But that’s not what’s predicted by the proposed model. That’s just vanilla “why growth is useful,” not “without growth your democracy will fail because of zero sum competition.”
I think the original comment can be summarized by this quote "without new economic opportunities, the only way to get ahead in life, is by taking from others, which leads to violence and tyranny".
To which you responded that japan is empirical evidence against that. To which I replied it is a good example to the contrary. Now you are saying 2 things
1. thats not the model
2. I have only explained why growth is useful, not why its necessary.
To 1, I agree, I totally reject this model, this is a curve fitting excercise, not real science and not real economics.
To 2, in a sense you are correct. There is something waiting under the surface to strike any country of today should they decide degrowth is the policy, should they not decide to print it off for another day.
See, all the dollars in the economy, the dollars in your wallet, and in your bank account, were created through the issuance of debt, such as home loans and government debt. Those debts have interest rates, meaning for every dollar in existence there is a multiple owed to the great abyss of currency being taken out of circulation when those debts are paid. If our monetary system doesnt continually increase the amount of debt in the system, eventually all the dollars would seemingly vanish from the system and we would still have debt that there were never enough dollars to pay for. There is the death of all your modern monies should degrowth be the objective, democracy or otherwise.
Now, the monetary system doesnt need to be that way, money could be a commodity that doesnt come with these strings attached. You might even find that the worlds largest polluters cease their operations immediately if that were ever to come true, I dont think the Pentagon would have the same incentive to invade oil rich middle eastern countries if they didnt have their precious petrodollar to defend.
Could a democracy work, with degrowth, and without the pitfalls caused by implimenting the credit theory of money? Sure, just start killing everyone, because for the first time in generations people would have a money that routes around attempts to inhibit growth, what else can you do at that point?
