Odd Lots - Why the Degrowth Movement Is Having a Moment

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

When it comes to economics, there are a bunch of different schools to choose from, but pretty much all of them are focused on boosting growth. Except, that is, for the degrowth movement, which aims to refocus economics away from GDP. As more and more complaints about "late-stage capitalism" seem to be piling up, along with worries about the impact of rampant consumerism on the environment, is this the degrowth movement's time to shine? We speak with Noel King, the co-host of Vox's Today Explained podcast, about her new mini-series exploring discontent with the capitalist model. She explains the intellectual origins of the degrowth movement, why it's getting more attention now, and just what an economy that no longer prioritizes "growth at any cost" might look like.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Joe, what would you say the most fundamental tenant of economics is? Wow. Yeah, sorry, I started with the big question. I don't know. It's not fair. What do you say this? Well, it has to be growth, right? Like the whole point is to generate economic growth. Yeah. I mean, if you were saying like, okay, like what ultimately you can fight about how best to measure growth. And there's like no one statistic that will ever like give you the answer of like, is this economy doing well or not? You can never reduce it that much.

But on some level, it does seem like the gauge of a successful policy, right, is how much the economy grows. Absolutely. And I know there have been, you kind of alluded to it just then, there have been various attempts in time to gauge economic well-being in slightly different ways. So I remember it didn't, it was Bhutan. Yeah, what happened to the Bhutan Happiness Index? You never hear about that. Is that not on the terminal? We need to get it on there if it's not.

But there is this fundamental question over what should be the goal of economics and ultimately the economy? And is it simply economic growth or could we be asking for something a little bit more? Right. And we're always like fighting about this implicitly, which is, okay, like should we trade growth for greater equality? should we sacrifice some growth for more environmental sustainability, perhaps? Like there are all these, like, should we trade growth for like better job quality or whatever?

But if fundamentally growth itself is always taken for granted as being per se a good thing. Absolutely. And I'm glad you mentioned the climate just then because, of course, when you think of economic growth, so much of it is tied into consumption. And if consumption is becoming a problem from an environmental perspective, then obviously you would want to reduce that, which would presumably be a hit. to economic growth. So all of this is a way of saying that today, we are going to explore something that's very, very different to traditional thinking around economics. We're going to be looking into something called the degrowth movement. So does that mean GDP, like the goal is to shrink in? Yeah, negative GDP. All right, let's learn more about it. And we really do have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Noel King. She is, of course, the host of Vox's

daily news podcast today explained. And she's releasing a four-part series called Blame Capitalism and one of the episodes is all about this thing called the degrowth movement. So let's check in with her. Noel, thank you so much for coming on all thoughts. I'm a big fan, you guys. Thanks for having me. Noel, maybe just to begin with, you know, I sort of teased that we are going to be talking about the degrowth movement. But what is this exactly? I will tell you what degrowth is, but first I want to tell you that I have a good friend who just got back from vacation in Bhutan. And the first thing I asked her was, is everyone super happy?

And she's an economics reporter, so she got it immediately. And she said, I didn't see a lot of homelessness. I didn't see a lot of poverty. People did seem happy. But I did see a lot of small farmers, like people who look like they are, you know, farming for a living and not going to do much better than that. So anyway, the happiness index is something I, too, am really obsessed with. When it comes to degrowth, if you ask economists who believe in

degrowth, who iscribed to it. What they're going to tell you is it's not a very well-defined thing, and we really want to avoid terminology that scares people, and degrowth is a word that scares people. But I did come across a very good definition. It's from the economic anthropologist Jason Hickle. He wrote a book in 2020 called Less is More that I've seen described as like the Bible of degrowth. And here's what Jason Hickle says. He calls degrowth, quote, a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being. A lot of that sounds really good. I think the word that is almost designed or destined to trigger people in economics is planned, right?

