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€.
Middle-Europe's prosperity as well as our high levels of mobility and consumption are based on three industrial revolutions whose technical progress has constantly been increasing labour productivity. The consequences are paradoxical: On one hand it is possible to produce ever more goods with the same amount of work. On the other hand these productivity increases are being used to make human la...
How to sell degrowth is one of the questions of our research and communication project Postwachstumspioniere at the Institute for Ecological Economy Research. In the paper “Successful non-growing companies“, Andrea Liesen, Christian Dietsche and myself are discussing motives and strategies that seem to apply to a variety of non-growing companies. We found that small and medium-sized [...]
Interview with Ole Bjerg Ole Bjerg is associate professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He writes for the ephemera Journal and is one of the organizers of the conference "Organizing for the post-growth economy". He gave us a short interview for the Stream towards Degrowth. Imagine we're living in the future, say in the year 2030, in a time of well-being. Humanity enjoys a good life ...