{"id":1610,"date":"2012-04-17T08:51:54","date_gmt":"2012-04-17T08:51:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/astraea.net\/blog\/?p=1610"},"modified":"2012-04-17T08:51:54","modified_gmt":"2012-04-17T08:51:54","slug":"growth-is-not-the-answer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/growth-is-not-the-answer\/","title":{"rendered":"Growth is not the answer &#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The new World Bank boss has initiated his tenure with a hearty rendition of the fat cats&#8217; mantra:<a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/business-17737660\"> &#8220;growth is good&#8221;<\/a>.\u00a0 Or is that &#8220;greed is good&#8221;?<\/p>\n<p>The trouble is that growth is the cause of all the problems.\u00a0 It starts with the politicians rule: &#8220;more people voting for me is good&#8221;, and the commercial rule: &#8220;quarterly growth is required for success&#8221;.\u00a0 The growth mantra means that those in power want more people on the planet and all their metrics are based in abstract one-dimensional money terms.\u00a0 They entirely ignore quality of life &#8211; which is what people care about &#8211; and ignore the fundamental drivers of nature like clean air and water, food, species diversity, and weather.\u00a0 They do not look for sustainable solutions.\u00a0 Growth is not sustainable &#8211; even you stop growing in your teens, unless you lard up.<\/p>\n<p>The World Bank must expand its repertoire so that &#8220;growth&#8221; is dismissed as good in itself, because it is not.\u00a0 Fairness and honesty are good.\u00a0 Educating people is good.\u00a0 Money is just a tool for barter and we need to wake up and realise that we are trading life for an illusion of &#8220;growth&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>The planet is a closed system which does not grow.\u00a0 It changes.\u00a0 It can become more interesting and sophisticated or reset itself with natural disasters and extinctions, as it has before.\u00a0 It is greatly worrying that the President of the World Bank is still admiring <a href=\"http:\/\/astraea.net\/blog\/?p=1555\">the King&#8217;s New Clothes<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>BBC: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/business-17737660\">New World Bank chief to focus on &#8216;market-based&#8217; growth <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The new World Bank boss has initiated his tenure with a hearty rendition of the fat cats&#8217; mantra: &#8220;growth is good&#8221;.\u00a0 Or is that &#8220;greed is good&#8221;? The trouble is that growth is the cause of all the problems.\u00a0 It starts with the politicians rule: &#8220;more people voting for me is good&#8221;, and the commercial &hellip;<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/growth-is-not-the-answer\/\" class=\"more-link pen_button pen_element_default pen_icon_arrow_double\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Growth is not the answer &#8230;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,6,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-worldofmoney","category-environment","category-living"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4hwcd-pY","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1610"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1611,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1610\/revisions\/1611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.astraea.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}