Planning to shrink and who's going to be responsible for that. So that's what de-growth is. It's saying we have gotten big enough and now is the time to get smaller. There, not calling for like a catastrophe like we saw during 2020. I remember being on air when COVID hit. And I remember saying, this is the worst, you know, these are the worst jobs numbers since the Great Depression. And I could not believe those words were coming out of my mouth. I was like, this is a catastrophe. What Jason Hickle and other degrowthers would say is, right, right, right, but that was entirely unplanned. We didn't expect COVID. The way to do this is take it in hand and make it happen deliberately. So it's interesting, like, what strikes you is that, you know, this idea

have planned. And when I hear that, it's like, well, like, you know, we're actually, one would argue that much of the world is embracing planning of some sort. And the U.S. is increasing. It's sort of like active industrial policy. And China has seen extraordinary success and a sort of, you know, big over the decades material standard of living with a large part of the economy on some level planned. To my mind, the question is, why do we need less growth or less economic activity to bring the sort of ecosystem or environment into balance. Because some would say we can do both, right? We can have growth, but also we can find ways to decarbonize the economy, other ways that the growth can be more sustainable without just having less activity.

And there are something like 33 countries in the world now that have managed to do that, that have managed to decouple their growth from their carbon emissions. And this was a big story. I remember the economist ran a story in 2022 and was like, hey, guys, we haven't been paying attention. look at what's been going on, and I think that's actually kind of an extraordinary success. I think what degrowthers would say is this. This is a belief that has a very interesting history, right? So I'm going to take you back to the late 1960s. Americans, other people worldwide Europeans have started becoming concerned about what is happening

to the environment. And they start asking themselves questions like, what's going to happen if we just keep on this trajectory? This is also around the time that the population bomb the book comes out and it predicts that if we keep reproducing, we're all going to starve to death, right? There's this very like a Malthusian kind of vibe in the air. So a think tank called the Club of Rome forms in Rome. It is founded by an industrialist and an economist named Orelio Pichai. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. This is in 1968. He invites some leading thinkers, economists, physicists,

chemists, other kinds of academics into a room. And he says, let's map out what's going to happen. If we keep growing the way we're growing, right? So four of them go back to M.I. which is using very early but very, very good computer technology. And they sort of feed scenarios into the computer. What happens if we keep reproducing at the same rate? What happens if we keep eating at the same rate? What happens if we keep clearing forests at the same rate? And they keep coming up with really bad news.

The planet will be burning. We will not have enough. We will all starve to death. They write this book called The Limits to Growth in 1972. And shockingly, you guys, the New York Times, thought this was like a pamphlet. Okay, when I first started studying this, I was talking to the degrowthers and I got the sense that like, okay, they're playing it up a little bit. It's probably like a pamphlet that people got, you know, that got handed out in the street. The New York Times reviewed

this book in 1972. There is an old review online and it is very critical of the conclusion. And it acknowledges that, you know, these guys are using computers and this is a new thing. And that's very important in statistics. But then it says like there's been dumerism for a long, long, long, long time, and this just seems like more doomerism. So from there, you have this movement of people. The Club of Rome seems fascinating to me, right? Like, it's an informal

think tank. They meet a couple of times a year. They have a website now. And they, for the past 50 years, have continued to bang this drum and have continued to say, if we keep going along these lines, we're going to burn ourselves out. They will use words like suicide, you know, very colloquially.

And if you look at what's happening with climate change now and with stories about glaciers melting and forest being raised, it does sort of seem like back in 1972, they predicted quite a bit in the way we think about the environment now, which is we are all very concerned about it, and we don't really have ways to fix it, they would argue. So you sort of touched on it in that answer there, but talked us about who, I guess, the ringleaders of the degrowth movement are now.

Like, who is spearheading this effort? And do you get the sense that it's resonating perhaps in 2023 in a way that maybe it didn't in the 1970s? So I'll tell you something really funny. I was trying to book this show, you know, get these people to talk in the month of August, 2023. Guess what goes on in the month of August for degrowthers? Vacation? Vacation.

Like all month long that was so funny. I did four series in this. I did four episodes in this series about capitalism. And everybody was very easy to reach except for the de-grocers. They have it all figured out. Automatic. Yep. They're like, I will be gone until September 7th. It was actually really great.

