wandered off somewhere else. A society that’s less focused on commerce than most in the 21st century will simply be a healthier, happier, more comfortable place to live. Focusing on commerce is so toxic. It ruins all the nice things we have, it screws up our relationships with one another, and it provides incentive to divide and destroy to make a profit. It takes all our human motivations and fixes them on greed. But if you don’t have that? I mean, you may have a little less random trash and e-waste lying around, but I’d be glad to bet on things being a lot less shitty.

Want to show the world to let go of its obsession with commerce? Believe in it and lead by example. It’ll do the rest itself.