Time to Stop Worshipping Economic Growth

In 2009, the Stockholm Resilience Center introduced the concept of planetary boundaries to help the public envision the nature of the challenges posed by limits to growth and physical/biological boundaries. They defined nine boundaries critical to human existence that, if crossed, could generate abrupt or irreversible environmental changes.

To remain within the nine planetary boundaries, nations must shed the fetish of economic growth and transition to a true-cost, steady state economy. Some of the critical transition steps include:

Replacing the GDP as a measure of well-being (lots of work has been done on coming up with an index of sustainable productivity).
Getting the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to require corporations to disclose their pollution externalities (the SEC is not hopeless, as can be seen by its recent decision to require CEOs to publish their salaries along with those of the average workers at their companies).
Going to a four-day work week to secure fuller employment (this has happened in some European countries; Canadian economist Peter Victor has papers on why this is a crucial transition step).
Dematerializing the economy (i.e., so that it’s cheaper to repair an appliance than it is to buy a new one).
Identifying the areas in which the economy should grow—and those where it should shrink or degrow (i.e., the usage of fossil fuels must shrink sharply, and in so doing, roof-top solar will grow to become a much larger part of the global economy).
Identifying the most heinous types of economic growth (ruthless and futureless) and showing how their costs exceed their benefits.
Stabilizing population to keep humanity from further transgression of the nine boundaries.

Source: Time to Stop Worshipping Economic Growth | Common Dreams | Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community

Uber and the lawlessness of ‘sharing economy’ corporates | Technology | The Guardian

Well said. No doubt that the corporations that are doing their best to stifle and own creative sharing need to be called out and dismantled before the movement is reduced to the size of their corporate tentacles. I only hope that innovation for collaboration continues but begins to be built through a local and cooperative model in the future. Why aren’t local activists building their own version of car sharing or homesharing with local controls (read transparency) built in?

It is much like the argument about organic food highlighted by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: that Big Organic and local organic have very little to do with each other. Labor, land use, relationship to the eater and decision making need to stay as directly managed by visible people and entities as possible to be able to be influenced by their neighbors. The same should be true for technology answers inside of the sharing economy, but just like the new alternative food economy, new regulations and oversight need to be designed so as not to squash local creativity and the collaborative spirit. Government as it stands is not capable of that; let’s re-imagine it and make it creative and humane to reflect the impulse of open source technology and sharing.

Uber and the lawlessness of 'sharing economy' corporates | Technology | The Guardian.