In 2021, China had around 30 million homes sitting vacant for extended periods. There’s enough unused housing in China to house around 80 million people, roughly the population of Germany. This isn’t “slack” in the market; there is little hope that these homes will someday find an occupant. These homes are bound to remain empty.
Indeed, most of these homes are simply held as financial assets;
If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it is that the Great God of GDP is a false god after all, impotent as Baal. The mighty American economy, with unprecedented GDP, has been knocked to its knees by one of the lowest conceivable life forms, a mere virus possessing not a single strand of DNA. Politicians who thought their legacies would be associated with “the greatest economy ever” now look like ridiculous priests of a sham religion.
Steady staters are used to being attacked by right-wing neoliberals. Attacks from left-wing neo-Marxists are new and require a reply. To put the matter simply, Marxists hate capitalism, and they mistakenly assume that steady-state economics is inherently capitalist. Vettese is a Marxist; ergo, Vettese hates steady-state economics.
To spell this out, let’s begin by giving Marx due credit for emphasizing the reality of class exploitation under all heretofore existing economic systems,
Capitalism and growth might have similar connotations, but they have important distinctions, too. “Capitalism” has become a clumsy catch-all for any number of value-laden projections—greed, big business, innovation, accumulation, complexity, workaholism. “Growth,” meanwhile, is a landmine of technical and cultural connotations, and I’ll explore just a couple of them here.
Technically speaking, their differences seem straightforward. Growth is a material increase in economic production and consumption. Capitalism is a highly complex term,
Banks should not be allowed to live the alchemist’s dream by creating money out of nothing and lending it at interest.
Herman Daly makes the case against using obsolete growth policies to dig out of the recession, and he issues a challenge to technological optimists.
Society has reached a tipping point where further economic growth is causing serious health problems.
A cultural shift is necessary to gain widespread support for a shorter work week.
Herman Daly exposes the absurdity of geo-engineering as a solution to climate change.
Striving to create perpetually more jobs on a finite planet is a sure path to growing unemployment.