Neoliberalism and its Discontents: Is Ecological Economics the Answer?

The traditional economic concepts that the Global North has been using since WWII assume that there is an infinite planet and that pollution has no economic consequences - assumptions that are wildly wrong. In contrast, ecological economics is a model designed to respect the fact that our economy exists on a finite planet and puts more emphasis on the quality of economic activity than its quantity. But a shift in mindset of this magnitude to embrace this new way of thinking requires guidance and a proper roadmap if it’s to be successfully integrated into urban policies. This episode sees Cities 1.5 looking to translate the theoretical into the practical by speaking to one of the world’s leading ecological economists, Tim Jackson, for a stand alone interview to help demonstrate what cities can do to deliver shared prosperity - not just an unsustainable goal of infinite growth.

Featured guests:
Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity - a multi-disciplinary, international research consortium that aims to explore the economic, social, and political dimensions of sustainable prosperity. He is an award-winning economist and published author of several books, including his latest: Post Growth: Life After Capitalism.

Links
Post Growth: Life After Capitalism by Tim Jackson (Polity Press, 2021)
“Prosperity Beyond Growth: An Emerging Agenda for European Cities,” by Ben Rogers et al., Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy
Prosperity without growth? The transition to a sustainable economy report by Professor Tim Jackson,Economics Commissioner, Sustainable Development Commission
Prosperity without Growth (book) by Tim Jackson
Transition Network website
Beyond GDP: A proposed new economic framework: Vancouver - C40 Knowledge Hub

Image credit: © Rosanna Wan C40

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Writing and executive production by Peggy Whitfield.

Narrative and communications support by Chiara Morfeo.

Produced by Jess Schmidt: https://jessdoespodcasting.com/

Edited by Morgane Chambrin: https://www.morganechambrin.com/

Music by Lorna Gilfedder: https://origamipodcastservices.com/

Transcript

[Cities 1.5 main theme music]  

David  00:03

I'm David Miller and you're listening to Cities 1.5, a podcast by University of Toronto Press, produced in association with The Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy and C40 Cities, a global network of nearly 100 of the world's megacities, committed to accelerating climate action. C40's mission is to halve the emissions of its member cities within a decade, while improving equity, building resilience, and creating the conditions for everyone, everywhere to thrive. Join me as I connect with leading mayors, experts, policymakers, and youth leaders who are helping ensure a 1.5 degree world by leading city-based climate action. 

Each week, we delve into the necessary transformative solutions to today's most pressing climate challenges. The fight for an equitable and resilient world is closer than you think. [Cities 1.5 main theme music fades out] 

[driving music] One of our goals here at Cities 1.5, and of the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy, is to help us all to understand the role our economic ideas, and the institutions those theories have helped to create, have in causing climate breakdown. Traditional so-called "neoliberal" economics, for example, assumes that there is an infinite planet, and that pollution has no economic consequences—assumptions that are wildly wrong—yet most of our economic policies are based on economic models that include those assumptions.

[upbeat, energetic music] Allied to this is the idea that we should measure nearly everything by its impact on economic growth, an outdated idea that, itself, has serious consequences. We discussed some of these ideas with economist, Katherine Trebeck, and youth leader, Saoirse Exton, in season one, but we wanted to revisit the complex topic of post-growth and ecological economics in this season because of its importance.

This episode sees Cities 1.5 trying to translate the theoretical into the practical by speaking to one of the world's leading ecological economists, Tim Jackson, for a standalone interview. This will help to demonstrate what cities can do to deliver shared prosperity – not just an unsustainable goal of infinite, unsustainable growth.

Ecological economics is a model which, first of all, respects the fact that our economy exists on a finite planet. It puts more emphasis on the quality of economic activity than its quantity, a significant departure from what's been favoured by most of the western world since 1944. A shift this large needs guidance and a proper road map if it's to be successfully integrated into urban policies, so what do cities need, to adopt to an ecological economic model, a model that prioritizes the idea that without health, there is no wealth for anyone on this planet? [music continues then fades out]

[light, rhythmic music] In this episode, we'll break down the theory of ecological economics into practical steps that cities can take now, to make for a greener tomorrow and enable a reality where there is, in fact, a tomorrow.

