Radical Thinking in Government Report

This report has been published by the Sustainable Development Commission. It makes interesting reading:

http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/publications/downloads/prosperity_without_growth_summary.pdf


Here is an extract:

"This may seem an inopportune moment to question growth. It is not. On the contrary, this crisis offers the potential to engage in serious reflection. It is a unique opportunity to address financial and ecological sustainability together. A world in which things simply go on as usual is already inconceivable. But what about a world in which nine billion people all aspire to the level of affluence achieved in the OECD nations?

"Such an economy would need to be 15 times the size of this one by 2050 and 40 times bigger by the end of the century. What does such an economy look like?

"What does it run on? Does it really offer a credible vision for a shared and lasting prosperity?

"Fixing the economy is only part of the problem. Addressing the social logic of consumerism is also vital. This task is far from simple - mainly because of the way in which material goods are so deeply implicated in the fabric of our lives.

"This growth model was always unstable ecologically. It has now proven itself unstable economically. The age of irresponsibility is not about casual oversight or individual greed. If there was irresponsibility it was systematic, sanctioned widely and with one clear aim in mind: the continuation and protection of economic growth.

"The failure of this strategy is disastrous in all sorts of ways. Not least for the impacts that it is having across the world, in particular in poorer communities. But the idea that growth can deliver us from the crisis is also deeply problematic. Responses which aim to restore the status quo, even if they succeed in the short term, simply return us to a condition of financial and ecological unsustainability."

Happy reading!