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€.
Among the proposals of how to address the climate crisis, calls for a Green New Deal (GND) have recently gained a lot of traction. Riccardo Mastini's article laid out much of the content of current GND proposals as well as criticism from the degrowth perspective. While critical scrutiny is absolutely crucial to ensure that ideas for change truly live up to their goals it is also importa...
By Christiane Kliemann Right before the recent UN climate change summit and shortly after the Leipzig Degrowth-Conference, international media, governments and the United Nations enthusiastically welcomed a new report entitled “Better Growth, Better Climate” and trumpeted its central message around the globe: that economic growth and tackling climate change can go hand in hand. While the repo...
On 14 March the last submission period closed for contributions to the conference. After a first quick review it was already clear that all expectations were far exceeded: more than 350 scientific papers were received from a broad range of disciplines such as economics, psychology, geography and urban planning. Further 260 proposals for practice-based activities were submitted by various civil-...
