Logo degrowth

Blog

What if Jeff Bezos funded Degrowth.info?

By: Nathan Barlow

15.02.2020

Money 2082383 1920

There’s lots of talk recently about the wealth of Jeff Bezos. There are maps comparing his wealth to entire countries, a “You are Jeff Bezos” game where you can spend his money on different things - like paying their fair-share of taxes, and a graphic that puts his wealth in perspective. A recurring point is that most people simply cannot fathom the amount of money he has. The number is $150 billion. My favorite attempt to bring the number into human terms is Quartz’s article, “The average US worker would need 10 times the length of all human history to earn as much as Jeff Bezos”. This beautifully captures the point that someone does not simply earn or work for such an amount of money, but rather captures it. We, at degrowth.info, thought a similar calculation would be interesting. We wanted to know how many humble (but hopefully useful) projects like ours Jeff Bezos’ wealth could pay for. In case you haven’t heard already, degrowth.info is improving its site to better support the degrowth community and improve the usability of the platform – this will cost 7,500€.

So, how many awesome projects like degrowth.info could ol’ Bezos fund? 18,215,179 !

Over 18 million, another massive number. Our site is one of a few that provides numerous resources, tools, and acts as an outlet for the degrowth community. In the same way that our little project touches so many people, imagine how many people would be impacted if 18 million similar movements could be funded without having to grovel for donations. Unfortunately we cannot (yet) expropriate Jeff Bezos’ wealth, so until then we have to continue to ask you, the degrowth community (and its friend and families), to support our webportal via our crowdfunding page. So, for now, please be our Bezos :) And also, you can read more about this topic on our website, check out this nice article about degrowth and wealth/income caps. Plus see the great efforts across Europe, but especially in France, to push back against Amazon on Black Friday. You can get involved with your local Attac network to organize against Amazon and it’s socially as well ecologically unsustainable practices. One last time – please help this website continue its work for the degrowth community! In solidarity, The degrowth webportal team  

About the author

Nathan Barlow

Nathan is currently a PhD candidate at the WU in Vienna. His research focuses on degrowth and strategies for social ecological transformation. He is an active member of Degrowth Vienna, and recently edited a collected volume titled "Degrowth & Strategy: how to bring about social ecological transformation". He enjoys working with well-organized groups to realize collective goals.

More from this author

Share on the corporate technosphere

Support us

Blog

Finnish degrowth activism in the run-up to the two 2019 elections

By: the Finnish degrowth network

In the spring of 2019, the Finnish degrowth network (kohtuusliike) undertook an election campaign. The aim of the campaign was to break the silence around degrowth ideas in political discourse. We were also curious to see how much support calls to limit production and consumption could generate within the ‘system’. We wrote a short manifesto outlining policy principles which we c...

Blog

Degrowth and transformation: a reflection

By: Christos Zografos

This article is part of a series on degrowth.info discussing strategy in the degrowth movement. The introduction to the series and an ongoing list of contributions can be found here. In a previous piece in this blog series, Joe Herbert and colleagues pointed out the “how to move towards a degrowth society” gap in degrowth discourse. As I have also come across this “how to get there” question...

Blog

TTIP: Reasons why the rest of the World should be aware

Ttip 1

By Manuel Pérez-Rocha The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a comprehensive free trade and investment treaty currently being negotiated – in secret – between the European Union and the USA with massive implications for people and the environment on both sides of the Atlantic. The stakes couldn´t be higher but not only for European [...]