[rhythmic electronic music] This is a huge topic that we think deserves a deep dive, so I've enlisted the help of one of the most preeminent ecological economists, Tim Jackson. A professor and writer, Tim is leading the way forward for urban policymakers in his home country of the United Kingdom, and also internationally through his research and advisory roles. Tim spends a lot of time thinking about not just the study of ecological economics, but how we can put some of these theories into actual use in cities. Tim's background, as both an academic and a policy advisor for government, brings additional depth to his insights.

So, let's get going. [light, rhythmic music] Tim Jackson is a Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey, and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, a multidisciplinary international research consortium which aims to explore the economic, social, and political dimensions of sustainable prosperity. He is an award-winning economist and published author of several books, including his latest, Post Growth: Life After Capitalism. Tim joined me remotely for a conversation on June 20th, 2023. [music fades out]

Tim, welcome to Cities 1.5.

Tim Jackson 05:20 

Thank you, David. It's great to be here.

David 05:23 

Well, we really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. It's our view that the work you do in ecological economics is not just important to the planet, but it's also important to city governments and the regions they lead. So, I want to first ask you just a bit of background for our listeners who may not be as familiar with your work. You've written a number of books, you've briefed governments, a couple of your works, Prosperity Without Growth and Post Growth: Life After Capitalism, I think are seminal works in ecological economics. Can you speak, just generally, so our listeners can understand the ideas that you're talking about in Prosperity Without Growth, and really what ecological economics tells us about the state of society and the planet?

Tim Jackson 06:16 

Prosperity Without Growth started its life as a report to the UK Government, and it was a report that I authored when I was Economics Commissioner on the Sustainable Development Commission, and that was set up, in fact, back in the 1990s by the Blair government to respond to the international agenda around sustainability. And one of the core questions in sustainability is the relationship between the economy and the planet, and, you know, economists —conventional economists—see the economy as something that grows indefinitely, that continues to get bigger and bigger, and they think about prosperity in terms of that economic growth. And the challenge, of course, is that the planet doesn't go on growing, that the planet stays resolutely the same size. It's a finite planet, the resources are finite, and as the economy grows and grows, it puts increasing pressure on the planet.

So, essentially, that's the insight that ecological economics brings to economics. It sort of says, "Yeah, it's great to think about economic expansion, economic development. Of course, we want some form of progress, but we have to recognize that scale matters." As the economy gets bigger and bigger—particularly, if it gets bigger and bigger in material terms—then that's going to have more and more impact on the planet, and that is going to undermine the ability of future generations to enjoy the quality of life that we hope that we can enjoy. Quite often I talk about it as the "dilemma of growth". Growth as we know it—economic growth as we know it—is really unsustainable. It's putting too much pressure on the planet. 

But the opposite—and there are, you know, some words for it like "de-growth"—tends to scare the hell out of economists, because they just don't know how to manage it, don't know how to deal with it. And it looks, at first glance, like something which is deeply unstable, and that dilemma, I think, haunts the debate about sustainability. It haunts our current society in some ways, because the economic growth that we used to have back in the 1950s and '60s, just isn't there anymore, and we don't quite know how to deal with it. It haunts our politicians because they find themselves addicted to growth, dependence on economic growth, even for their political success.

That sort of slim window of hope, I suppose, that Prosperity Without Growth was offering was to ask the question, "Is prosperity really the same thing as economic expansion? Might there be different ways of thinking about what it means to live well, what the good life means on a finite planet, that don't lock us into an economy that constantly thinks of itself as having to expand, day after day, year after year, forever?"

David 09:12 

The idea that we can't grow our economy infinitely on a planet that's finite seems to be really clear and sensible. Can you speak a bit to how economists and policymakers got addicted to the idea of growth in the first place, given that rather obvious point that there have to be limits to it? 