Living what they preach. That's exactly right. So a couple of names you're going to be familiar with. Jason Hickle, the economic anthropologist I mentioned, who wrote the book, Less is More. You will be familiar with the name Herman Daly. Herman Daly was an advocate of steady state economic growth. He passed, unfortunately. I believe it was late last year.

There is a gentleman named Dirk Phillipson. He's a professor at Duke, an economic historian. He wrote a very good book called How GDP Came to Rule the World, which is, you know, an argument against taking GDP, as you said in your intro, taking GDP as the fundamental underpinning of our economy. There's a really interesting guy named Tim Jackson, also an economist, identifies as an ecological economist. That was not a term I had encountered until I started reporting on this.

And Kate Rayworth, the famous one, who wrote the book, Donut Economics in 2017 and caused a big stir. Now, I don't know if Kate identifies as a degrowther, but they certainly identify with her. We looked for the physical center of the movement. There's a lot of activity in Barcelona. There's an economist whose name, I hope I pronounced correctly, Georgus Callas. He's a Greek guy. And it does seem like they're mainly concentrated in Europe, which, you know, you might expect. But these are people who know each other, who speak to each other, and to your question about, is this more popular now?

Yeah, I really think it is. One of the things that I couldn't help but notice is suddenly around 2022, 2023, everybody has a degrowth piece. Right. So the New York Times is interviewing Herman Daly, the man who has been arguing for five decades that we should stop obsessing over growth. And it's gotten a lot of respect. I mean, he's not a crackpot. The New Yorker has John Cassidy writing, Is Prosperity Possible without growth in, I believe, 2020, 2021. And then just a few months ago follows up with Bill McKibben. Is it time to take degrowth seriously? in the Financial Times, Martin Wolf, the great, the esteemed columnist, who I'm sure we all read, he recommends as one of his top books of the year, Jason Hickles, less is more about degrowth. So I definitely think we're starting to see this permeate in a real way. And I think it's probably because so many of us are very worried about what's happening with the environment, with the ecology.

But I actually think there is another reason for this. And I can speak about what happened to me personally when I started reading about degrowth. If you guys don't mind. Go for it, yeah. I started to agree with them. I started to full on agree with them. My dad had worked on Wall Street in the 1970s before financialization, before securitization. So before there was real money.

But he walked away from Wall Street in his early 40s really hating Wall Street. And he told us as kids, you know, money isn't everything and you should never work in this life just to get money. He was, it was like one of the most firmly ingrained things in my brain from the time I was four or five years old. So I grow up and I'm a journalist and journalists don't care very much. about money. But then I moved overseas and I started covering conflict in African nations. I was a war reporter and I was looking at what happened when a country like Sudan, where I was based for a long time, didn't have an economy to speak of. And then suddenly Sudan discovers oil in additional places. And all of a sudden there's roads and there's bridges and there's towers. And so from that point on,

I looked at growth somewhat suspiciously, but I was able to see like, okay, this is the real world impact, right? A person who dropped out of school at nine or ten because of war because of conflict because there was no money. And then the oil boom happens and this guy is sending his kids to college. I can't think of a more perfect encapsulation of growth, right? What it means for real people when an economy grows. And yeah, it means things for CEOs too. It means things for fat cats. But if you're an ordinary person, it means a lot for you as well. And so I've been very pro-capitalist in my thinking, but like everyone else, I've been really concerned about what is happening to the environment. But along come these degrowthers, and they look at society in a very philosophical way, and they ask questions like, are we really happy with all this stuff we have?

Now, the guy in Sudan who is sending his kid to college, he's very happy with sending that kid to college. Do I need all of the things that I have? And that's what really made me start thinking about where do I shop and how do I shop. You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now. I'm Amy Morris. And I'm Karen in Moscow here to tell you. you about our new on-demand news report delivered right to your podcast feed. Bloomberg News Now is a short five-minute audio report on the day's top stories. Episodes are published throughout the day with the latest

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Listen to the latest from Bloomberg News Now on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. Ideological rebellions happened from time to time, particularly after crises. And so I think like 10 years ago this time, maybe a lot of, 11 or 12 years ago, you know, we had Occupy Wall Street. It was probably an agglomeration of a lot of things. It was targeted banks. There was a lot of, that was some of the early talk about debt cancellation and student debt cancellation.

