This link appeared in WDRL 126 on .
Imagining a World Without Growth - The New York Times
“It’s hard to imagine now, but humanity made do with little or no economic growth for thousands of years.”—that’s how this article in the New York Times starts. An essay about how the world could look like without economic growth, as a solution to our economic / free market problems and the environmental issues we face through globalization and growth-driven economy systems. If you put this into perspective with how human beings lived for milleniums, it’s interesting how this changed over the last century. This kept in mind, we also should not forget that we as population might not even want to change this system. Given the support Mr. Trump currently gets in the caucuses in the U.S., there is a reason why I think we need to take into account that people don’t want to give up on the model of super-growth any time soon. Interestingly, China—a nation that profits from our economic growth—is now experimenting with approaches of saving our planet by cutting down CO2 while still growing economically, resulting in a mixture of both worlds. I’m curious to see how the world’s population will work this out over the next decades.