Library

By: Jon D. Erickson

In The Progress Illusion, Erickson charts the rise of the economic worldview and its infiltration into our daily lives as a theory of everything. Drawing on his own experience as a young economist inoculated in the 1980s era of “greed is good,” Erickson shows how pseudoscience came to dominate economic thought. He pokes holes in the conventional wisdom of neo-classical economics, illustrating how flawed theories about financial decision-making and maximizing efficiency ignore human psychology and morality. Most importantly, he demonstrates how that thinking shaped our politics and determined the course of American public policy. The result has been a system that perpetually concentrates wealth in the hands of a few, while depleting the natural resources on which economies are based.

By: Lukas Hardt, Peter G. Taylor, Timothy J. Foxon, John Barret

In order to avoid environmental catastrophe we need to move to a post-growth economy that can deliver rapid reductions in environmental impacts and improve well-being, independent of GDP growth. Such a move will entail considerable structural change in the economy, implying different goals and strategies for different economic sectors. So far there are no systematic approaches for identif...

By: Konstantin Stadler, Daniel Horen Greenford, Timothy Crownshaw, Corey Lesk, Damon Matthews

The tertiary (or 'service') sector is commonly identified as a relatively clean part of the economy. Accordingly, sustainable development policy routinely invokes 'tertiarization'—a shift from primary and secondary sectors to the tertiary sector—as a means of decoupling economic growth from environmental damages. However, this argument does not account for environmental impacts related to t...

By: Pinar Ertör-Akyazi

The expansion of industrial fishing via technological advancements and heavy subsidies in the Global North has been a significant factor leading to the current global fishery crisis. The growth of the industrial fleet led to an initial increase in global catches from the 1950s to the 1990s; yet, today, several marine fish stocks are harvested at unsustainable rates, and catches are stagnati...

By: Milena Arias Schreiber, Ida Wingren, Sebastian LInke

The EU Blue Growth agenda is being implemented at a time when European coastal fisheries and traditional fishing communities are struggling to survive or have already vanished from areas where they used to flourish. Driven by the strong conviction that current disadvantaged and vulnerable coastal fishers still have a central role to play in rural development, local level initiatives are cal...

By: Chris Benner, Manuel Pastor

In light of the Covid-19 crisis, the article by the authors of the book "From Resistance to Renewal: A 12-Step Program for Innovation and Inclusion in the California Economy", C. Banner and M. Pastor, debunks the granted assumptions of the neoclassical theory, such as self-interested human behavior, the necessity of inequality and growth, trying to pull the threads between between the new possi...

By: Alicia Said, Douglas MacMillan

The era of blue growth, underpinned by neoliberal policy discourses, has been pervasive in the promulgation of European marine governance and policies in the past decade, with little or no regard for the sustainability of small-scale fisheries. In this paper, we engage with theoretical and empirical observations to reflect on how the promise of sustainable economic growth arising from the c...

By: Teppo Eskelinen, Tuuli Hirvilammi, Juhana Venäläinen

The Nordic welfare states, despite their history of successful welfare generation, have recently experienced a penetration of capitalist market relations to ever new spheres of life. Also their failure to create ecologically sustainable welfare models has been undeniable. Simultaneously, community economies have emerged as a source of ideas and practices on what ‘the economy’ fundamentally c...

By: Louison Cahen-Fourot, Emanuele Campiglio, Elena Dawkins, Antoine Godin, Eric Kemp-Benedict

Herman Daly's view of the economy as an “inverted pyramid” sitting on top of essential raw material inputs is compelling, but not readily visible in monetary data, as the contribution of primary sectors to value added is typically low. This article argues that “forward linkages”, a classical development theory concept capturing the relevance of a sector for downstream activities, is an informat...

By: Max Koch, Emanuele Leonardi, Giorgos Velegrakis, Stefania Barca, Mabrouka Mbarek

Special session “Cities of Dignity” presents seven successful strategies of such urban transformation toward more democratic, sustainable, socially equitable and antipatriarchal relations from below in a series of case studies: the self-determination and organization of slum dwellers in Buhj in India; Black-led urban commons in Birmingham, Jackson, and Detroit in the U.S.; the San Roque popu...

By: Jan Groos

Wissenschaftlicher Podcast zu Degrowth und Akzelerationismus "Kann es so etwas geben wie nachhaltiges Wachstum? Oder sollten wir uns nicht vielmehr vom Prinzip des Wachstums an sich trennen und stattdessen andere Vorstellungen des guten Lebens entwickeln?"

By: Joseph E. Stiglitz

The public-health effects and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in developing and emerging economies are only just becoming apparent, but it is already clear that the toll will be devastating. If the international community wants to avoid a wave of defaults, it must start developing a rescue plan immediately.

By: John Childs

Scripted as a sustainable alternative to terrestrial mining, the licence for the world’s first commercial deep-sea mining (DSM) site was issued in Papua New Guinea in 2011 to extract copper and gold from a deposit situated 1600 m below the surface of the Bismarck Sea. Whilst DSM’s proponents locate it as emergent part of a blue economy narrative, its critics point to the ecological and econ...

By: Sam Butler-Sloss, Marc Beckmann, Lea Trogrlic, Maria João Pimenta

In this new report, the authors try to get a grip on what it takes for the economics profession to treat the climate crisis like the crisis it is. For that, we interviewed nine leading economists - all coming from different geographies and exposing different levels of optimism about the changes that are possible. They include Jayati Ghosh (Jawaharlal Nehru University), Yanis Varoufakis (Helleni...

By: Giorgos Kallis, Jeroen van den Bergh, Tilman Hartley

GDP growth is declining in industrial economies, and there is increasing evidence that growth may be environmentally unsustainable. If growth falls below returns to wealth then inequalities increase, as Thomas Piketty recently showed. This poses a challenge to managing slow and/or negative growth. Here, we examine policies that have been proposed to solve the problem of increasing income inequa...

By: Daniel Horen Greenford

This video is based on findings from our recent study: Greenford, D. H., Crownshaw, T., Lesk, C., Stadler, K., & Matthews, H. D. (2020). Shifting economic activity to services has limited potential to reduce global environmental impacts due to the household consumption of labour. Environmental Research Letters, 15(6), 064019.

By: Ragnheiður Bogadóttir

Blue Growth is promoted as an important strategy for future food security, and sustainable harvesting of marine resources. This paper aims to identify dominating ideologies and strategies of Blue Growth in the Faroe Islands, mainly regarding salmon farming and industrial capture fisheries, and to investigate how these ideologies materialize in the social metabolism of Faroese society. The a...

By: Donnie Maclurcan, Crystal Arnold

Donnie Maclurcan Ph.D. and Crystal Arnold from the Post Growth Institute (http://postgrowth.org) explore how the coronavirus is affecting both global and local economies, and what you can do to help to ensure we manage this moment wisely. Short presentations are followed by questions and answers.

By: Sarah Hafner, Aled Jones, Annela Anger-Kraavi, Irene Monasterolo

Well-known academic and non-academic institutions call for a new approach in economics able to capture features of modern economies including, but not limited to, complexity, non-equilibrium and uncertainty. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of ecological macroeconomic models that are suitable for the investigation of low-carbon energy transitions and assess them based on the feat...