New Papers

This set of papers consists of reduced versions of three highly topical texts.

Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth has earned an impressive reputation since it first appeared as a paper immediately after the financial crisis of 2008. At the time Jackson was writing, the dominant economic and political aim was to bring about a return to prosperity. That is still the overriding concern today. 

Prosperity depends on growth, measured and understood as a continual enlargement of the GDP (gross domestic product). But this is simply and plainly incompatible with the parallel and no less powerful requirement to bring about a drastic reduction in the consumption of fossil fuels, particularly coal, in order to reduce global warming. 

This is the frightening dilemma which Jackson sets out to resolve. He does so by redefining what is meant by ‘prosperity’ and what is meant by ‘growth’.  But this is no verbal fantasy. Jackson is an accomplished and responsible economist who does not dodge the difficult issues. He looks to the financial crisis as an opportunity to build a more just and equitable world in the face of the urgent need to tackle climate change.

Susan George in Shadow Sovereigns – How Global Corporations are Seizing Power turns the spotlight on the big corporations whose activities receive  less public scrutiny than they should.  But their current attempts to bring into law the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is rightly attracting strong public concern.  George devotes a chapter to TTIP and how it is being  brought to fruition – behind closed doors.  Other possibilities that George looks at have a world-wide application and are all bad news for the general well-being of citizens, though, of course, with immense potential for the continuing increase of profits for the companies themselves.  George has particularly hard words for the corporations’ track record on denial of climate change, a campaign costing many billions of dollars and implemented by an army of lobbyists.

Tim Jackson says that the aim of his book is ‘to find a credible vision of what it means for human society to flourish in the context of ecological limits’. He sees his work as a ‘framework’  which requires further work in detail before his vision will have credibility with the politicians who will rightly ask ‘will it work in practice?’.  The Post Growth Project is a collection of papers which is a step in that direction. Brian Heatley’s paper (Chapter 2 in the book; our Paper 29) is particularly relevant. It offers an economists’ model  of how key variables like labour, energy or materials will interact if certain assumptions – in this case, green-leaning ones – are fed into it. This is how economists systematically look at future possibilities and provide indications (‘answers’ is going too far) of ‘how it will work in practice’.