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@aral it’s the only place capitalism has left to turn.

When the global north has created the conditions for the global south to pursue the expansionism it ‘profited’ from and, due to the instant mass comms tech it has created, it is much more difficult to continue colonialism openly, the only other extraction point left to squeeze is its own people

@urlyman @aral I can definitely see some of that tendency (re-shoring their exploitation, lovely sentence), but wouldn't you say Big Tech is just as much exploiting the Global South as it is the North?

The same, surveillance capital tech is deployed pretty much everywhere.

@newde oh the north is definitely squeezing the global south more. To the tune of $2 trillion per year according to Fadhel Kaboub (https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111878209819145074)

And it will double and triple down on that.

But it seems likely that’s not enough anymore for the level of returns sought https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/112008283161822016

@aral

@newde e.g. I think I’m right in saying that the level of return that the pension sector *requires* to be functional is 6% per annum. If that’s stalling, that’s quite the time bomb

@aral

@urlyman Hmm, that's interesting. Even though I shouldn't -- as it always turns up in discussing economics at some point -- I keep forgetting about pension funds.

Something to chew on as a degrowth-er. Do you perhaps something to read about that?

@newde @PlanetCritical had an interview with Ian Edwards of https://bankofnature.substack.com/.

I think I absorbed the “6%” from him

https://www.planetcritical.com/p/leveraging-pensions-to-force-the-transition doesn’t seem to have a transcript on mobile but Substack podcast episodes usually do on desktop

@newde Ian’s idea is to leverage the maybe $50 trillion in global pension funds by getting fiduciaries to actually behave as fiduciaries ought to do in the context of climate science.

Which is a lovely idea in isolation.

Whether such funds could carry on achieving 6% if the global south were allowed to sit at the table as equals may be another matter

@newde in a degrowth setting I presume growth continues to go to the global south while the global north contracts, so that, overall, the global economy is something akin to steady state. So emissions stop going up.

It’s not clear how or to whom the ‘returns’ are going to in that idealised setting (which is probs never going to happen).

And probably, a global steady state that takes decades to transition to ‘sustainability’ is going to be too much

@newde relistening to it, Rachel does a good job of pushing Ian on how his ideas fit into degrowth-adjacent tenets. To my mind, he doesn’t really answer. He kind of skirts around it.

The central idea of putting all that money to work right now is good.

@urlyman Of course, with the South potentially also investing in the same economy, it would speed up the growth accelerating the immediacy question of the question: what happens next?

@newde what indeed?

@urlyman Nuclear fusion, self driving cars, AI based personal assistants and maaany robots. Obviously! Oh and massive carbon capture, of course.

@newde carbon CAPTCHA

“Please tap all the AI-generated video clips of cement factories”

@CartyBoston Not sure nice is the word I’d use to describe it. These are not things I’m happy to be right about.