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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odlots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Joe Wycenthal. 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 it is? 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? It 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? You never hear about that.
Is that not on the terminal? We need to look, 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 it 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 de-growth movement. So does that mean GDP like the goal of the
shrinking? 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 de-growth 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 de-growth movement. But what is this
exactly? I will tell you what de-growth 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 economic supporter. 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 de-growth, if you ask economists who believe in de-growth, who is scribe 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 in de-growth is a word that scares people. But I did come across
a very good definition. It's from the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel. He wrote a book in
2020 called Less Is More that I've seen described as like the Bible of de-growth. And here's what
Jason Hickel says. He calls de-growth, 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. They're 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 Hickel and other de-growthers would say is, 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 of 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 in the US is increasing its sort of like active industrial
policy. And China has seen extraordinary success and 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. But look at what's been going on. And I think
that's actually kind of an extraordinary success. I think what de-growthers 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
MIT, 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. I thought this was like a pamphlet. Okay, when I first started studying this,
I was talking to the de-growthers 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
doomerism 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 are going to burn ourselves out. They will use words like
suicide, you know, very, 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 talk to us about who I guess the ring
leaders 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's the life show.
Funny. I did four series in this. I did four episodes in the series about capitalism and
everybody was very easy to reach except for the degrowthers. 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,
wrote the book Less is More. You will be familiar with the name Herman Daily. Herman Daily was an
advocate of steady state economic growth. He passed, unfortunately, I believe it was late last year.
There is a gentleman named Dirk Phillipsin. He's a professor at Duke in economic historian.
He wrote a very good book called How GDP Came to Rule the World, which is 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 hadn't 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. Georgia's Callis. 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 Daley, 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 crack pot.
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 McKibbin. Is it time to take degrowth seriously?
In the financial times, Martin Wolfe, 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 are 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 his
kids, you know, money isn't everything and you should never work in this life just to get money.
He 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 10 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 de-grauthors 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?
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slash SBSNY slash radio to learn more. Ideological rebellions happen from time to time,
particularly after crises. And so I think like 10 years ago this time, maybe 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. It 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 zeitgeist 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 US 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, we're 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 were a reaction.
They absolutely were backlash. And degrowth 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 Service. 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 ended,
but this is a long tail of us doubting capitalism. The environmental 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. Right. And he mentioned,
and I can't believe I didn't see it coming. He mentioned RFK's famous speech in Kansas,
in 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 Phillips and 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 sort of like talked 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 US for a second. No, well, 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 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 degrowth
are the deep people as who are part of this movement. I feel like degrowth are a 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 Molly 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. 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
something 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 its oil money. That's not a great thing for degrowthers. However,
it is a good thing for empower Sudanese people. And I think what they would almost certainly say
is let's get the empower Sudanese 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 a 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,
US 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 US would
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 a 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 US and what should we be doing
in Western Europe, right? Because it's easy to tell me, Noel 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 don't, I don't actually don't think we have
many exports, many imports from Sudan. But you know what I mean? Like 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 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,
an end, legislate an end to planned obsolescence, right? My iPhone will last for 15 years,
not three, the way Apple wants it to. Eliminate advertising in city centers. Paris, France loves the
decrothers. 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.
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Bloomberglive.com slash tech summit 2023. 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 iPhone's that last 15 years, which fine. I think that's a great plan.
That sounds fantastic. Let's do that. Right. Go for it. But you're right. Many of us in the West are
implicated is 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 degrowthers 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,
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
of a very like 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 this is 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 and 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 and even in the 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 know. 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 many very few people would dispute that like, you know, if it resonates
in Europe, it resonates in the US with the 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, we're lonely
people. You know, when you mentioned the iPhone actually where I thought you might we're 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 there is enough rich Western countries.
You're speaking my language and you 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 and 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
the 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. 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 you didn't hear much about degrowth in the 1980s and the 1989.
It's a very 2023 phenomenon. 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.
So 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 drum
beat 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 that that you know, I'm skeptical
of like the idea that like, okay, if like people there, we work less or buy less, etc. that that
means that there is going to be some pot of stuff or activity or things that then get allocated
to someone else who makes 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. Not necessarily on a policy
standpoint, but like individual reset regarding consumption or diet or meat use, etc. 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 yeah, but it feels like people are always going to benchmark
themselves to the person or people nearest to them, you know. And so, 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, you 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 only have declining
material experiences, 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, etc. 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 and
pose down them that 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
doesn't pose 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, on we
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 US 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 you before and I'm saving it to the end of the episode. Whoa. I've kind of like,
I've been like a doomer 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 am sort of like 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, 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 Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me
at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wyzenthall. 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,
Dash O'Bennett at Dashbot and Moses Adnan. And follow all of our podcasts at Bloomberg
under the handle at podcasts. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash
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