Digging into this paper by Sullivan and Hickel, and I am a bit distressed by the way authors misrepresent and distort their sources to fit their political narrative.
They mix and match statistics whenever it suits their narrative. They talk about a rapid increase in life expectancy in Maoist China and attribute that to expanded public health care and education, but when it comes to citing numbers, they cite the death rate.
Funny thing about the death rate is that it is as much a reflection of health, as it is of demographics. Death rate in western nations is double that of China, because, well, old people tend to die at some point.
OTOH when you look at actual life expectancy numbers, they continued to climb in Dengist China. But that doesn't fit the narrative, so it is not mentioned.
This gets an even darker turn when they mention infant mortality rate.
According to the authors infant mortality rose due to privatization and capitalist reforms, and only got reversed when government reintroduced social health insurance.
What's missing is the obvious mention of the one-child policy.
What is the most surprising here is that the source their cite describes it as an important factor in the rise of infant mortality. But again, that doesn't fit authors' narrative, so it is silently discarded.
Another case of such source abuse is their mention of BNPL (Basic Needs Poverty Line) for China. In the main text they unflinchingly say that according to this measure, extreme poverty was 0.2% in 1990 and 24% in 2005.
I’m a firm believer that #degrowth is necessary (though I hate the term). But I don’t know how it should be brought about. So I try to read, but I find a lot of the #degrowth lit I’ve come across frustratingly cherry-picking and wooly, including Hickel’s book. Particularly when it comes to practical ways to proceed. This makes it easy to deflect the general argument about necessity into one focusing on lack of rigor, which is a shame.
In terms of degrowth, I think it will come to local measures to solve real problems. The US Housing crisis as a consequence of the suburban experiment/ car-centricity is one example.
The measures to resolve this crisis, build resilience and adapt to extreme weather all require locality (by this I mean various levels of self sufficiency). The very texture of climate change ruins the predicates for modernity, a mild stable climate.
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