Alert! I am back on twitter for an hour (wait, did its name change?) and before it gets me depressed I want to share the news of our new paper on the perceptions of degrowth among Euro-parliamentarians. /THREAD The research was part of @r_mastini's PhD on the Green New Deal and degrowth, and was based on interviews with 41 Members of the European Parliament.

The media report these days on a new study that supposedly shows that, after all, not only money buys happiness, but that there is no limit on how much happiness money can buy. But is this so? /Thread. washingtonpost.com/business/2023/… Context: the study is an ‘adversarial collaboration’ between, on the one hand, Kanheman&Deaton, who had found that happiness increases with income but flattens somewhere between $60,000 and $90,000, and on the other, Killingsworth who found a linear relation with no satiation./2

I am happy to share our new paper with @ANGELOSVARVARO1 and Panos Petridis, published open access @WorldDevJournal. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…. In it we propose a new way to study ‘real-existing degrowth’. THREAD Why ‘real-existing degrowth’? Because ‘one cannot fight for something that one does not know’.

"A discourse analysis of yellow-vest resistance against carbon taxes" - our new paper is available open access! sciencedirect.com/science/articl… Here is a taste of what you will find there: This is one of the first rigorous, and peer-reviewed studies of the Yellow Vests movement and their stance on climate change and carbon taxes. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence about the Yellow Vests, but few rigorous studies. /2

I read the piece about degrowth on @vox by @KelseyTuoc and it is really disappointing. I thought I was interviewed by a journalist, but I realize I was just there to give a handy citation for an opinion piece. Not nice. /1 I am cited for claiming that degrowth is not about climate change. I said instead that degrowth is about much MORE than just climate change, but cited out of context I fit the wish of the author. Jason points to other flaws in the article here. But.... /2

https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1422899556019232774

'Is degrowth against growth in poor countries'? There are many misunderstandings circulating on this issue, so time for a ... THREAD @MaxCRoser @BrankoMilan Those of us who write about degrowth write first and foremost about the part of the world we live in - Europe and North America. We do not see ourselves part of the expertocracy that feels entitled telling Africa or the rest of the world what they should be doing. /2

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

Interesting thread, but I don't think ecosocialists or degrowthers are arguing that if German socialists had come to power the world would be green by now. Socialism is not automatically green. Eco-socialism is what it says - a green version of socialism - to be tested /1

https://twitter.com/Leigh_Phillips/status/1356701992425459712

The historical counterfactual also in not totally convincing. So let's assume Germany and Europe went socialist. The world economy would have evolved exactly the same way it did? 🤔 I doubt it, this is too deterministic. Examples: /2

On twitter we spend time in silly debates: is degrowth impoverishment, negative GDP, lockdown misery bla bla. But in our normal lives we are producing some pretty k.a. research. Here are 22 papers by researchers from the (broader) degrowth community published just the last year! I give these in no particular order. And they range from the most quantitative to the most ethnographic or the most philosophical (disclaimer: I am in involved in 4). These are papers that I happened to read. I am sure I miss many more - please add at the end of the thread!

One of the seemingly strongest arguments in support of green growth is that an economy can keep growing based on non-material goods and services without using more energy. @Noahpinion distills this into a thought experiment of a Matrix economy. THREAD/1

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1309171221758607365

The Matrix economy is a world where energy/resource input is steady, but GDP keeps growing as we pay more and more for virtual experiences that give us more and more pleasure (paying with virtual work) /2

Last year I published a book on Malthus and Limits. Let me explain what I argued, and how it is relevant to current debates where the name of Malthus and his supposed false prophecy keeps popping up / THREAD According to the standard story, Malthus posited that while food production can grow only arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4), population grows geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8), predicting thus famines. Malthus, the story goes, underestimated the power of technology and was proven wrong. /2

@ii_sambliss wrote an excellent thread fact-checking Shellenberger's ‘Apocalypse never’.

https://twitter.com/ii_sambliss/status/1278796324301942784

. If you want a researched story of the origins and evolution of the ideas behind the book check our 2019 paper @journalofpolit1 journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/JPE/… /THREAD Shellenberger styles himself now in the ‘born-again’ mold that Americans love. He is supposedly an environmentalist who saw the light, and comes out to tell the world the truth about environmentalism /2

One of my side-projects is a website on how to write better papers, mostly for social scientists. howtowriteanacademicpaper.com/index.html Here is a thread with the posts you can find there #writingcommunity #academicwriting #postdoc #PhDthesis #AcademicTwitter #researchpapers #PhDChat /1 My most-viewed post is the one on how to write simply – how to cut the crap, that is. I was inspired by William Zinsser’s ‘On writing well’ (highly recommended!). A workbook accompanies the post with exercises on how to simplify your own text. howtowriteanacademicpaper.com/how-to-write-s… /2

This is a good point. I have addressed it in my recent book ('Degrowth', 2018, @agendapub) and in my work with @jasonhickel. Let me summarise and hopefully clarify for the sake of a better conversation. THREAD /1

https://twitter.com/TedNordhaus/status/1258548013913346049

Our claim is NOT that the relationship between GDP and GHGs is immutable, or a law of physics. (If I have used language in my less mature texts that made it seem so, my apologies – but I don’t think I did ☺). /2

1. @TimHarford wrote a piece in the @FT arguing ‘that the pandemic is giving us a taste of what an end to growth might look like’, proving that 'hitting demanding emissions targets through crude degrowth would be hopeless'. Some thoughts - THREAD ft.com/content/0b1718… 2. To begin, no one that I know is arguing for the crude, undirected type of degrowth ‘of five pandemics in the next decade' that @TimHarford attributes to degrowth advocates. We are scientists, and generally scientists don’t say nonsense like that. Our argument is more nuanced.

1. There is a weird chart circulating, which supposedly shows that covid-induced ‘degrowth’ (sic) is an order of magnitude more expensive in reducing carbon emissions than clean energies. There are so many things wrong with this analysis, that I don’t know where to begin….THREAD 2. First, as Jason Hickel has argued for the nth time, degrowth is not the same as recession or depression. -

https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1255589713915908096

1/ For those new to degrowth and my work, here is a a brief presentation of my 3+1 books on degrowth (the +1 is coming out this September) with a few selected highlights. THREAD (23) 2/ My first book is an edited volume, the Degrowth vocabulary, published by @routledgebooks, coordinated with my good friends and colleagues Giacomo D’Alisa and Federico Demaria. Published in 2014, we collected in the book chapters from the top thinkers on degrowth at the time.