Logo degrowth

Blog

"The dollar is approaching its collapse, which will force a reconfiguration of our systems of money, finance and banking"

14.02.2014

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 beyond economic growth. Let's look back at the last few decades.
1. In what respect did society depend on growth? Society depends on the growth of living organisms, plants and animals. However, this kind of growth is taking place within a natural cycle of life and death so that nothing grows infinitely. 2.What obstacles impeded a turning away from economic growth? The major obstacle was the creation of money by banks as interest bearing debt. As soon as this obstacle was overcome through a monetary reform the need for perpetual economic growth became obsolete. 3. How did your actions contribute to a society beyond growth? Through my writing and teaching I played an active role in raising the awareness of the detrimental effects of the past monetary system and the benefits of the implementation of a new system based on full reserve banking. 4. From your point of view, what does well-being imply in a society that consciously chose low production and consumption levels? Freedom in the sense of being in control and in contact with the means of one’s own subsistence. 5. Which signs for a world beyond growth did you already notice in 2013? That the dollar is approaching its collapse, which will force a reconfiguration of our systems of money, finance and banking.

Share on the corporate technosphere


Our republication policy

Support us

Blog

D.E.growth: A Small Change in the Slogan with Large Benefits

Antal fig3 2

By: Miklós Antal

In a recent article with Stefan Drews, we discussed why degrowth might be an unfortunate name and slogan for the alternative economics movement. We listed several expressions that could possibly be better, but we were also upfront about their disadvantages. Here I propose a new term that might combine the advantages of the word degrowth with those of its more positive alternatives. For an asse...

Blog

Critical Self-Reflection as a Path to Anti-Capitalism: The Degrowth-Movement

By: Dennis Eversberg

Although growth-critique is currently in vogue and degrowth is mentioned favorably even by the pope in his most recent encyclical, there is as yet almost no scientific research on degrowth as a social movement. We can now present the first empirical findings on the character of this movement, based on a survey we did at the 2014 Degrowth-Conference in Leipzig, in which 814 conference participa...

Blog

Our Library is now online – have a look and explore!

Screenshot media library 1

After almost a year of tireless work we are proud to present our degrowth library. Here you can find various materials related to the transition to an economy independent from economic growth. The library already contains almost 700 entries, from introductory videos to newspaper articles and scientific publications in different languages. Diverse search options and an extensive list of themes m...