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€.
The arrival of smartphones, self-driving cars and the Cloud are all symptomatic of a profound shift that is re-writing modern society from within: the Fourth Industrial Revolution. New technologies claim to provide answers to a host of problems, but is technology unbound always a force for good? In the first of a three-part series on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, EcoPolítica’s Paz Serra...
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...
In order to make our conference a truly democratic and inclusive event, we have started an exciting crowdfunding-campaign. It will run for 55 days and ends shortly before the conference. Our goal is to enable as many people as possible to participate in the conference and to contribute to a change towards a society beyond the imperative of economic growth. In order to achieve this, however, we...