Tim Jackson 09:33 

Yeah, I mean, it is really interesting. [chuckles] You can sometimes explain this to a kid more easily than you can explain it to an economist or a politician, and I think there's a kind of a sleight-of-hand trick that economists use and that politicians like to believe in, which is to distinguish between material growth – the amount of resources we're taking out of the planet and the impact that we're having on the planet – and economic growth, and if you ask a conventional economist, they will say, "You know, Tim, you don't understand. Economic growth is not about an expansion of materials. It's actually an expansion of economic value, and you can attach economic value to anything you like, so why shouldn't the economy just grow and grow and grow, and it just becomes more and more and more efficient in terms of its use of materials?" [gentle music] And that little conjuring trick is what has allowed both economists and politicians, in a sense, to get away with the idea of eternal economic growth, because as long as we are clever enough, we can keep introducing efficiencies and technological solutions and substitutions, and we can just do things much, much better and much, much cleaner, and we'll have less impact on the planet, and our economies will still grow, which is what we want. We want growth. [music fades out]

Before I totally answer your question, I'd just say that that idea which is often called "decoupling"—and it's the decoupling of the material impacts from the economic output—is a very, very good one. The idea of doing things with more material efficiency, more energy efficiency, with using better technologies, you know, that's the foundation for the transition that we need, actually, to a green economy in one sense. And so, nobody who argues against growth is arguing against that sense of material efficiency, but they do tend to ask—and I would tend to ask—you know, very hard questions about the extent to which it's possible to decouple this economic expansion that economists want from the material impact that has on the planet. And ecological economics actually says there are some real, scientific, physical, thermodynamic limits to the efficiency with which we can do things, and we're reaching some of those limits already.

The argument that economists want to escape from the trap is limited by physics, it's limited by thermodynamics. It's limited by the extent to which technology really does decouple economic expansion from the impact that it has on the planet. And I think, you know, to answer the question about why we're so fixated on it, I think, in some sense, we have to be honest, that economic growth delivered some good things, and at certain points in time, it was actually very clear that it contributed to prosperity. And it's still the case for the poorest countries in the world. If you look at the data, you find that a bit of an income boost for the poorest countries in the world will do a number of really good things in terms of prosperity. It will increase people's health, it will increase their access to education, it will increase their life expectancy, it will make them happier, and you see all these things happening in the data for the poorest countries in the world. You don't see it in the richest countries in the world, and paradoxically, for the richest countries in the world, they're still busy expanding and they haven't managed to decouple, and they're not extending life expectancy, and sometimes they're undermining health, and often, there's a kind of stagnation in terms of prosperity, even though the material impacts of the economy continue to grow.

David 13:26 

Well, if we add to this the fact that growth is based on national accounts – the gross domestic product and the gross national product, which notoriously don't measure a whole variety of things from the perspective of climate change (they assume pollution is free) – you really do have a toxic combination between the efforts to continue growing in societies where it doesn't seem to be producing prosperity, and the impacts of those economic strategies on the health of the planet, and I would think, some would argue, the health of people, as well.

Tim Jackson 14:03 

No, you're absolutely right. I mean, it's a really important point. We're fixated on measuring the growth of a particular indicator that everybody knows, and even economists will sometimes recognize, misses out a lot of what it should be measuring. It fails to measure the bad impacts that economic growth has. It doesn't measure some of the changes in wellbeing that you'd want to capture in a true measure of prosperity. And, as Robert Kennedy once said, "It measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile" was his characterization of the GDP, and that was actually, he said that in 1968, so we've known it for a long time. This is a bad measure, and so why we would want this bad measure to grow and grow forever is a little bit of a mystery, but it's partly kind of past dependency. That's how we set up the national accounts. Well, they weren't set up, interestingly. They were basically kind of an accounting mechanism to figure out how much money the allies could spend on the war effort during the Second World War, and we didn't have a proper accounting process until the Second World War to figure that kind of thing out. And in that sense, you know, it did its job at the time, but that's now 70 – nearly 80 – years ago, and we're still using that old, outdated measure, and it's leading us into trouble. 

