Name: 【TED】Kate Raworth: A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow (A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow | Kate Raworth)
Uploaded: 2018-06-05T00:01:31.000Z
Duration: 15 min 54 s
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Have you ever watched a baby learning to crawl?

Transition words & phrases

Because as any parent knows, it's gripping.

and then they pull themselves up to stand,

And that simple motion of forwards and upwards,

it's the most basic direction of progress we humans recognize.

We tell it in our story of evolution as well,

from our lolloping ancestors to Homo erectus, finally upright,

that economic progress will take this very same shape,

that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive,

and what we need, especially in the richest countries,

but I believe this is the shift we need to make

if we, humanity, are going to thrive here together this century.

So where did this obsession with growth come from?

it's just the total cost of goods and services

but it very soon became the overriding goal of policymaking,

so much so that even today, in the richest of countries,

governments think that the solution to their economic problems

is best told through the 1960 classic by W.W. Rostow.

I love it so much, I have a first-edition copy.

"The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto."

need to pass through five stages of growth:

first, traditional society, where a nation's output is limited

by its technology, its institutions and mindset;

where we get the beginnings of a banking industry,

and the belief that growth is necessary for something beyond itself,

like national dignity or a better life for the children;

then takeoff, where compound interest is built into the economy's institutions

fourth is the drive to maturity where you can have any industry you want,

and the fifth and final stage, the age of high-mass consumption

where people can buy all the consumer goods they want,

Well, you can hear the implicit airplane metaphor in this story,

Rostow left us flying into the sunset of mass consumerism,

What to do when the increase in real income itself loses its charm?"

He asked that question, but he never answered it, and here's why.

he was an advisor to the presidential candidate John F. Kennedy,

who was running for election on the promise of five-percent growth,

so Rostow's job was to keep that plane flying,

not to ask if, how, or when it could ever be allowed to land.

So here we are, flying into the sunset of mass consumerism

with economies that have come to expect, demand and depend upon

because we're financially, politically and socially addicted to it.

We're financially addicted to growth, because today's financial system

is designed to pursue the highest rate of monetary return,

putting publicly traded companies under constant pressure

to deliver growing sales, growing market share and growing profits,

and because banks create money as debt bearing interest,

because politicians want to raise tax revenue

and a growing GDP seems a sure way to do that.

And no politician wants to lose their place in the G-20 family photo.

But if their economy stops growing while the rest keep going,

well, they'll be booted out by the next emerging powerhouse.

because thanks to a century of consumer propaganda,

which fascinatingly was created by Edward Bernays,

who realized that his uncle's psychotherapy

could be turned into very lucrative retail therapy

if we could be convinced to believe that we transform ourselves

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【TED】Kate Raworth: A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow (A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow | Kate Raworth)

potential

extraordinary

incredibly

mindset