Does this feel like a distinct from that? Or is it sort of like this angst that many people feel about inequality and the economy? Like, is this the sort of current manifestation of a sort of underlying angst that 10 years ago or 11 years ago presented as the Occupy movement? I think it's both. I think that is a great question and I think it's both. And I'll tell you why. You guys remember there was a time when we didn't all talk about capitalism, right? It was just the system and we talked about bosses. We talked about banks. But like I was an economics reporter. I never once used the word capitalism on air. Something did change. And it was seeing people in culture spaces start talking about capitalism that made me like about six years ago go, what the hell is going on? Why are my cool friends in the zeit guys talking about it and I'm not talking about it on air? So we did a bunch of research and we started seeing, to your point, the point in U.S. history that we all started talking about capitalism, it was first the Tea Party and then it was Occupy Wall Street, right? These two movements emerged together and suddenly we are hearing the C word capitalism all the time. The Tea Party and Occupy were very, very carefully tied to the financial crisis and they were two very different movements that wanted different things, but they absolutely wore a reaction. They absolutely wore backlash. And D growth strikes me much the same. It really, does. It strikes me much the same. But the financial crisis at a certain point ended. I think what it's going to take, and the financial crisis ended, and the young people are still out there yelling

about capitalism. We see that in Pew surveys. Every year they take a new, every year or two, Pew does a new round of data on capitalism. And every year you see the young people a little bit less, a little bit fewer, a little bit fewer have faith in it, right? So the financial crisis has ended, but this is a long tale of us doubting capitalism. The environment, mental problems that the world is facing. And these are things, you know, I see in my daily life. I'm a big hiker. I like to go out west. These are things that I see in my daily life. I don't know that they end the way the financial crisis ended. I think they have an equally long tail. And so I do wonder, I mean, I said to Dirk Phillips and the economic historian, I said, look, you know that an American

president or an American politician could never get elected on a platform of degrowth. And he mentioned, and I can't believe I didn't see it coming. He mentioned RFK's famous speech in Kansas, and I believe it was 1968. When he talks, RFK talks about GDP not measuring the health of our children, the happiness of our children, the health of our waters, you know, how sane we all are. And he said, you know, Dirk Philipson tells me, as far as I understand it, RFK may very well have been elected president, right? And it was one of those moments where I was like, I don't have an answer for that. I actually don't have an answer for that. It's a really interesting point, and I'm not going to clap back at you because I want to think about it for a while. And so, yeah, to your point, is this just, is this a blip? Is this a

furious blip? Maybe. It very well might be many things are furious blips, but if we continue seeing what climate change is doing to us, I could see this having a bit of a longer tail. And the thing is, you never know what the kids are going to do a generation from now. You just don't, you know? Tracy, you know, the other speech, you know, that I'm thinking about too, which is like there is some, you know, the Carter, the Carter gave the famous malaise speech where he like talked about the quote erosion of our confidence in the future. And that was like at a time of high inflation. But it also sort of got at this idea that like there was a president who was sort of like talk about like maybe we need some like societal reset. Yeah, you've seen sort of glimmers of this theme at various points in time. But no one has actually like enunciated. it as a degrowth movement, at least in politics. But I want to ask, you know, move away from the U.S. for a second. Noel, you mentioned your experience in the Sudan. You know, developing countries will probably have a different view of economic growth and progress than a lot of the developed world. And they're certainly in a different position. How does the degrowth movement take them

into account? And how does it tell people to think about, you know, when are you? you big enough? They certainly do take the developing world into account. I mean, you would imagine so, right? It's the type of person whose mind instantly goes, the degrowthers, the people who are part of this movement. I feel like degrother is slightly pejorative. The people who are part of this movement are the type of people who are wired to think about the developing world. And so when I push them on that, I mean, I brought up Sudan in interviews. And what they would say is, it's not Sudan that needs to stop growing. It's the United States. It's Western Europe. It's not like we've had our time, but it is we have enough.