David 15:19 

In certain ways, that's a relatively recent measure as well, given that it's 70 years old and not 500 years old.

Tim Jackson 15:26 

Exactly. I mean, to be fair, it does sit on top of a system that was kind of expansionary before that. It's since we've come up with that measure that it's become almost like a national obsession to see how high you can rank your country in the GDP ratings. And, in fact, I tell you a really interesting experience. Just after I published that report with the Sustainable Development Commission, the original Prosperity Without Growth report, I took it into Treasury in the UK and I spoke to the Special Advisor of the Chancellor in the UK and, you know, his one question to me was, "Well, it's great, Tim, but what does it look like when I go to the G7 meeting, which is the top GDP nations in the world? And we're no longer at the top of that list, and we may not even be in that top-seven list anymore." It was almost like, you know, the most important thing in the world is who's got the biggest GDP?

David 16:21 

[somber music] If we accept the premise that we're on a finite planet, so a system that assesses our public policy success by measuring infinite growth on a finite planet, if we accept that that premise is wrong—you've written the seminal report on it that became a book, you've advised the UK Government for a long—what are the lessons that government should take from that? And, in particular, can you speak a little bit to the lessons that city regions and their elected leaders – the leaders of council and mayors – should take from that fairly indisputable fact?

Tim Jackson 16:59 

Let me start by maybe going back to that dilemma that I talked about. Once you've entered into the possibility that prosperity is not the same thing as growth – you know, that you might be able to have prosperity without growth, so, you've then got to define what you mean by that prosperity. What does it mean to live well? What is it that communities need? What is it that nations need? And, you know, a starting point for that is very much health because, actually, you know, as John Ruskin once said, "There is no wealth without health". That sense that health is the starting point for prosperity is a really, really interesting one. It begins to focus your mind, not just on the kind of priorities that the economy should be delivering for people, but also on the process itself because, when you think about health – very, very interesting – health is not a place where growth is a unanimous good. Actually, it can be the opposite. The only things in health that are represented by the concept of growth are cancers and tumours that are very, very bad for health. [music fades out] 

And if you take something like, you know, food, for example, certainly, if you haven't got any food at all and if the harvest has failed again and, you know, you're living, as many people still do, in the dry lands in Sub Saharan Africa where you're constantly at risk of famine, then having some more food is a very good thing. But, on the other hand, and this is, you know, one of the most fascinating statistics of recent years—very recent years—the World Health Organization now estimates that more people die from diseases of affluence, from non-communicable diseases like diabetes, or obesity and hypertension, than die from malnutrition, from not having enough. 

It's indicative of a system that doesn't know where to stop, and that's actually, you know, a characteristic, if you like, of the capitalist market system. It doesn't know where to stop. It knows where to continue growing. It knows how to try and extract more and more value. Its ethos is about "expand, expand, expand," or as that famous philosopher and economist called Karl Marx once said, "Accumulate, accumulate, accumulate." That is the Moses and the prophets. You know, it's a really important point to pause, I think—not necessarily for us all to sign up to Marxism or become communist—but to recognize that the economic system that we have devised is one that is very, very good at "more and more", and not that good at "enough" and recognizing where that point of "enough" lies.

And articulating that, actually, you know, can be potentially transformative, because it begins to focus your eyes, as a decision-maker, as a policymaker, or as a politician on what really matters in life, starting with that aspect of health and life expectancy, thinking more broadly in terms of what prosperity means in terms of people's wellbeing. What do they need? They need connection with community, they need to know that their families are safe, they need to know that there's some security in their livelihood, and that means thinking about employment. All of these things matter to prosperity. Then, once you've articulated that vision, you're asked the very reasonable question, "Well, how do we deliver that?" And in the growth-based economy, we deliver it in a very specific way; we make sure that the pie expands, that the economy is expanding, there's more income out there, and it doesn't really matter where that income lives because, eventually, it will all trickle down and poorer people will have decent lives and decent life prospects and their employment will become secure and everything will work itself out. 

