Imagining A World Without Growth – But Seriously!

2 thoughts on “Imagining A World Without Growth – But Seriously!”

  1. Wonderful post! Thank you. Porter’s thumbnail revision of the end of slavery reduces the issue to economic determinism. The techno-optimist economic (ir)rationalists are only fair-weather friends as far as climate policy goes. Porter may as well have just written “We must reduce emissions- except if it reduces economic growth”.

  2. A perfect example for obedient and submissive thinking – a few bright brains know how it works and the rest of the population will follow towards unchallenged visions (‘bright young minds need a constructive goal to work toward’; ‘political and religious leaders got together to design and fund an ambitious global training program’; ‘pharmaceutical development funding is supervised by the WHO’). Such believe in the masterminding of a few and the superiority of supra-national organizations is, at best, naïve. It reminds me to the guided ‘development’ a la Mao Zedong or former USSR. In addition, the authors misses to mention that economic growth has pulled millions of people, for example in sout-east Asia, out of poverty during the last 2 decades and that, unlike Eduardo Porter states, the whole Holocene was a long period of almost continuous economic and population growth. Further, believing that ‘through strengthening smallholder productivity and self-sufficiency’ undernourishment can be eliminated is dangerous. It is our modern agriculture with its continuous breeding progress, highly mechanized and capital-intensive, that provides a safe harbor for food security. Hopefully those unfortunate smallholder farmers will asap find their ways out of their self-sufficiency, as ‘western’ farmers did.

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