Hot take: we don’t actually need to grow the economy. We need to disambiguate growth and development. We don’t need to build data centers to make tech billionaires richer, we need more maternal health wards, community solar, and free school lunches. Those just don’t make rich people richer. We should instead orient our economy around meeting every human’s basic needs without overshooting environmental limits.
The economy-as-total-spending model definitely has its limitations, and solving those distributional issues is a way to increase public well-being without increasing total consumption
Hot take: we don’t actually need to grow the economy. We need to disambiguate growth and development. We don’t need to build data centers to make tech billionaires richer, we need more maternal health wards, community solar, and free school lunches. Those just don’t make rich people richer. We should instead orient our economy around meeting every human’s basic needs without overshooting environmental limits.
This. Growth for the sake of growth is literally the logic of cancer cells.
The economy-as-total-spending model definitely has its limitations, and solving those distributional issues is a way to increase public well-being without increasing total consumption
I am a fan of Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, I think she does a good job illustrating what that sort of economy might look like