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€.
COVID-19 is both one and the same as any other ecological crisis (such as climate change) because its emergence is rooted in the same mode of production that has generated all other ecological crises and social inequalities of our times. In late 2019, a novel coronavirus (SARS CoV-2) emerged from a wet market in Wuhan in the province of Hubei in China. It has so far resulted in cases ov...
By Jamey Ellis Each of us has given without the expectation of receiving. Each of us knows the rewards of doing so. Sometimes the joy felt by those giving can even seem to outweigh that of the ones receiving. We’ve all taken part in a gift exchange, be it birthdays, holidays or anniversaries. But do we actually need to wait until a specific moment to find that joy of giving? Could such giving...
By Christiane Kliemann At the end of a conference like this, there might be as many impressions and insights to take home as there are participants, and so it is almost impossible to nail this rich variety down to a few one-dimensional bullet-points. What seemed to unite the findings of the various reporters, however, was the perception that the multitude and diversity of the represented appro...
