By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth
My milk package, the electric cars, agriculture land use and the wood saving stoves are all examples showing why overall reduction in resources use or emissions (absolute decoupling) through substitution and efficiency is a pipe dream in a growth economy.
By Nafeez Ahmed, Insurge Intelligence
For years, financial institutions and governments have been focused on the idea of ‘decoupling’ GDP growth from resource use. This has been driven by the recognition that to stay within the ‘safe limit’ of 2 degrees Celsius, we have to dramatically reduce our material consumption.
By Jason Hickel, New Internationalist
We can end poverty, right now, without any additional aggregate economic growth at all. The key here is to recognize that we don’t live in a poor world. On the contrary, we live in an incredibly rich world. Global poverty is a product not of any actual scarcity, but rather of the systematic creation of artificial scarcity.
By Mark H. Burton, Steady-State Manchester
Positive Money is to be commended for its efforts in helping to bring the deep and systemic problem of Economic Growth to the public eye. However, while agreeing with this broad orientation, it is worth taking a close look at the report’s policy proposals and at the economic theory behind them.
By Sam Bliss, Uneven Earth
Once free from the efficiency mindset, we see that setting legal limits is not the only solution to the Jevons phenomenon. If efficiency makes growth, maybe inefficiency makes degrowth.
By Julia Steinberger, Open Democracy
This fundamental question is the one I ask myself in my research, as an ecological economist. What are the physical things (like energy, materials, infrastructure and so on) we need to live well? To answer it, we must understand what we truly need, and how satisfying our needs connects to well-being.
By Simon Mair, The Conversation
Work can be “shit” or it can be good. Sociologists and psychologists have developed various frameworks to explain what makes a job good or bad. And we’ve identified a few common factors. A good job is socially useful, it provides material security, it is varied and creative, and it offers us a degree of autonomy. A shit job does nothing for society, fails to help us meet our material needs, is repetitive, and offers little autonomy.
By Anne B. Ryan, Feasta
In the past, we did not need to make a big deal of enough; it was built into our lives in many ways. Our language recognised it in phrases like ‘enough is as good as a feast’, and ‘waste not, want not’. But in modern life the sense of enough is badly underdeveloped; in affluent societies we have largely forgotten the wisdom captured in the old sayings.
By Katharine Trebeck, Open Democracy
This frankness and the positioning of human need delivery in the context of a planet burning up before our eyes make this rich book required reading for anyone who wants to break out of siloed thinking, who wants to understand the enormity of the task at hand, and who wants to be reminded of what the purpose of the economy should ultimately be.
By Caroline Whyte, Feasta
To get back to Thunberg: while I would say it’s highly likely that some of her success comes from her connections, some of it may well be down to her own skills, and some may also be down to fortunate timing.
By Herman Daly, Local Futures
We believe that growth is the costless, win-win solution to all problems, or at least the necessary precondition for any solution. This is growthism.
By Peter A. Victor, Resilience.org
The opening chapters of this updated, revised, and expanded second edition Managing without Growth tell how the recent idea of economic growth emerged from the idea of progress, itself only a few hundred years old.