And what we've understood is, that is not the way it plays out, and it's not only not the way it plays out in terms of human prosperity. It can't go on playing that way because of its impact on the planet, but we are, at the same time—and this is to do justice to that idea of a dilemma—it's not enough just to have this, you know, fine vision of where we want to be, of what prosperity really means, of how we want healthy communities and strong families and good lives and nutritious food and healthy bodies. It also has to be the case that we recognize the profundity of that dilemma, that the growth-based economy revolves around a set of institutions and social norms and practices and expectations that continue to constrain what we do and, in some cases, stand in the way of change.

And so, when it comes to asking, you know, what you do about that second bit, the first bit is relatively easy because you can ask what matters to them and you can think about the policies to develop what matters to them. You can make sure that you pay your nurses properly so that you have a decent care system, and you don't just stand on your doorstep during a pandemic and applaud them for their wonderful sacrifice. That's policy that you can do. The other bits of it is trickier because it means having to confront what I think is usefully called our "gross dependency" that we've built – our institutions, our structures, our financial markets, our pension system, our health care system, our social care system, around an assumption that we can always have growth to deliver it. And that's hard political work. That's going back, case by case, to each individual aspect of the economy that depends on growth, and asking the question, "Where do those dependencies arise, and how do we tackle them? How do we create a growth-independent economy?"

[upbeat music]  And there's a very, very good reason for doing that, aside from all of the sustainability arguments, which is that the growth that we used to have back in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, when we were first chasing GDP, already isn't there anymore. And actually, many mainstream economists are beginning to realize that. They talk about a kind of secular stagnation, that growth rates in advanced economies have been declining for at least the last three or four decades. So that's a task that we should be doing anyway. We should be looking at how we can thrive, whether or not we have growth, and to do that, we have to engage in this hard task. "Where are we dependent on growth?" and beginning to think through different institutions, different structures, sometimes different social norms that allow us to flourish, with or without growth. [music fades out]

David 23:42 

From a city perspective, Tim, I was really intrigued to hear you start with health, because public health in many cities in the world is a central responsibility. There's been a healthy cities movement for decades, so it's very aligned with what you're speaking about, from an action-on-the-ground perspective, but it also intrigued me because the push for growth as the main policy priority is not only poisoning the planet – it's actually poisoning people, which is a very powerful outcome.

Tim Jackson 24:14 

Yeah. 

David 24:15 

You've been really clear and articulate about the ideas and, for me, about language that mayors could use to speak to the kinds of society they want, where you think about prosperity and health and other goals first, as the public policy goals. And you just spoke about trying to rebuild building blocks, that we've built building blocks based on this idea that infinite growth was possible. Now that we know it isn't, we need to build new building blocks. Do you have any thoughts about where mayors, and the city administrations they lead, might be able to contribute to building those building blocks, bearing in mind that cities have different responsibilities globally? The UK have been very narrowed, but in many places, they're broader and have a fair bit of agency over local decision-making in their city regions. 

Tim Jackson 25:08 

Yeah. No, I mean, I think it is very useful to think in that city level and, actually, there's a really interesting historical precedent for it, which is, in the 18th and 19th century in the UK, when pandemics swept through populations – actually earlier than that. From the 16th, 17th century, pandemics were sweeping through populations every now and then – the plague in the City of London in the 1600s, cholera and typhoid in the 1700s, and 1800s – and actually, it was cities that took those public health decisions on the back of scientific evidence that what needed to be done was to build the sewerage system in those cities, and it was cities who took that lead, and they took it with, you know, some philanthropic funding, some business funding, but they took that decision, drew those funds together, built those sewers, and basically eradicated those sources of disease in cities, and radically improved the quality of people's lives in the process of doing that.

And then, you know, the laying down of a water infrastructure, the recognition that the ways the pathways of disease work in cities, it's not just a question of kind of cleaning up after the act; it's actually a question of clean water, clean sewage. I'm not saying those problems are necessarily the same problems for most developed cities now, although they are still problems for cities in developing countries. The actions that were needed to make those things happen happened through influential people recognizing the science, gathering the finance, and making the changes at the city level. It wasn't led by central government.

