The report ‘Prosperity without Growth’ by UK Sustainable Development Commission – the UK version of Comhar was published before the G20 summit. It is not bad, rather courageous in fact especially compared to our always politically timid and circumspect Comhar. I could not see Frank Convery putting his name to a report that says economic growth is not devoutly to be strived for.
The analysis is excellent. You will see indicators and ‘wellbeing ‘, topics under discussion by NESC and the Scoal Partners, covered very well.
It is disappointing that, although it correctly identifies the debt economy as contributing to the imperative for growth, it fails to see how that economy in turn is linked to the money creation system. That blank spot means they could not correctly identify money reform as an effective remedy.
Secondly, it mentions citizen income in the main text in relation to addressing inequality (a factor in well being) but fails to include it in recommendations. Instead, it cites the tired old mechanism of redistribution through taxation
Finally, it correctly identifies the need to include the depletion of natural and social capital in accounting systems but again sadly, fails to identify their propertisation and pricing as one option to accomplish it.
The author also does not seem to be familiar with Feasta research into no growth scenarios (funded by the EPA). Although in CSD defence, it has to be admitted that the Feasta study is not published in the mainstream as yet due to unaccounted for delays on behalf of the EPA. – Shades of IEN and the IEN NSDS submission.!
But all in all it is a very good report. I will review their next publication ‘A Sustainable New Deal’ in another post soon.
Prosperity without Growth is not a very good report. It represents a huge amount of work and a huge investment of public money with no noticeable attempt to rethink the basic issues. The report does not consider why politicians depend upon growth as an indicator of their success and how they cannot give this up even when everything falls down around their ears. It also ignores and rudely belittles the potential for a complete ‘game change’ from growth-causing-problems to growth-reversing-problems. The ‘opinion pieces’ commissioned by the SDC all follow anti-growth herd thinking, with no opinions sought to challenge this dusty dogma. The ‘consultations’ run by the SDC similarly were used only to reinforce previous thinking rather than to attempt any rethinking or creative effort. The SDC have wasted 9 years of opportunity for getting the government on-board any kind of breakthrough on the scale of what’s needed.