That hope for a better life for us and for our children, it's something that we can't afford to throw away, we can't afford to throw that hope away. Since the publication of Growth Without Prosperity, a number of environmental theorists – including Robert Pollin, Leigh Phillips and Kenta Tsuda – have echoed the Treasury official, raising serious questions about the practicability of degrowth models. They have noted that if the transition away from fossil fuels threatens to cause a green recession, the sudden contraction of other economic sectors would likely lead to mass immiseration. A strong redistributive state would be required to prevent this outcome; but the state apparatus would itself be eroded under any eco-austerity regime. Can degrowthers prove the ecological benefits of their agenda justify the risk of plunging millions into poverty? Poverty, in some sense, is legitimated by the idea of growth because as long as you keep everything growing, those rich people can continue to get richer and richer, as long as the poor people get richer as well. The result – a controversial 2009 report to the UK government – was published as the book Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet. (A substantially revised and rewritten edition was published in 2017). This book, now translated into 17 languages, examines the problems of growth and consumerism and the prospects for a new “ecological macro-economics” and a redefinition of prosperity. More is not always better; we need to focus on what helps us flourish as human beings and helps us lead a satisfying “good life.” Buddhism, by contrast, says that the way out of suffering is compassion. It’s about understanding that my suffering is what connects me to other people. Neglecting that suffering and turning away from it, is actually a neglect of my responsibility as a human being.” The only real solution to suffering, according to Buddhism, “is to work to reduce the cravings for the things that create the struggle” in the first place.

And yet it's being taken from our kids because of the damage that our economy has caused to the planet.

Content

Far from the war-zone imagined by 19th-century philosophers, an unbiased observation of nature displays the cooperative and symbiotic relationships between species as described by ecologists and sought after by ecological economists. It is wrong to have Capitalism focus on and propagate the idea for individuals to 'accumulate stuff' continuously. I do think the ideas presented here need to somehow be successfully communicated to ‘the enemy’, the Trumps, Bojos and their hordes of zombie enablers. And as most of them don’t even read, let alone read this sort of book, that’s where TJ’s vision falters. One can imagine, or rather hear already, the contemptuous dismissals ideas such as flow or balance typically provoke from the currently dominant hard-nosed bully-boy (and girl) Capitalists. And yet, there comes a point at which more becomes too much. The World Health Organization has said that nowadays we have more people dying from diseases of over-consumption than dying from malnutrition, under-nutrition.

It is perplexing, of course it is, in that it is a world that is not an obvious conclusion. It is highly desirable, of course it is. A noble creature will approach nothing else but this. A human creature? Maybe not so obviously. It is essential to build understanding that the economy is designed to be destructive and that we must seek solutions to the climate and ecological crises there but we also need to invest in understanding the complex nuts and bolts that will be required to do the necessary re-plumbing. All in all, I found this book an interesting trip through all the complex ethical and philosophical (yet material and concrete) that one needs to think about when talking about post-capitalism. We're living on a planet where climate change is already creating disasters in in all sorts of ways around the world, and where we're told by scientists that those disasters will get worse in the future. There are moments where I find myself quibbling with certain key readings of history within his narrative. But overall his arguments are, to folk like me, massively compelling and essentially sound. But I’m not amongst the rapine disaster capitalists that need to be ‘converted’.

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Since the dawn of capitalism, industrial organisation and labour exploitation have caused devastation of our environment and our lives. And a Well-Being Bill sponsored by Lord Bird heads the list of private members bill in the House of Lords. Knowledge is spreading and the economic system held in place by those who control money and power is being challenged. And we're also in the same time, we're living in a world where some people into 2 billion people without access to clean water supply, people without decent housing.” As French economist Esther Duflo argues, economists are like plumbers in that they need not only to tinker with systems that are not working, but need to design and install improved and updated systems. Green growth is a lovely term, it's something that should appeal to everyone. And it sounds like we don't have to change the status quo very much, we don't have to think too deeply about what our economy is doing, we don't have to change our priority to chase growth in GDP.