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€.
By Christiane Kliemann With the Summer School in the lignite-mining area of the German Rhineland, for the first time the degrowth and climate justice movement are explicitly thought together. This is why the opening panel "No Climate Justice without Degrowth" had the interesting task to draw the very big picture and join the dots between climate change, degrowth, climate justice and the strugg...
Deschooling as a Path to Social-Ecological Transformation By Fabian Scheidler and Andrea Vetter "Deschooling is at the root of any movement for human liberation", wrote Ivan Illich, today almost forgotten but once a world-renowned critical thinker, in 1971. With books like "Deschooling Society" and "Energy and Equity” he inspired in the 1970s both the emerging environmental movement and the r...
This Article was written by Jennifer Hinton and Donnie Maclurcan of the Post Growth Institute for the postconference “Stream towards Degrowth”. An annual event, Free Money Day, was created in 2011 and is run by the Post Growth Institute. Each September 15th, people all over the world hand out their own money to complete strangers, two [...]
