Welcome to Degrowth Max Rashbrooke
Max Rashbrooke is an important public intellectual in New Zealand, regularly commenting on issues of inequality, wealth, poverty, taxation and democracy. With his 6 May 2023 article on degrowth in Stuff, he has dipped his toe into the waters of degrowth and found them not quite inviting enough to swim…
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A 4-Step Plan for a Post Growth-Ready New Zealand
There is a plausible future in which economic growth is too hard – or undesirable – and is dropped as a economic goal. Instead, distributive and regenerative factors would be emphasised in business and policymaking to enhance wellbeing and nature as new economic priorities. Economics would become socio-ecological. You might…
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IPCC Gives Mainstream Economics A Free Pass
The IPCC report, issued on 20 March 2023, is an invaluable synthesis of climate science; however, there is a fundamental issue with IPCC reports in general. They communicate climate science using language that is also used by mainstream economists, such as modelling, equilibrium, financial flows, market barriers, leverage, costs and…
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Cool the Extraction Jets
If only our politicians and media were as fixated with wellbeing and environmental growth on a quarterly basis as they are with financial growth. If only we had an environment governor who could intervene to “cool the jets” on materials extraction, waste and pollution in the way our Reserve Bank…
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How Is Degrowth Different To ‘Sustainability’?
Ever wondered how degrowth differs from conventional sustainability? The goal of degrowth is universal wellbeing, to be delivered through global and local provisioning systems that are distributive and regenerative. This demands a reprioritisation of social values and behaviours toward sufficiency and sharing; it is driving development of innovative post-growth business…
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Degrowth-Oriented Value Creation
An important new paper on degrowth-oriented business value creation has just been published. We all understand how businesses create value in the growth paradigm – business models organise activities to enable strategies of efficiency, expansion and innovation to create products and services that increase material and financial wealth for stakeholders.…
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New Zealand’s Growth Nostalgia
New Zealanders’ enduring relationship with GDP growth as an economic goal is nostalgic, traceable to the 1960s and a fall in the price of wool. Growth goals have reflected who we are as a nation. We are strivers through thick and thin. Looking forward, however, GDP growth would be misplaced…
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If the Market and the State Cannot Provide Affordable, Sustainable Housing in Australia, Perhaps ‘Housing for Degrowth’ Can.
Having access to adequate housing is a human need and human right. Everyone deserves to have a home. In Australia, residential buildings are provided either by the market as private housing or by the state as social housing. Yet, modest income households are falling into a gap between them. Furthermore,…
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Dépense: What Is It?
Finding an effective solution to the environmental and social crises has been stymied by a lack of politically desirable, alternative social models. This has led to decades of incrementalism that has only exacerbated the challenges. Over the last five years or so, degrowth has appeared at the periphery of the…
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Women’s Work: What’s It Worth?
Morocco footballers celebrated their World Cup successes first with their mums, recognising the daily support their mothers give them. This is analogous to the whole economy, momentarily giving visibility to the fact that women everywhere bear the burden of care work. The economy doesn’t only consist of goods and services…
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Degrowth and Labour Solidarity
Political geography professor Matthew Huber argues that degrowth is middle class environmentalism and cannot hope to connect with the working class. Degrowth intellectual Jason Hickel responds, echoing environmentalist Chico Mendes, who said that “ecology without class struggle is just gardening”. He writes that “degrowth is justice” and that recognising this…
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Sustainable Development is Out, Degrowth Is In
Sustainable development, facilitated over the last 50 years by the UN, underpins mainstream business sustainability – the art of balancing decision making over three co-equal pillars: economic growth, environmental protection and social progress. But any business equation that includes economic growth inherently endangers environments and societies because growth (ie development)…
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Heliocene 