When politicians tell us to focus on growth we need to ask: ‘Why, and for whom?’ | Rowan Williams
andFor years, we started facing the imminent reality of the lock. We have faced an uncertain future, as our usual methods of adaptation, success, displacement and excessive work will be suspended due to an unprecedented existential threat. For several months, we lived by monitoring feelings: public and private sadness on the scale of loss; Anger and confusion about the imposed restrictions, withdrawn, re -imposition; Fatigue when compressing the maintenance of basic public services – as well as a kind of sporadic sporadic excitement of the possibilities that we did not guess. Clear sky, silent ways; time; Feeling of what matters and who matters to us, as individuals and the whole of society. The fragile buds of a kind of renewed spiritual imagination pushed a centimeter or so through the soil.
However, our ability to learn from crises is impressive (as it has been proven after the 2008 financial collapse). After a few years of clotting and attitudes, we went back to where we were, our fingers firmly in our ear about the nature of international, medical or environmental crises, which participate in a feverish struggle to prove that we will not be a “defeat” in our economic future. We went back with super shipping “Growth” language As the sufficient and primitive goal of national life-through a global turning point, he chanted a thirsty competition and the possibility of sterile commercial wars.
being “Anti -growth– Or in the new vocabulary during the past few months, it is running “Nimby” or “naysayer” – Top on the new catalog for fatal sins. But before we settle with our new government’s speech on growth as a priority that excels (use the word specifically) every social or environmental goal, it is necessary to ask what is meant by this language. What do we want to “grow”?
We constantly feed on a narration in which growth is something that does not need an explanation or justification. We intend in the gangs’ position (which Edward Ji Robinson is immortal) in Bogart/Bacall Classic KEY LARGOWhoever agrees to what he really wants, agrees that the answer is simply “more.”
But there are some best answers that can be provided – the answers that are more compatible with the actual citizens who say they hope for public policy. I was working with Sustainable prosperity understanding center (Cusp), led by Professor Tim Jackson at Sari University, where some of these possible answers were analyzed and “tested on the road” in a series of large -scale public talks. Emerging evidence is clear. Those who participate in these talks – and the very diverse social and economic groups they represent – are convinced that stable, successful and positive societies are not produced by seeking to achieve growth for their interest, but with clarity and dismay about the growth that is supposed to serve. People are looking for more stable work patterns. We want opportunities for safe work and loyal to ourselves and our children – the public services that can be relied upon and housing at reasonable prices. We want – a basic issue, for sure – flexibility, a solid and confident environment instead of a state of feverish anxiety. We want a space for breathing, literally and metaphorically: it is not a coincidence that “breathing” and “soul” are the same word in many languages.
The “increasing” economy against such a background should mean developing the ability to maintain all this. But the isolation of growth from the common good (not to mention environmental security), and you simply plan to collapse: individual psychological collapse in varying degrees of seriousness and mass explosion like Exhaustion of limited resourcesThe competition becomes more violent and the grave inequality of power is intensified. Just as Donald Trump’s second presidency already shows, one of the early losses of the reckless focus on local growth separate from the facts of the natural world and the human world is the rule of law, national and international – protocols and skills that we put in place to make power responsible.
Therefore, when we hear politicians – especially politicians on the left who are supposed to have some investment in the hopes and ideals that are just mentioned – attractive to the necessity of growth, we must ask with the determination of what the word means, and what we are supposed to grow in or the like. Until now, we have heard a few government from the government about how we have evolved towards a real flexible society – flexible in the sense that you are able to deal with the unprecedented challenge without losing our commitment to the well -being of each other and our safety.
The uncomfortable truth is that in our current global context, growth means the opposite of this shared responsibility. Fears about weakening profit. The distance of the workforce is enhancing alienation and insecurity. Who wants this specifically? Their profits are supposed to be at stake. Is it impossible to convert this into an argument for understandable growth as building a solid tax base, with incentives to make profit in creating job opportunities?
“Public opinion research shows that the largest part of the population is more progressive and ambitious than the political parties at the center.” This is one of the conclusions of the proper logic policy group (including Kate Picky and Richard Wilkenson, whose classic studies of equality and luxury, Level of spiritand It was first published in 2009, still admired and ignored by politics makers), at the end of its 2024 group of “Manifesto” articles, Act now. It suggests the work of the doorstep the same conclusion. there Increasing evidenceIn detail in articles in ACT Now, the policies capable of creating a flexible luxury without an endless vortex of simple economic expansion – such as comprehensive access to basic goods and services, reduce working hours, and the introduction of carbon and wealth – are not the options of Yoo Pedy.
What if we distinguish the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the closure with a speech or two from the government starting from here-from the urgent need to remove mystery of the fundamentalism of growth in the tweet and to express something we want to prosper? To encourage us to be clear about the place we want to be as a society, in terms of not only identified through possession and control, but also alerts hunger to belonging, dignity, stability and inheritance that deserves to move to a new generation? You may start to look as if we were not, after all, unable to learn. This may indicate that the government was not fully interested in building a new consensus on security, respect and hope.
