{"id":550,"date":"2011-12-09T12:06:33","date_gmt":"2011-12-09T12:06:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terrywassall.org\/?p=550"},"modified":"2011-12-09T12:06:33","modified_gmt":"2011-12-09T12:06:33","slug":"prosperity-without-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/2011\/12\/09\/prosperity-without-growth\/","title":{"rendered":"Prosperity without growth"},"content":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/www.ted.com\/talks\/tim_jackson_s_economic_reality_check.html<\/a>I’m currently reading Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth:\u00a0Economics for a Finite Planet<\/a>, now a book published by Earthscan but started as a report\u00a0for the now defunct Sustainable Development\u00a0Commission where the original report can still be downloaded,\u00a0Prosperity without Growth? – The transition to a sustainable economy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I haven’t finished the book yet but it is very interesting. It grapples with the logic of capitalism,\u00a0consumerism\u00a0and the deeply flawed economics that assumes growth and measures it in GDP. \u00a0The two things I think are not covered in the book that I think are central to the discussion of the social logic of consumption are the role of marketing and advertising and the extent that consumerism creates dependencies through bot deskilling and the destructions of aspects of social life that were to some extent at least\u00a0relatively\u00a0independent of cash relations and the consumption of consumer goods. These are to some extent the ‘cracks’ in capitalism and the rule of money that John Holloway writes about some of which are the revitalising of older forms of sociality and doing things together for one self and others. Cooking meals rather than\u00a0consuming\u00a0ready meals\u00a0would\u00a0be but one \u00a0small example. We have a lifestyle of rushing and time pressures that, combined with the loss of the knowledge, habits and routines of cooking and communal \u00a0eating, creates a market for consumer goods that are not quite the positional ans status consumption Jackson speaks of. The main point is, I think, that consumerism does not only depend on status, identity and\u00a0telling\u00a0each other social narratives based on the symbolic language of possessions and aspects of lifestyle and the\u00a0forms\u00a0of inclusion and exclusion these imply. Consumerism also creates forms of dependency based upon the destruction of\u00a0relatively\u00a0autonomous aspect of life that existed outside the cash and commodity nexus and by a range of forms of de-skilling. Jackson seems to have\u00a0bought\u00a0into the idea that human beings are essentially constituted to be novelty seekers. I am more inclined to think that this is a\u00a0potential\u00a0and propensity that is an emergent property of the development of consciousness, symbolic language and detachment (in Norbert Elias’s conception of the term) and is therefore something that can be developed and ‘naturalised’ by social and ideological processes rather than seen as\u00a0constitutive\u00a0of human nature. If this is the case humanity’s endless seeking for novelty may not be another nail in the coffin of imagining and working towards a better sort of society and way of life.<\/p>\n

Tim Jackson also based his Ted Talk on the book
\n