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Beyond Growth: Forget GDP, we need sustainable wellbeing [1]
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Date: 2023-05
I’ve just been to a three-day conference on sustainable prosperity in Europe, attended by thousands of people.
In a stirring opening address, the speaker said governments must stop misusing GDP growth as their goal and move swiftly and urgently to sustainable wellbeing within planetary boundaries. They got a standing ovation.
The young leader of a climate and social justice movement concluded the event with a call to join the “movement of movements”, to create a new economy based on sustainable prosperity, justice and sufficiency. Everyone rose to their feet to show their solidarity.
This is not the start of a utopian novel set in an alternative universe.
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This was a real event: the Beyond Growth conference held at the European Parliament last week. Sponsored by the European Commission and the Club of Rome, it attracted more than 2,500 participants (with another 2,000 online).
I believe it marks a tipping point in thinking and governance in response to the convergence of crises facing humanity today.
We are in a race of tipping points. We are exceeding biophysical planetary boundaries and the climate is fast approaching irreversible tipping points that could give us a world that human civilisation has never experienced.
Social capital is eroding due to runaway inequality and political polarisation. People around the world recognise that life is not getting any better. Levels of anxiety, depression and burnout are skyrocketing across the Western world. Full-time employees unable to pay rent, people turning to precarious gig work to make ends meet, employers cutting staff and increasing workloads – all have become normal in this system, which extracts natural resources, energy and time.
The root cause of these crises is our societal addiction to an outdated economic paradigm based on the single-minded pursuit of GDP growth at all costs. This paradigm claims that all people want is more income and consumption without limit, that the market economy can grow forever, that massive inequality is justified to provide incentives to promote growth, and that any efforts to address climate and other environmental problems must not interfere with growth.
The EU conference, in contrast, emphasised what has long been recognised in parts of the academic and policy communities – that GDP was never designed to measure societal wellbeing, since it only measures marketed production and consumption, conflating positive and negative outcomes. It also says nothing about the distribution of income, unpaid work, or damage to the environment. Continuing to misuse GDP as a policy goal is driving our societies towards an unsustainable future that benefits an increasingly small fraction of the population while impoverishing the vast majority.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/beyond-growth-eu-economy-gdp-sustainable-wellbeing/
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