Thread by @g_kallis

Friends ask me to comment on @BrankoMilan 's barrage of posts against degrowth. I think the best responses are to be found below Milanovic's own posts and they come from his own audience. I consider myself actually part of his audience /THREAD

I have a lot of respect for @BrankoMilan 's work on income inequality. I like also his dry and cynical Balkan humor (I am a Greek you see). And I learned a lot from 'Capitalism Alone', especially the chapter on China, where he provides a sober picture dismissing Western myths /2

I am not waiting however to learn something of substance from @BrankoMilan about climate change or mitigation. 'Capitalism Alone' is dealing with the future of the global economy and does does refer once to climate change. Not once! /3

So I am not taking what @BrankoMilan says about degrowth at face value. I don't think he has given serious thought to these issues. This is evident by the fact that he tries to squeeze and reduce degrowth to what he knows how to handle best: global income distribution. /4

Degrowth instead starts from two other premises. 1. Compound growth is impossible in the long run (turns to infinity) and catastrophic for the planet. 2. This catastrophe will hit poorer countries worse => global justice requires that we in high-income countries slow down. /5

Those of us who write about degrowth understand well the enormity of the task. How difficult it is to reduce production, how difficult it is to organize politically against the capitalist interests & ideologies that leave no alternative to working & consuming more and more. /6

No one that I know has said any of this is easy. So @BrankoMilan 's repeated 'Gotcha' sound hollow to me. I had 'gotcha' myself before him and devoted a full chapter on the limitations of the case for degrowth in my 2018 book 'Degrowth' /7

Degrowth might well be socially or politically impossible (I want to maintain an optimism of will and think it isn't, but I can understand the Balkan 'I've seen it all' cynicism). Even so, this does not make the alternative any more sustainable. /8

Capitalist elites of course want to make us think that there is an easy alternative fix and we can have our cake and eat it all. They sell fairy tales of fantastical technologies and all. @BrankoMilan seems to know better, and fortunately does not repeat such myths. /9

If we accept that compound growth - green or else - is catastrophic for the climate and bound to come to a crash end, then the responsibility to come with alternatives is not only 'ours' (those of us who point to the obvious fact), but also of all other reasonable citizens. /10

And if @BrankoMilan is right about the social/political impossibility of degrowth, then I want to hear what is is his alternative. Or how does he see 'capitalism alone' surviving 3 or 4C climate change and in what form. And what will such a world mean for global inequality? /11

Maybe take a short sabbatical out of these unnecessary and unhelpful tweets and posts that repeat well rehearsed arguments that economists have parroted the last 50 years, and devote the time to think more seriously about alternatives and implications? Just saying. END OF THREAD.