## Metadata - Author: [[Tim Jackson]] - Full Title: Post Growth - Category: #books ## Highlights - The broad thesis of this book is that good lives do not have to cost the earth. Material progress has changed our lives – in many ways for the better. But the burden of having can obscure the joy of belonging. The obsession with producing can distort the fulfilment of making. The pressure of consuming can undermine the simple lightness of being. Recovering prosperity is not so much about denial as about opportunity. ([Location 572](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=572)) - the economy is not a separate or even separable part of the natural world, but a ‘wholly owned subsidiary’ of the environment. ([Location 713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=713)) - We are trapped in an iron cage of consumerism. But the cage is of our own making. We are locked in the myth of growth. But the key was forged in our own minds. There are physical, material limits to our existence. But there is a creativity in our souls that can free us to live meaningfully and thrive together. ([Location 772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=772)) - statistics had become weaponized in the interests of elite minorities. ([Location 904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=904)) - As the economist Richard Goodwin argued, wages and profits inevitably engage in a predator–prey relationship. The owners of capital are in constant competition with the ‘owners’ of wage labour. ([Location 1154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=1154)) - People don’t like being told their lives are limited. That much is clear. And when the telling is done by those whose lives appear to be much less limited, anxiety rapidly turns to resentment. The challenge of governance in a postgrowth world is profound for this very reason. Governance seems to embody an asymmetry of power between the governing and the governed. Power asymmetries are a poor place from which to introduce moral imperatives that appear to limit people’s opportunities. Particularly in a culture that prizes individual freedom. ([Location 1362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=1362)) - The early economists were trying to ‘democratize’ moral right and wrong; and in the process to wrest power away from the church. They were stupendously successful in at least a part of that task. The extent to which economics itself not only usurped but eventually abused that power is a salutary lesson from history. Power tends to corrupt, as the British parliamentarian Lord Acton once remarked. ([Location 1760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=1760)) - There’s a reason why financial depreciation is hardwired into standard accounting practices at both corporate and national levels. It’s there to account for the ‘running down’ of capital equipment. Left to their own devices in a sun-drenched world, physical assets tend to fall apart. Using them tends to accelerate that process. Iron turns to rust. Concrete turns to dust. Even silicon chips degrade over time. Depreciation is the economic manifestation of the inevitable march of entropy. ([Location 2358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=2358)) - Nature as struggle; profit as a competition; consumption as insatiability: this is the unholy trinity of a Darwinian capitalism. Is this real life? Or just a mirage in the desert of economic dogma? At best it is a historical contingency, only as real as the social context that shaped our conceptions and informed our metaphors for nature. ([Location 2722](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=2722)) - The journey described in this book overturns assumptions that have lodged themselves at the heart of our culture for centuries. Our relationship to nature; our response to struggle; our aspirations for work; our sense of prudence; our commitments to the future: none of these things survive the analysis of the last few chapters in the form allocated to them by capitalism. All of them demand quite fundamental revision. ([Location 4109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=4109)) - Locke’s reasonably inclusive ‘life, health, liberty and possessions’ has been progressively reduced to the idea that the social contract is a kind of collective insurance policy for the protection of private property. Government becomes the ultimate enforcer of property rights. The result is a vision of the state as an executive club whose main function is to protect the interests of property-owners. And by definition, this convenient elision excludes the interests of the poor, the marginalized and the dispossessed. ([Location 4341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=4341)) - Quite clearly that lesson cannot be to confer on the state the task of persuading its citizens to relinquish their cravings. There is nothing so morally suspect as having those in power persuade those with no power to accept the paucity of their condition or to forgo their opportunities in life. But neither can it be that we condone the role of the state as the conveyor of false dreams and broken promises. Or, worse, its function as the principal apologist for a system that deliberately conjures up cravings only to leave them cruelly, perhaps even intentionally, unsatisfied. Purely so as to sustain a corrupt and unjust distribution of privilege. ([Location 4422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=4422)) - In the ancient Buddhist and Taoist traditions, it’s the way itself which brings us power. ‘If you have a path to go on, you have power,’ wrote Thich Nhat Hanh in the epigraph I used to frame this chapter. ‘You can generate this kind of power every moment of your daily life.’ ([Location 4448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=4448)) - Capitalism is a catalogue of system errors. It has overturned the principle of balance in human health – relentlessly insisting that more is better. It has denigrated care – continually depressing the value of the carer. It has over-stimulated consumer appetites – ruthlessly arousing dissatisfaction. It has accelerated material throughput – dangerously undermining the integrity of the natural world. ([Location 4584](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=4584)) - In the ruins of capitalism, as I hope to have shown in this book, lie the seeds for a fundamental renewal. More is not always a virtue. Struggle is not the only basis for existence. Competition is not the only response to struggle. Drudgery is not the only reward for labour. Productivity doesn’t exhaust the return to work. Investment is not a meaningless accumulation of financial wealth. Denial is not the only response to our own mortality. ([Location 4595](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=4595)) - The longer you stare in the lockdown mirror, the more its shadowy image resolves into a sharp and discomforting truth. Lockdown was not just an aberration. It was a distillation of the pervasive anxiety at the heart of our lives. We are locked down on planet earth. We are locked down in our material bodies. We are locked down in the confinements of culture and custom. We are locked down in the time allotted to us. We are creatures with an infinite capacity to imagine and to dream. And yet we are prisoners in our own lives. ([Location 4731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=4731)) - I’m not arguing that work is in vain. On the contrary, I aim to rescue work as a fundamental element in human prosperity. It has the potential to be the site for our most profound experience of the state of flow. And it contributes to our unending need for intimations of immortality. It is in the corruption of work that these rewards are lost. Not in work itself. ([Location 4900](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08YMSXK5H&location=4900))