And so, you know, I think, if you take that as a case study and as a sort of example, it kind of points the way. It is people in cities who know what they want their quality of life to be, what they want the good life to be, to understand what it means to live in a good neighbourhood, to understand what it means to eat good food, to have sufficient exercise. What's needed to achieve that is an understanding that it is different in different cities, but is the part of the focus of thinking about prosperity at city level, and that process of a kind of collaboration between people who know what they want, governance, mayors, the government structure—the local government structure—who have the capacity to organize at city level, and funding, whether that's philanthropic or business funding, which can be put to the task of developing that form of prosperity that meets the needs of the people in the city, and that is, at the same time, protecting the long-term future of, not just the city, but of the planet, by creating more sustainable activities. 

And I think that's at the very broad level, and I haven't been very specific about giving the activities themselves, but I think that conjunction of, you know, local aspiration, business finance, and the organization that local government can bring, and the leadership that local government can bring, that is what created the public health revolution that absolutely improved, dramatically, the longevity of populations through that early and middle period of industrial capitalism. 

[gentle music] And so, if you take that as an example, you say, "Well, accepting there are some limitations," you know, a city does not always have fiscal and financial responsibility for everything that's going on within its geographical boundary. That's just the reality of it. But there are always some areas where cities do have that capacity. One of the most obvious ones actually is in food and food provision. The provision of food and the way that we eat our food accounts for something between 20 and 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions everywhere. So actually, you're talking about a system where people have a vested interest in having good, nutritious, healthy food, on the one hand, that local government has definitely some capacity to think about how that food is produced, delivered, wasted or not wasted, and distributed between people. And business has a vested interest in becoming engaged in that process, certainly at the local level. So, all those dimensions are in place in the case of food. [music fades out]

And actually, some work that we did with the initiative called Transition Towns Initiative in the UK – in the early days, the Transition Towns Initiative focused quite a lot on food because it was the one area where there was good citizen engagement. It wasn't some distant concern for global environmental issues that may or may not affect me one day; it was actually a real issue of concern in relation to environment, in relation to health, in relation to taste, in relation to enjoyment, that people could move together, irrespective of the fiscal constraints that a city might face.

And then you get to the kind of more difficult levels around transport, transportation infrastructure, and what can be done to reduce the impact of transport, which is another big chunk of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. And there you have more constraints, but you're still in a position that goes back to that original example. If you can bring together government organization, the wishes and aspirations of people, and the right degree of financing, it is not impossible—and some cities are showing this—to engage in infrastructure projects that dramatically reduce the carbon generated through transportation throughout the city. 

So, that's just a couple of examples, really, and I think it is important to kind of go case by case, but I think, when you can bring those forces to bear, you sort of understand that cities, although they may be constrained at points, fiscally, financially, they have an enormous role in terms of leadership coordination and the motivation to create, really, truly sustainable cities that are enjoyable for people to be in... prosperity, with or without economic growth. 

David 31:27 

Well, it's fascinating to hear your logic, starting with the impact on human health, and moving to cities where people want to live in, because if you look at C40 cities, for example, they're committed to having a climate plan. As part of membership, you have to have a climate plan that does your fair share of having global emissions, by 2030, on a path to net zero by 2050. And what do those climate plans consist of? They consist of actions to grow sustainable local food, they consist of revolutions to transport so people have much more of an ability to walk, cycle, take transit, don't have to own a car, which is actually a cheaper way of life, but also healthier. They're about buildings being lower cost to run. There needs to be investments to make the more energy efficient and clean energy and more and all of those things, at least start to, I think, address the point you just made, which is how do you create a city that people want to live in, that they can live in prosperously, with a good quality of life? And that isn't a question about whether the city's growing, at all.

