Quote:
Originally Posted by sendler
If you listen to financial news on the radio, you'll hear a daily report on economic growth, with dire predictions if it has slowed, and cheerful tones if growth appears to be rising.
Yet we know that endless economic growth is incompatible with life on a finite planet.
Jason Hickel's article on the promise and potential of degrowth is academic, and not easy reading, but important.
Here's a snippet:
"The core feature of degrowth economics is that it requires a progressive distribution of existing income. This inverts the usual political logic of growth. In their pursuit of improvements in human welfare, economists and policymakers often regard growth as a substitute for equality: it is politically easier to grow total income and expect that enough will trickle down to improve the lives of ordinary people than it is to distribute existing income more fairly, as this requires an attack on the interests of the dominant class. But if growth is a substitute for equality, then by the same logic equality can be a substitute for growth (Dietzand O’Neill, 2013)."
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https://mronline.org/2019/08/30/degr...SQF1ovFN7-8-kE
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Something new to me upon reading Zombie Economics,was that,as of March,2010, all economists were outsourcing boom and bust information from the Business Cycle Dating Committee,National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
The data comes out a minimum of a year AFTER THE FACT. If the world is in a recession,the typical economist won't know about it until the reports are issued.
In the Global Economic Crisis of December 2008,the economists didn't know that the meltdown had started in December of 2007.
I'd be wary of economic 'news' reporting.