>How is the economy to be structured to meet human needs according to Degrowth and who gets to define what those needs are?
Humans, collectively, instead of a few fancy lads obsessed about how Line Must Go Up while the rest of us drown in poison.
>Without economic growth either the number of human beings has to remain stagnant (at best; more likely that number would have to be reduced to make such a system sustainable) or the overall standard of living would have to be lowered.
Human beings are currently yoked to the economy. That is to say, we are already mere human resources: feedstock for a machine that seems to exist for its own sake and only serves our needs as a byproduct, allowing us to reproduce so that we may all have the 'freedom' of being consumed. We cannot opt out of this arrangement.
You conjure up fears of a vague dystopia (god forbid we "stagnate" aka exist in a steady state!) while ignoring the actually-existing nightmare all around us.
Fretting over the ability of hypothetical future humans to buy plastic junk while choking on petrochemical fumes is bizarre, to say the least, given the rapidly decreasing chances of the planet being able to sustain complex civilization at all.
>While thermodynamically the resources on planet Earth - and ultimately the universe - of course are finite, for all pragmatic intents and purposes they are not.
You're right. We can pump all the oil and dig up all the coal then burn it to release enormous amounts of energy and enough waste products to kill us several times over. But why?
>Merely redistributing wealth doesn't cut it either, because without growth there can be no further creation of wealth.
What is wealth, and why do we create it?
Is wealth a Juicero in every home? Mountains of Funko Pops, fields of crossover SUVs, an endless grid of office buildings?
>Given continued technological progress and ensuing paradigm shifts
This is neoliberal word salad.
>it is entirely possible to sustainably live on this planet under the premise of both economic and population growth
What is the purpose of an economy? Is to make spreadsheets happy and to reproduce itself, or do you accept the radical notion that economies exist to serve humans? If it's the latter, then our economic machine is obviously unfit for purpose — it is the Orphan Crusher [0] on a global scale.
Yes, we can expand this Orphan Crusher and generate even more orphans to crush. We could capture all the energy of our sun and dedicate it to making and crushing orphans. We could crush orphans on an intergalactic scale, transmuting half the matter in the universe into orphans and the other half into the machine which crushes them. But why?
[0] https://twitter.com/pookleblinky/status/1309325764739858432