Preston Walberg

I want to tell you a story about something fascinating that has happened in Japan. An academic named Kohei Saito wrote a book about democratic "degrowth communism". Everyone said it would be a flop, because degrowth "is a terrible word", and communism "is a terrible word too."

There are a few things to understand about this "cost of living crisis" and the responses to it. First, if workers' purchasing power over the national product is down, that means someone else's purchasing power is up: namely, rich people and the owners of capital.

If your economy requires people to produce and consume things they don't need or even want, and to do more of it each year than the year before, just in order to keep the whole edifice from collapsing, then you need a different economy.