In defense of the washing machine

I write reasonably often about decadence, the movement to save the world by shrinking the economy. Why? After all, it is a very prominent ideology, largely confined to European socialist academics, with absolutely no chance of becoming law or policy anywhere. Is it even worth continuing to refute?

I think so, and the reason is that while the actual proposals of the degenerates are unusual, ridiculous and have no chance of becoming law, the underlying anti-growth sentiment is much more widely held – and that sentiment shapes our policy priorities. I often get responses to this newsletter that push back on our growing skepticism, repeating lines like, “We can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet.”

So degraded conversations are not so easily dodged and are worth having.

A lot of chatter about washing machines

The most recent round of degrowth arguments was launched by a Dutch PhD candidate who wrote that we shouldn’t have washing machines — yes, Washing machine.

“Washing clothes by hand is a chore, often lonely. But it doesn’t have to be. We can have communal washing facilities in every neighborhood where people can plan to come in groups to do their laundry together,” he said. Recommended on Twitter. “Hand washing is tiring if you have a load, but it’s still physical activity and exercise. We spend time in the gym and run outside to stay fit; Wouldn’t it be so bad to spend some of that time and energy washing clothes by hand?”

The take catches fire because it captures much of what animates the modern degeneracy movement: ignorance of the realities of life and irrational priorities. Doing laundry by hand is the tedious, grueling, deeply unpleasant task that has occupied women for as long as we have worn clothes. Comparing the backbreaking work of hand scrubbing all the clothes every week to going to the gym is fundamentally unimportant. Dozens of women’s labor historians rushed to explain how bad it was to do laundry by hand, and how a washing machine represented a giant leap in living standards, freedom, and human welfare.

Another thing that makes this opinion so absurd is that washing machines aren’t actually a significant contributor to the environmental problems that downsizers claim to take care of. It only costs a few dollars to run your washing machine for an entire year. We’ve improved them dramatically since 1980 — they’re 50 percent bigger and use about a quarter of the water and electricity.

The proposal to scrub all your clothes by hand is a proposal to replace fairly low-energy machine work with a part-time job’s worth of unpaid miserable labor for almost no real environmental benefit.

More reasonable detractors often focus on concerns about short device lifespans and say that devices last longer and are easier to repair — but this is an intellectual subculture where you can always win attention with the most radical opinions, which is how we ended up arguing whether everyone should be rubbing their hands on their clothes. about that

Why washing machines are a matter of debate

One of the takeaways I had as I delved deeper into the decadence movement was that it was a lifestyle fantasy masquerading as a political movement. People drawn to it find something fascinating about an imagined past where people worked with their hands and interacted with the land. So they propose policies that meet this aesthetic criterion, regardless of whether it improves the environment in any way or whether it is a good tradeoff.

There is nothing wrong with personally choosing an anti-consumer life. But there is something wrong with dramatically lowering everyone else’s standard of living without any real benefit.

But one good thing came of the washing machine speech – a chance to be reminded of how much better the world is than it used to be, and how much heartbreaking, backbreaking labor our grandmothers and great-grandmothers did that we can now appreciate to be free.

Especially for washing machines, there is one The famous TED talk By the late Swedish academic Hans Rosling, which amounts to a beautiful statement of how much good this humble machine has brought to the world:

I watched my mother load a washing machine for the first time in her life when I was only 4 years old. That day was a great day for my mother. My mom and dad saved up for years to be able to buy that machine. And on the first day it was being used, even grandma was invited to see the machine. And Grandma got even more excited. All her life she heated water with wood, and hand-washed laundry for seven children. And now he was going to see Vidyut do that.

My mother carefully opened the door, and she loaded the laundry into the machine this way. And then, when she closed the door, Grandma said, “No, no, no, no. Let me push the button.” And Grandma pushed the button and she said, “Oh, great. I would like to see it. give me a chair give me a chair I want to see it.” And he sat in front of the machine, and he watched the whole washing program. He was mesmerized. To my grandmother, the washing machine was a miracle.

… If there was a democracy, people would vote in washing machines. They love them.

And what is the magic with them? My mother explained the magic with this machine on day one. She said, “Now Hans, we’ve loaded the laundry; The machine will work. And now we can go to the library.” Because this is magic: You load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machine, children’s books. And mommy has reading time for me.

My favorite part about Rosling’s speech was her reminder to the audience that people want laundry machines so badly and will vote for them. The UN estimates that only Two billion people have washing machines; For another six billion, a life of hand-washing clothes is not a distant memory but a tedious task that consumes a significant portion of women’s time and energy worldwide.

And this is why I don’t want to leave the washing machine speech alone. “Should or Shouldn’t People Have Access to Labor-Saving Technologies?” Not a hypothetical question. It is not only written in PhD thesis. It’s not just for Twitter dunks.

As you read this, billions of people still don’t have, or don’t have, a washing machine Access to electricity to run them. But we can make political choices — how we encourage the development of cheaper and better technologies, how we support basic electrical infrastructure, what innovations we consider to be societal priorities — that can make a difference.

In this week’s UN General Assembly, the international organization Dr Deciding what to do About slow progress for the global poor. If we think of the washing machine as a silly modern luxury, our policy will reflect that. If we see them as powerful tools for women’s liberation, our policies will reflect that.

Degrowthers are toothless, that their advocacy will absolutely not be the end of the washing machine of the rich world. But our ambivalence toward material improvements in living standards is not without teeth, because improvements in living standards are desperately needed, and we as a policy community must decide whether we are willing to prioritize them.

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