We have to decide that we have enough and Sudan doesn't and Mali doesn't and much of the African continent and much of the developed world doesn't. And we have to be okay with letting them grow and we have to work with them to make sure that their growth is greener than our growth was through industrialization, right, and into the present day. So this is not a movement. And again, this is why I find them sympathetic. I, it's very easy for me to dismiss people who have never thought about Sudan. As somebody who lived there for three years and covered that country for three years, if you haven't thought about Sudan and you're making some big grand point, then I've got some things to say to you. And so it was fascinating to hear them say, oh, no, no, no, we're not saying that these countries that need to

grow are the problem. We're asking about the manner in which they grow. I mean, Sudan and it's oil money, that's not a great thing for degrowthers. However, it is a good thing for impoverished Sudanese people. And I think what they would almost certainly say is, let's get the impoverished to these people up out of poverty, right? But yeah, they have taken the developing world into account. And the prescription to me seems to be it's the developed world that has to change. An economist, a sort of mainstream economist, and I would probably be sympathetic to this view, but a mainstream economist would listen and say, the error that's being made is the

assumption that there is a finite amount of growth and that it's the role of the developed world to step back and allow for more growth to be allocated to the developing world. And obviously, you know, U.S. consumer is a big source of demand for goods made all around the world. A lot of growth comes, people would argue, comes from trade and relationships and networks, etc. And that the U.S. and the developed world would not be doing any favors to poorer countries to retrench, to buy less, to consume less oil, to consume less food, to consume less crops. to consume fewer manufactured goods that are made in the developed world. It seems like on some level there's like a fundamental rejection of this assumption or there's

this fundamental belief that like there is only so much pie to go around and that the developed world needs to take less in order for the developing world to have more. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I don't, that point you just made about what an economist would say about the way the world works. I don't think they have great answers for that. I think that's why they tend to focus on what should we be doing in the U.S. and what should we be doing in Western Europe, right? Because it's easy to tell me, Noelle King, just stop eating meat.

And I'm like, okay, yeah, I'm on board with that. It's much more difficult to say Americans in general stop buying products that are exported from Sudan. I actually don't think we have many imports, many imports from Sudan. But you know what I mean? It is this thing where on an individual level, it makes a lot of sense to me. But when you start talking about a globalized world, a globalized economy, where we're, we're all really interconnected. I mean, there's a gloss on that. They can gloss over that, but fundamentally what you find yourself wanting, what I find myself wanting at the end of the day,

is like, just tell me how this would work. And I think I didn't get a good answer in this series. I didn't get a good answer. I got some good individual things, you know, um, an end, legislate an end to planned obsolescence, right? My iPhone will last for 15 years, not three, the way Apple wants it to. Um, eliminate advertising. in city centers. Paris, France loves the degrowthers. Paris has actually gone about eliminating advertising, as I understand it, in certain parts of the city. And they love that and they look at that. And they say, look, this is a moment for us. But I mean, I think if you look at the world the way it is now, it's very hard to see how any of this becomes policy. It just seems to me like it's going to

become individuals making choices that, of course, at the end of the day, don't add up to very much. I'm Francie Lacquan, an award-winning journalist. And I've got a new podcast. I'm a podcast, leaders with Francine Lacqua from Bloomberg podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from heads of state to fashion icons about the news of the moment. But I've always been curious who are these people as leaders. I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions. A poor decision is always better than no decision.

