Degrowth

So I didn't watch the video (I prefer to get my serious information in old-fashioned text form) but the topic at least has me thinking about degrowth.

Whenever I read about this theory, it's typically presented in terms of GDP, "We need to reduce our GDP," "We need to stop using GDP as a measure of progress," etc. But it seems to me that GDP isn't really the right topic. Is it not resource consumption that is the real target? Water, energy, food, steel, concrete, and so on.

This seems an important distinction to me in that GDP has several significant factors, including labor, productive capital (machines/factories), and knowledge, in addition to material inputs. You could, for example dramatically reduce GDP by bombing factories or suppressing technical knowledge. This would be a disaster in terms of human well-being, but also in terms of degrowth's own objectives in that productive capital and technical knowledge enable more goods to be produced with less input resources in many cases.

Further, it is conceivable for it to occur that a breakthrough in technical knowledge would allow more valuable goods or services to be produced using fewer resources, and result in a situation where both GDP is going up, and resource consumption is going down. There are probably good, real examples of such technologies. The information revolution of the end of the 20th century is probably one of them.

It's possible that this is more thoughtfully considered in the literature (I'm not terribly well-read on this topic) and I'd be interested in some good references in this direction. If not, I think many of the criticisms of degrowth are probably sound. I think it is unnecessary and undesirable to reduce the quality of life for the majority of people in order to create an economic system compatible with the real limits of ecological resources, and focusing on reducing GDP risks causing that.

If the focus is actually resource consumption, as I think it should be, then I think the rhetoric around GDP, and even the name degrowth, is misleading and unappealing to most people. It seems to me that the operative word ought to be efficiency. Doing more with less. In that view the path forward looks more like investing heavily in R&D, rearchitecting urban infrastructure, and driving down water, energy, and land usage per capita. GDP hardly seems relevant.