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Rishi Sunak has rolled back the UK’s net zero policies and ripped up decades of cross-party consensus on climate change, Tim Jackson writes. “Perhaps consensus is a commodity yet more fragile than consciousness. But its disappearance carries a tragic sense of political and social loss.”
In June this year, Iceland’s Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdóttir hosted the first Wellbeing Economy Forum in Reykjavík. Tim Jackson’s keynote there explored the relationship between the ‘wellbeing economy’ and the ‘growth economy’ teasing out where the logic of wellbeing differs from the logic of growth.
Growth is unsustainable. But the world beyond growth is frightening. We have built an economy that is dependent on growth. We must learn anew how society works, when the economy is not growing. And we need to confront the impossibility theorems presented to us by those who resist change.
Care is an anathema to capitalism. Its virtues are capitalism’s vices. Its employment-rich foundation for wellbeing is capitalism’s ‘productivity crisis’. Yet, without care we are nothing, our progress is nothing. Without care there is no economy.
A talk delivered by Tim Jackson for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance Ireland Hub, launching the Community of Practice for Artists and Creatives, March 2023.
Politicians are wrong to believe that we can only afford decent care in good economic times, Tim Jackson writes. Without health there is no wealth. Without care there is no health. Care is investment. It’s not a luxury consumer item.
The siren call of climate-burning expansion bewitches British politics. More of the same will emerge in the autumn statement, Tim Jackson writes. To all intents and purposes, we’re already living in a post-growth world. And it’s time to take that challenge seriously.
Gross domestic product remains the predominant measure of progress across the world, it’s time to change that, write Paul Allin, Diane Coyle and Tim Jackson. Amid the global threats posed by climate change, spiralling energy costs, insecure employment and widening inequality, the need to rethink our notion of progress is now an urgent priority.
From the slopes of Mount Kenya to the University of Kansas; from the horror of Nazi Germany to the atrocities of the Vietnam War; from ancient Chinese wisdom to the civil disobedience of a Swedish schoolgirl, in his recent book Post Growth, Tim Jackson wanted to draw together a coherent narrative for our time—a different story from the one we have consigned ourselves to.
Whatever the UK government says it’s doing—and not doing—one thing is clear, Tim Jackson writes, the “treasured free-market economy” is never going to compensate for our failure to insulate people’s homes against the cold, and the future against the ravages of climate change.
CUSP Director Tim Jackson reflects on the life of and work of the late Thich Nhat Hanh and its relevance for contemporary debates about the meaning of prosperity and power.
Professor Mihaly ‘Mike’ Csikszentmihalyi was one of the founders of the positive psychology movement and father of the concept of ‘flow’. His death last month at the age of 87 marks the passing of a rare and visionary scientist. In this blog, Amy Isham and Tim Jackson reflect upon his life and legacy.
The economic system to which we are in thrall throws us out of balance, Tim Jackson and Julian Sheather write in this blog. By failing to meet our most essential needs it is doomed to immiserate and, ultimately, sicken us. We urgently need to regain a richer, more satisfying understanding of ourselves, and our place in the world.
Now is not the time to abandon spaceship Earth, Tim Jackson writes in his essay for The Conversation UK Insights Series. Let’s dream of some “final frontier” by all means. But let’s focus our minds too on some quintessentially earthly priorities.
Our pursuit of prosperity is shaped by material circumstances and situated within social and physical environments. As part of our work programme, we have been speaking to people in different places and neighbourhoods to explore how visions of the ‘good life’ and ‘good work’ emerge in the context of their everyday lives. In this blog, Sue Venn, Kate Burningham and Tim Jackson are summarising the early findings.
Following the money that flows through the social care system, a new CUSP paper demonstrates how private equity firms have stacked some care home chains with shocking levels of debt and stripped them of their assets, likely creating in the process a level of economic precarity that threatens the stability of the whole sector. This blog is summarising the main findings.
Tim Jackson summarises the recent TRansit project which has pioneered a novel agent-based, stock-flow consistent macro-economic model. Tim discusses the findings from the project and sets them in the context of the Bank of England’s work on ‘transition risk’.
A recent study of long-term fluctuations in economic growth published in Nature Scientific Reports suggests both danger and opportunity in the emerging debate about post Covid-19 economic recovery. In this blog, Craig D. Rye and Tim Jackson outline the findings.
