Why is a drive for growth bad? Seems like the double-speak of saying growth is bad while happily profiting off of and simultaneously restricting it is whats bad.
Growing up in a prairie city I heard this sentiment from people who simply don't like other people constantly, and I'm like "When did you try growing, you stagnant deteriorated shithole!?", and sprawl doesn't count. They hate ambition, they hate people, they hate taxes, and have no interesting ideas. They hate traffic, but refuse to do anything but drive. Their healthcare system and infrastructure is failing, there is no new economic activity happening; get busy growing or get busy dying. It doesn't work though if you stop for 70 years and then try to catch up.
A lot of what you say here I agree with. I'm not sure that I'd define maintenance of infrastructure as growth though, and I too hate sprawl.
Growing the economy is great, but only if done in such a way that it's sustainable. Growth or death is too simplistic, perfectly captured by the grandparent comment. Bringing in immigrants to generate growth when you can't house the current population seems crazy. Things don't have to get bigger to be successful. You could make a business and have zero employees and make a living. Does it need to be a massive company that's growing? There is always a limit, and something will eventually prevent growth, so why does it have to be an external force?
Where I am we are trashing the waterways and the land in pursuit of money. You can't swim in most our rivers anymore - the recent numbers look good though, as the government redefined 'swimmable' and now it's 'safe', despite the contaminants.
https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/explainer-new-swimmable-water-...
That's at best a less-than-complete view of immigration.
For immigrants themselves, it is usually an issue of self-determination and freedom.
I can't say I'm fully privy to the immigration debate in Canada, but framing it as an issue of "growth" could not be a complete view of the advocates of immigration. Especially with the level of acceptance of refugees in Canada.
The not enough housing aspect is completely incidental to immigration. In my city, the overriding reason that we have not built enough housing for even our own children is that people show up to block any environmentally friendly housing proposal, largely arguing against growth. In other words, using the framework you are right now! And it's a rather twisted version of the "we can't have growth" framework because it ignores the underlying reason for not allowing growth: environmental sustainability. So instead, the only housing that gets built is the most environmentally disastrous type of housing: sprawl far away from the locations where people need to be for their jobs and everyday life, causing massive environmental destruction.
I would argue that there are few more counterproductive ways to talk about the environment than to bring up a "need for growth." First of all almost nobody actually cares that much about growth in 2025 and secondly it has disastrous consequences when the rubber meets the road.
I don't care about growth, nor do most people I know. We don't need to endlessly consume to be happy. The world won't end when this economic system unravels either, it's not the first and it won't be the last one to fail.
It was massive turmoil for sure, but world didn’t end (I’m referencing your earlier comment, not downplaying the devastating fall).
How would continual growth work? We will run out of everything.
Continual growth is possible in at least two ways:
1) standard sigmoids, which never stop growing yet are also finite
2) standard ecological growth, where growth is never ending but so is death. This is much more typical of systems like capitalism than sigmoids growth. New upstarts experience exponential growth for a whole, then peak, and then die.
Of course be careful of mentioning these standard scientific observations around those in the degrowth cult, as the cognitive dissonance may cause an unpleasant explosion.