Tim Jackson 32:41 

Exactly. And I think that's absolutely right. In that sense, C40 Cities is already doing that. And I think, you know, the one thing that you kind of, perhaps need to be almost more aware of, as a background part of the canopy with which you're playing, is that there are, nonetheless, forces that push towards growth, that you somehow have to almost resist if you want to really do justice to that vision of bottom-up, prosperity-led, sustainable strategy for a city. I'm only saying this because I've seen this at work. When I was Economics Commissioner, again, we used to go around the regions in the UK over a period of seven years, and I would hear, at city level or region level, I would hear the same narrative over and over again – "What we need to rescue the city or what we need to rescue the region is we need a good influx of inward investment to create more high-wage jobs in the high-tech sector, and that will bring sufficient wealth so, ultimately, we'll be able to afford to do all these other things".

And, if it worked, you know, that would be great, and if it didn't have this environmental impact on the other side of it, it would also be great. But, the one lesson I took away from those seven years is that every region had the same model and none of them succeeded, partly because everyone was competing with each other for that inward investment, but also because they had their eyes fixed on this glittering prize of, you know, a high-tech solution to all of their problems, that they neglected the basics. They weren't taking care of health, they weren't looking after infrastructure, they weren't providing amenities for citizens, and they certainly weren't investing in the transition to a zero-carbon economy. And that's one of the difficulties of the growth paradigm, is that you end up kind of following a false promise and illusion, and everybody's following the same thing. Everybody's chasing the pot of gold at the end of the growth rainbow, and they're so busy doing that, that they kind of trip over their own feet and miss all the actions that could be taken at the local level, and that's a really important part of thinking through the problem, I think, at city level.

David 35:00 

Mayors should keep their eyes fixed on the possibilities before them, not on a fool's gold errand of growth. [pensive music]

Tim Jackson 35:09 

Absolutely. 

David 35:10 

Tim Jackson, I, and our listeners could listen to you forever. You have a lot to offer the world ,and not just on our podcast, so we want to thank you very much for your time today, and more importantly, for your ongoing work. Since that seminal report for the UK, the kind of ideas you represent have become far more discussed and far closer to making a very real difference. We see the UN Secretary General now speaking about, "How do we have prosperous societies without growth?" So, your work's making a huge difference, and we really appreciate the opportunity to speak to you.

Tim Jackson 35:47 

Thanks, David. It's been a pleasure talking to you. [music continues then fades out]

David 35:56 

[upbeat, energetic music] Ecological economics is a simple idea at its heart. There is no economy if there is no livable ecosystem. We need to prioritize the wellbeing of the planet and, by extension, our wellbeing, and focus our attention on doing the best we can with what we have, because cities need to make serious practical changes to prioritize shared prosperity. The world is beginning to recognize that the time of measuring all decisions by growth is drawing to a close, and acting now to change our ways will make things much smoother for urban policymakers, cities, and their inhabitants, today and in the future. 

Read more about ecological economics in Volume 2, Issue 2 of the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy. [music fades out]

[Cities 1.5 main theme music] Next time on Cities 1.5, we're continuing the discussion on economics by looking beyond growth. Cities play a critical role in the systemic shift that we need in order to move on from the sole metric of growth and reconfigure our economic policies to, instead, achieve shared prosperity.

I speak with guests, Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Co-President of the Club of Rome, and leader of Glasgow City Council, Susan Aitken, to discuss the theoretical and practical changes cities need to know to go beyond growth. You won't want to miss it.

Thanks for listening to Cities 1.5. I'm David Miller, the Managing Director of the C40 Centre for City Climate Policy and Economy. I was the Mayor of Toronto, Canada, and know, first-hand, the impact cities can have in solving the climate crisis.

Cities 1.5 is produced by Jessica Schmidt. Our executive producers are Isabel Sitcov, Peggy Whitfield, Jessica Abraham, and Claudia Rupnik. Our music is by Lorna Gilfedder. Cities 1.5 is a production of the University of Toronto Press and the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy.

To find out more, visit the show’s website link in the episode notes. See you next time. [Cities 1.5 main theme music continues then ends]