This blog is an edited version of a keynote CUSP director Tim Jackson gave at the 2013 Sea of Faith Annual Conference in Leicester. In outlining the philosophical foundation of a different approach to economics, this essay speaks as much to the financial crisis from 2008, as it does to the current health and economic predicament from COVID-19.
The challenges facing the world and the UK today are unprecedented. A global health emergency, a global climate crisis; and a catastrophic loss of biodiversity, are undermining the basis for future prosperity in the UK and across the world. This article, written for The New York Times in 2012, speaks to the theme of restoring the value of decent work to its rightful place at the heart of society.
This article explores inequality in the UK. It examines the evidence for rising inequality over the last fifty years, estimates the economic welfare lost to society from an unequal distribution of incomes and addresses the critical question of managing inequality in the context of declining growth rates.
It is clear that the larger the economy becomes, the more difficult it is to decouple that growth from its material impacts… This isn’t to suggest that decoupling itself is either unnecessary or impossible. On the contrary, decoupling well-being from material throughput is vital if societies are to deliver a more sustainable prosperity—for people and for the planet. (This article is posted on the Science website).
Robert Shiller’s new book probes how social behaviour trumps statistics in determining the fate of economies—Tim Jackson weighs it up. (This article is posted on the Nature website).
Environmental engagement is on television screens, in the streets and at your local book group; environmental communicators are everywhere and everyone.—A recent edition of the Environmental Scientist focuses on the new radicalism in environmental engagement. This blog was written for the Editorial.
At current rates of reduction, the UK fair carbon budget will be spent in just four years’ time.”Every year that progress is delayed, the challenge only gets bigger”, he argues, we don’t only need a credible strategy on zero carbon targets, but also emission pathways, with a defined level of negative emission technologies.
Climate emergency demands a wholescale shift away from fossil fuels. Tim Jackson and Andrew Jackson reflect here on the emerging concept of ‘transition risk’, a key element in the Bank of England’s response to climate change, and outline the challenges inherent in understanding and modelling it.
‘System change, not climate change’ is the mantra for a new politically-charged ecological activism. In the wake of two key economic conferences, CUSP director Tim Jackson reflects on what this means for the financial and political stability of Europe.
After the most profound shake-up in decades, European politics stands at a pivotal point in its long history. With nationalist parties drawing support from communities who have been left behind and green parties benefiting from a huge upsurge of concern around climate breakdown and biodiversity loss, there is a unique opportunity, argues Tim Jackson, to build a new vision for Europe that is green, prosperous and fair.
“The circular economy is a very good idea, but it is a better idea when it is placed in the context of delivering prosperity, rather than aimed at increasing growth.” A conversation between Emanuele Di Francesco and Tim Jackson, discussing post-growth concepts of a circular economy, the limits of labour productivity and the dynamics of inequality.
The 2018 Post-Growth conference at the European Parliament marked a milestone in the history of the post-growth debate. In this interview, Riccardo Mastini discusses the possibilities and challenges for imagining a world beyond growth with two key post-growth thinkers—Tim Jackson and Giorgos Kallis.
Our systematic failure to address existential anxiety robs society of meaning and blinds us to the suffering of others; to persistent poverty; to the extinction of species; to the health of global ecosystems. With this think piece, Tim Jackson adds to an eclectic set of essays, published in honour of Wolfgang Sachs.
The Entropy Law still matters. CUSP director Tim Jackson responds to Michael Liebreich’s essay on the ‘The secret of eternal growth’.
Tim Jackson introduces his CUSP working paper ‘The Post-Growth Challenge’, in which he discusses the state of advanced economies ten years after the crisis. Our attempts to prop up an ailing capitalism have increased inequality, hindered technological innovation and undermined stability, he argues.
Ten years after the financial crisis, inequality in advanced economies is still rising. Tim Jackson presents the findings of a new CUSP working paper to explore potential solutions.
Fifty years on from Robert Kennedy’s historic speech on the limitations of the GDP at the University of Kansas in March 1968, Tim Jackson reflects on the failings of measurement and vision which still haunt both economic policy and our everyday life.
What can prosperity possibly mean in a world of environmental and social limits? This question lies at the heart of CUSP’s five year research programme on sustainable prosperity. We wanted to know how ordinary people in different contexts might answer this question, so we set out to ask them. What we found was fascinating.