Look beyond economic growth

Global economic growth has quadrupled since 1970, That’s for many of us good news except for the most important aspect of our lives: our planet, it isn’t that good news. But there is more to come. Mainstream projections indicate that economic growth will quadruple again by 2050. Houston, we have a fundamental problem! Another question we can ask is if economic growth makes us more happy? I do not believe so and I believe we must make the economy serve our planet and people instead of the other way around.

Kate Raworth, a renegade economist teaching at Oxford University, makes a powerful argument that while our politicians are hung up on keeping the growth curve rising, GDP does not tell us all we need to know about a country’s wealth and well-being. As economist Simon Kuznets wrote in 1934, “The wealth of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of its national income.” Raworth argues we need to look beyond economic growth alone for a true measure of prosperity and progress. She asks, “What if instead of starting with economic growth, we start with the fundamentals of what we care about. Everybody meets their human rights, living within the means of this planet. Then we ask, what kind of economic system would take us there?”

One of the biggest trends we are now seeing is that we slowly start to revalidate the things we thought were important to us. It is less about possession and more about sharing. We become more aware of our dependence of our planet and that our current way of living isn’t helping our planet. We become aware that our current lifestyles are out of stock.

We need to reset the way we look at our economies and how we measure growth.