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€.
Recently, an article on degrowth appeared in Harvard Business Review (hereafter HBR). Rather than offering a critique of capitalism, the article proposes that degrowth may not be a threat to business after all, and in fact, there are burgeoning degrowth markets waiting to be tapped into by the risk averse. Although we applaud the authors in getting the word “degrowth” into the illustrious pages...
What does degrowth mean to you? By Marc Menningmann In this video, some of the scientists, activists and ordinary other participants who gathered at last year's Degrowth Conference in Leipzig share their personal understanding of degrowth. It shows how many different facets degrowth can have. Now we have added English subtitles to it which can be activated by clicking on the little green b...
By Ulrich Brand “Business as usual” is the motto of ruling politics nowadays. The dominant public discussions and policies are staged as necessities and unavoidable adaptions to an austerity policy which is apparently without alternatives. We are assured that rising poverty-rates, the redistribution of wealth from bottom to top and the cutback of social rights and democracy are only te...
