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€.
Call for participation On 7 and 8 July 2017, the Leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) will meet in Hamburg. This self-styled club of 19 of the most powerful economies in the world and the EU claims to fight global crises. However, reality reveals a different picture: The G20 defends a system that exacerbates social disparities instead of leading policies against deprivation and hunger and...
By Christiane Kliemann Alberto Acosta, economist and father of the Ecuadorian constitution, made very clear in his opening speech, that it is not enough to simply do away with the growth paradigm if we miss to build up a different world altogether. On the example of a news article on the possibility of an economic recession in Germany and the devastating impacts this would have on other Europ...
In order to facilitate the transition towards a postgrowth or even degrowth economy, further research on alternative ecoomic and social models is utterly important, as we have no working models of non-growing economies at the moment. However, despite the urgency of this matter, progress in this direction is slow. Large amounts of research-funding are directed towards "green growth" and other...
