Post Growth. Tim Jackson

the extent of the profound economic and social shock that was about to launch itself on an unsuspecting world. Even as Trump delivered his frontier eulogy, a young Chinese doctor, Li Wenliang, was fighting for his life in Wuhan Central Hospital.¹⁰

Less than a month before, Li had alerted the world to a new, unfamiliar and surprisingly virulent strain of coronavirus that had broken out in an area of the city occupied by an animal market. He had been roundly reprimanded for his pains. Two weeks later he would be dead: a heroic statistic on the alarmingly exponential curve of an escalating pandemic. Li would be the first of many, unnecessary and utterly preventable deaths, as frontline workers lost their lives caring for others.¹¹

      Within weeks, the global economy would be plunged into an existential crisis. Denial would turn to confusion. Confusion would turn to expediency. Expediency would overturn everything. Normalcy would evaporate more or less overnight. Businesses, homes, communities, whole countries went into lockdown. Even the preoccupation with growth would diminish momentarily in the urgency to protect people’s lives. Alongside an uncomfortable reminder of what matters most in life, we were being given a history lesson in what economics looks like when growth disappears completely. And one thing became clear very rapidly: it looks nothing like anything the modern world has seen before.

      Eventually we will find a better terminology to describe our world. Language sometimes situates itself a little too close to the object of its scrutiny. Happiness may or may not be the currency of tomorrow’s pensions. By then our sights will have been recalibrated. Our vision will have been renewed. We will have the ability to articulate a future for our economy free from the shackles that bind our creativity to the terms of an outmoded dogma.

      But for today Post Growth is still a necessary thought-world. Even in the midst of change, we remain obsessed with growth. Post Growth is a way of thinking about what might happen when that obsession is over. It invites us to explore new frontiers for social progress. It points in the direction of an uncharted terrain, an unexplored territory in which plenty isn’t measured in dollars and fulfilment isn’t driven by the relentless accumulation of material wealth.

Life after Capitalism had been a tentative, speculative subtitle to this book. An invitation to the reader to imagine our prevailing economic paradigm as a temporary thing; a barely surviving remnant of old ways of being; not the immovable immutable truth it presumes itself to be. In the early months of its writing, capitalism was taken apart, piece by piece, in an increasingly astonishing effort to save lives and rescue normalcy. During the year 2020, the world witnessed the most extraordinary experiment in non-capitalism that we could possibly imagine. We now know that such a thing is not only possible. It’s essential under certain circumstances. The goal of this book is to articulate the opportunities that await us in this vaguely glimpsed hinterland.¹²

      Post Growth is an invitation to learn from history. An opportunity to free ourselves from the failed creed of the past. Just as the poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou once invited the American people to do in the poem with which this prologue began. Its job right now is to help us reflect honestly on the situation we find ourselves in. Its deeper task is to lift our eyes from the ground of a polluted economics and glimpse a new way of seeing what human progress might mean. Soon it will not be needed. Its power for today is to free our lips from the mantra of yesterday and allow us to articulate a different kind of tomorrow.

Notes

      1 1. ‘On the Pulse of Morning’ from ON THE PULSE OF MORNING by Maya Angelou, copyright © 1993 by Maya Angelou. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. This poem was recited by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of US President Bill Clinton, 20 January 1993 (see Angelou 1993). The live performance can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9nTt2F0Kdc.

      2 2. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1.

      3 3. Berger 1967, p. 22.

      4 4. History of WEF: https://www.weforum.org/about/history. ‘All shall be well’, from Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. Online at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52958/52958-h/52958-h.htm.

      5 5. Merkel at Davos: https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2020/jan/23/davos-2020-javid-merkel-soros-us-brexit-trump-trade-wef-business-live?page=with:block-5e299d708f0879d539efd9c5. See also: https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-en/news/speech-by-federal-chancellor-dr-angela-merkel-at-the-2020-annual-meeting-of-the-world-economic-forum-in-davos-on-23-january-2020-1716620.

      6 6. Mnuchin: https://time.com/5770318/steven-mnuchin-greta-thunberg-davos/.

      7 7. Trump v. Greta: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/21/our-house-is-still-on-fire-greta-thunberg-tells-davos.html.

      8 8. Less snow in the Alps: https://time.com/italy-alps-climate-change/.

      9 9. Sebastian Kurz in Davos: https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2020/sessions/a-conversation-with-sebastian-kurz-federal-chancellor-of-austria-db08d177be.

      10 10. Warmest January: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/13/weather/warmest-january-noaa-climate-trnd/index.html. Insider trading: https://fortune.com/2020/03/20/senators-burr-loeffler-sold-stock-coronavirus-threat-briefings-in-january/.

      11 11. Death of Li Wenliang: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/06/asia/li-wenliang-coronavirus-whistleblower-doctor-dies-intl/index.html.

      12 12. In picking the subtitle, I was influenced considerably by Wolfgang Streeck’s provocative title How Will Capitalism End? (Streeck 2016). But I should also pay homage here to Peter Frase’s excellent Four Futures, which used the same subtitle (Frase 2016).

1 The Myth of Growth

       ‘We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth.’

      Greta Thunberg, September 2019¹

       ‘Too much and for too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.’

      Robert F. Kennedy, March 1968²

      St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1968. It was an unseasonably mild Sunday evening. The night air held the promise of an early spring as Senator Robert F. Kennedy arrived in Kansas from New York. He had just that day declared his candidacy for the 1968 Presidential race. To run, he would have to stand against the incumbent President, Lyndon B. Johnson. Senator against President; Democrat against Democrat: it looked like a tough fight ahead and Kennedy was by no means convinced