“We will sacrifice because we know in future generations, my children, my grandchildren, are going to be in a better space,” said Tracie Mafile’o, a Tongan researcher based in Aotearoa, also known as New Zealand. I spoke with Mafile’o for this week’s piece about the need for a post-growth economics of well-being and the ways Pacific Islanders approach that work.
Anytime I’m out reporting, I always collect far more quotes and anecdotes than I can ever hope to include in the published piece, and sometimes beautiful sentiments like Mafile’o’s above never make it to print.
But it’s sentiments like that that motivate this newsletter. I’m not a parent and I might never be one, but I’ll always be committed to uplifting the stories and solutions that afford generations present and future the best possible opportunity for living in worlds and communities to thrive.
Another quote from the cutting room, this time from Sally Hett, who you’ll meet below, illustrates part of what makes the well-being economy an important conversation in that vein:
“I saw the wellbeing economy movement as bringing in a vision for what we do want, and allowing people to see themselves in it, and how they can contribute.”
Please enjoy. And if any thoughts or feelings arise while you read the story, make sure to leave a comment! I’d love to hear from you.
—Syris Valentine
The Myth of Endless Growth is Strangling the Earth—and All of Us! This is How We Break Free
Crisis confronts the economy. The billionaire class has become a black hole for wealth, to the increasing impoverishment of everyone else. The war in Iran has revealed—just as did the pandemic in 2020 and the crash of a container ship in the Suez Canal in 2021—the fragility of modern trade. Insurers themselves have even warned climate disasters could spell the collapse of capitalism.
Each of these challenges are the byproduct of an economy whose primary objectives are profit and growth. Nevermind what drives the growth or who it serves: So long as the GDP grows, we’re told, we’ll all be happier, healthier, and wealthier for it. Walk a few blocks through my city, Seattle, where teams of homeless huddle on street corners just blocks from the glittering terrarium Spheres making up part of the Amazon headquarters, and the myth that growth guarantees wellbeing shatters.
“The U.S. is a shocking example where growth doesn't solve anything,” said Aljoša Slameršak, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s Institute of Environmental Science and Technology who studies post-growth approaches to climate mitigation. “You could have endless growth, and just by the political decision of how you share the benefits of it, you would always have abject poverty.”
Confronting the growth imperative must be central in addressing the climate crisis because for the economy to grow so too must energy use and, by extension, emissions. The spread of renewable energy has helped the economy to grow faster than its emissions, but this decoupling has been insufficient to bend the global emissions curve. In the 34 years since the United Nations adopted its framework convention on climate change, worldwide emissions have only dipped for recessions and global crises.
To resolve this anti-progress on climate change and the declining wellbeing of people around the world, scholars like Slameršak are investigating how the economy can be reimagined to support the outcomes that matter most. An array of alternatives have been proposed: degrowth, doughnut economics, solidarity economics, wellbeing economics, and more. Each approach takes a slightly different tact for thinking about how to remove the blinders we’ve long worn in our pursuit of endless growth. The most significant question for each proposal is simply, what would this look like in practice?