NotitiesDegrowth, and the widening gap between natural- and social science economics
It's the entropy, stupid!
De groei van de economie wordt niet goed begrepen en het ontbreekt aan een juist theoretisch model om het economische systeem te beschrijven. Het degrowth-movement moet de brug slaan naar natuurwetenschappelijke economie om het systeem echt te kunnen veranderen en te voorkomen dat het gedoemd is te mislukken.
It is much too natural-sciencey for the social science of economics. And this is a problem because the only way to actually make a remote chance in ‘degrowing’ the economic system is by using a proper (i.e. non-equilibrium) theoretical model to describe the system, associated with a hard empirical framework.
Why does an economy grow in the first place? Absolutely nobody is asking this question. So, effectively nobody understands, at a fundamentally technical level, why an economic system grows, but everybody thinks they can just have it stop growing, or even reverse it. From a scientific point of view that does not make any sense. Every orthodox and heterodox economist thinks that we, the people, are the driving factor behind ‘growth’: after all, we all want to prosper, make profits, develop innovative new technologies etc. It’s these human incentives behind capital allocation and better technologies that make the economy grow, right? What else could there be? An economy cannot grow without actual human actions, right?
If the degrowth-movement wants to change the system, as a heterodoxy within social-science-economics, it will at least have to properly understand and describe the system first, and cross the bridge to natural-science-economics. If it does not, it will be destined to fail.