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€.
Contribution for a dialogue between Degrowth, Human Development and Buen Vivir Over the last 50 years, the mounting evidence of a civilizational or multidimensional crisis has progressively dislocated the (still dominant) industrialist and developmentalist discourse, setting out the imperative of a socio-ecological transition to overcome this crisis. In particular since the turn of the cent...
By Nina Treu According to recent calculations by the Macroeconomic Policy Institute the Euro-crisis has cost Greece almost a quarter of its GDP. This is the biggest ever recorded contraction of an economy in times of peace. It would be cynical to consider this an example for degrowth (or postgrowth) in Europe. This is certainly not the case. On the contrary, the mission statement of the degrow...
By Lasse Thiele The first part of this article offered an introduction to post-development thought, which for decades has been trying to deconstruct Western models of prosperity and growth. This second part introduces some of the countless linkages between critiques of development and contemporary European critiques of growth. The discourse on sufficiency for example - the idea of recognizing...