Listen to new episodes every other Monday. Follow leaders with Francine Lacaner wherever you get your podcasts. I can see the argument for individuals. So, you know, for instance, you make the personal decision to stop eating meat. And I can even see an argument, you know, in some respects for governments. Maybe they legislate certain things, obviously, you know, rules around pollution and production and things like that. But what do companies do in the degrowth world? Because really, you know, the idea of maximizing shareholder value seems to be at complete odds with the idea of, you know, shrinking. economic growth. You are absolutely right. Again, a real world problem here is, and in the degrowth materials I've read, what's really interesting to me is companies are not often mentioned. We have a lot of history, we have a lot of philosophy, we have a lot about government. Unless it is something really specific, like Apple should make iPhones that last 15 years, which fine, I think that's a great

plan. Yeah, that sounds fantastic. Let's do that. Right. Go for it. But you're right. Many of us in the are implicated as often viewed as a bad word. I don't view it as a bad word. We're all implicated in shareholder capitalism. I was telling a friend about de-grothers and she's got a heart. She's like a real caring woman. And she said, here's the problem. I have two daughters and I need their 529s, their college funds. I need them to grow until these girls are 18 because I'm going to have to pay for college someday. And when you are up against that, I, you know, I wish I could have put her in a room with Dirk Phillips in or with Tim Jackson. And I imagine what they might say is, you know, couldn't your daughters go to community college?

Couldn't your daughters go in state? But that is fundamentally at odds with the way human beings work these days. And these are people who have a very positive, very positive notion of what human behavior could be if we were not all convinced that we're in competition with each other. And one of the things that's interesting about them is they do believe human nature has been perverted by capitalism so that we do think we need more.

We do think my house has to be nicer, my car has to be nicer, when in fact, we're just being fed that. So it's a lot of stuff that you would have learned, you would have come across in college, right? But again, the question of what do we do with companies that actually need to engage in shareholder capitalism because so many of us are invested in the stock market and like need it to retire. I mean, at a basic level, I don't retire if the stock market doesn't grow or I retire under a bridge. And so this is, this is where, again, I would think that this movement probably, probably has a lot to say about individual behavior that many people in the future might find, even in the near

future might find really, really compelling. But I can't really see a CEO sitting down with any of this material and being like, oh, yeah, that's a great idea. Right. There's a limit to, regardless of the structural changes we may want to make, whether it's environmental that like individual agency or one firm can. I just have one last question. And I want to go back to your point about how like, In the developing world, places that have gotten a lot richer, thanks to globalization, exports, growth has been generally seen as a good thing. And very few people would dispute that. Like, you know, if it resonates in Europe, it resonates in the U.S. with a certain subset of the population. Some people might listen to this and say, like, it's not really about capitalism.

It's not even really about the environment. It's about some sort of like deeper spiritual malaise. Like, we are lonely people. Yes. When you mentioned the iPhone actually where I thought you might were going to go, is like, we spend hours on a day looking at screens and it seems to be making people lonelier and we have less interaction with other people. Like that seems to be well known. And, you know, people have like families later in life and so forth. Like how much does it feel like is it really about GDP?

Is it really about carbon or just sort of a reaction to this sort of, I don't know, like spiritual crisis, some might say, that is in a rich Western Congress? countries. You're speaking my language and you've put your finger on something really, really, really important. I think a big appeal of degrowth is about this sick feeling that a lot of us have, that we have a lot of stuff, that we're doing good. We have roofs over our heads. We have cars. We can buy food. We have what we need, but we don't really know when enough is enough. And I think that's why it spoke to me. In all honesty, that's why it spoke to me. It made me question, what is enough? And if somebody in another part of the world can do better, if I have a little bit less, is it worth it for me to have a little bit less? And the answer that I came to is, yeah,

no doubt it is. You know, I think in the 70s, in the late 60s and 70s, it was about, it was just about the environment. I really do believe that. I think people weren't as malaised, forgive my language, forgive my inventing words. I think people weren't as spiritually sick, as many of us do feel now. They weren't as lonely. They weren't as divorced. And I think degrowth speaks to the current moment in part, because as you said, it's less about the economy and more about as an individual, do I feel like capitalism has worked for me? And one of the things that we really try to trace in this series is that it's a vibe. The revolt against capitalism is a vibe more than it is anything else. It is people being sick and fed up and feeling like they're being screwed and feeling like they're lonely and there's student debt and then you have a bad job and then you don't have a pension anymore. Like all of these things really, really, really make us anxious. And if we were not anxious about those things, Would something like degrowth, would it appeal as much? No, I don't think you need this kind of philosophy.

