How Getting Rid of ‘Shit Jobs’ and the Metric of Productivity can Combat Climate change

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.

Enough is Plenty

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.

‘Heat, Greed and Human Need’: Review

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.

Greta Thunberg, Motives and Being Strategic

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. 

Growthism: its Ecological, Economic and Ethical Limits

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.

Managing without Growth. Slower by Design, not Disaster

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.

Escaping Growth Dependency One Step at a Time

By Rob Macquarie, Positive Money blog

Nowhere in Escaping Growth Dependency is it assumed that ending fractional reserve banking is the only option for positive change. But the report does claim that monetary reform is often overlooked as a viable area of work for the ecological project.

Sooner or Later, We Have to Stop Economic Growth — and We’ll Be Better for it

By Richard Heinberg, Ensia

The end of growth will come one day, perhaps very soon, whether we’re ready or not. If we plan for and manage it, we could well wind up with greater well-being.

Hickel Response on Degrowth

By Jason Hickel, Center for Economic and Policy Research

So yes, let’s dramatically increase clean stuff and reduce dirty stuff (in terms of their share of total economic activity), and let’s do this with massive public investment.  Here we agree.  But there’s no reason to nonetheless keep increasing aggregate economic activity forever. 

COP24: Climate Protesters Must Get Radical and Challenge Economic Growth

By Christine Corlet Walker, The Conversation

At COP24 environmental movements have an opportunity to use their platform to highlight the relationship between economic growth and environmental impact, and even to discuss radical alternative futures that are not dependent on a growth-based economy.

The Climate Crisis as Seen by the Economics Mainstream

By Brian Davey, Feasta

Although the effects of climate change seem to be near to apocalyptic over the long term, over the short term taking signficant action to cut emissions also appears to be a tremendous challenge.

How the Light Gets In

By Tim Jackson, Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity

It’s probably fitting that Michael Liebreich’s The Secret of Eternal Growth was published so close to Halloween. It’s so full of outlandish bogeymen, it sits perfectly alongside the ghouls and the ghosts of the trick-or-treat season.