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€.
As Vincent Ligey, coordinator of the Budapest Conference organizing team mentioned in the closing plenary, it was an experiment to hold an international degrowth conference in a former socialist country where the soil for degrowth ideas is not particularly fertile. The more it came as a surprise that the conference had received a widespread coverage in Hungarian media. Szandra Koves, press out...
By Christiane Kliemann Right before the recent UN climate change summit and shortly after the Leipzig Degrowth-Conference, international media, governments and the United Nations enthusiastically welcomed a new report entitled “Better Growth, Better Climate” and trumpeted its central message around the globe: that economic growth and tackling climate change can go hand in hand. While the repo...
By Christopher Boyce I write this sitting in a service station on the M11 in the UK travelling back from Leipzig after what was an inspiring conference on degrowth. I’ve been hitching for only a couple of years now, but as soon as my talk on money and happiness was accepted for the conference in Leipzig, [...]