I think there would still be people advocating it. But I think the reason as a philosophy, not as an economic argument, but as a philosophy, the reason I think it works is because these are exactly the times that we're in. That's probably why that you didn't hear much about degrowth in the 1980s and the 1990s. It's a very 2023 phenomenon. Right. All right. Well, the series is blame capitalism.

Go check it out on Vox. And Noel, thank you so much for coming on the show to explain degrowth to us. Appreciate it. Thank you guys so much for having me. This was really fun. Joe, that was interesting, but also kind of depressing. Because I feel like, I feel like all of this makes sense. But at the same time, like economic growth and technological progress and like the drumbeat

of more consumption is just almost this runaway train that it feels like no one actually has control over. Yeah. I mean, I guess what my view is that I'm skeptical that people doing less or consuming less will make other people better off. That, you know, I'm skeptical of like the idea that like, okay, if like people, we work less or buy less, et cetera, that that means that there is going to be some pot of stuff or activity or things that then get allocated to someone else to make someone better off.

What I do buy, and it was sort of, she touched on it, Noel touched on it in that last answer, is that like on an individual basis, I'm not surprised that more and more people feel like they need like some individual reset. Right. Like not necessarily on a policy standpoint, but like individual reset regarding consumption or diet or meat use, et cetera. And you see that. And so I guess like it makes sense to me that like more and more people feel like they need something like that in their life. Well, the other thing I would say is it almost feels like an absolute versus relative gains problem. And I think, you know, you're almost getting into, I guess, human philosophy here. But it feels like people are always going to benchmark themselves to the person or people nearest to them, you know?

And so that dynamic seems really hard to get out of. Well, and I think people benchmark themselves to the year before, right? Yeah. So it's like, I mean, people do not want to have for very understandable. And I'm, you know, and I say people, I mean, myself and this too, like, people don't want to have declining material experiences. Right. Right. Like, you know, it's one thing to say, okay, I want to, like, slow down.

And people obviously get to stages in their life where they, like, feel they need to buy less stuff or work less or consume less, et cetera. But by and large, like, people like to have that choice. and people like to be able to modulate that, but I don't think people like having the feeling imposed on them that, oh, what I have or what, you know, is cost more next year or I have less than that. That being said, you know, there may be, you know, there could be an argument that, like, climate does impose

this sort of, like, hard limit on consumption in some way, and then it's interesting. Yeah. Well, the other thing I would say is, like, clearly there is this sense of, on Wii is a nice way of putting it, but maybe impending disaster would be another way of putting it as well, which pure GDP figures just do not take into account, right? So, you know, the U.S. economy going up one or two percent per year is not capturing the decrease

in life expectancy for some people or just general dissatisfaction with life. Tracy, can I tell you a secret? I'm saving, I've never said this to before, and I'm saving it to the end of the episode. Whoa. I've kind of like, I've been like a doom. all my life. Like I, going back, like, even like when I was in high school and stuff, like, I've always sort of been convinced that, like, some big societal shoe to drop is, like, right around the corner. Wait, I thought you used to say you were short-term pessimistic,

long-term optimistic. Maybe I, I am sort of, well, I sort of mean that there's always some disaster around the corner, like short-term, like, I always think we're, like, on the doorstep of something bad. Over time in my life, I've realized that I'm normally wrong, which is, like, you know, was sort of like trying to balance that out. But I am always of this view that like something bad is always right around the corner. See, I'm short-term optimistic and long-term pessimistic. I think we kick the can down the road for the next year or two.

We always find a short-term solution, but eventually it's all going to come to a head. Well, we'll check back in a few years, see who's right. Check back in the next century and, you know, see who's right. Okay. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

you can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guest, Noel King. She's at Noel King. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashel Bennett at Dashbot, and Moses Adnan. And follow all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under the handle at podcasts.

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