Degrowth argues for stopping this eternal growth. It pushes instead for a sustainable degrowth that would reduce our ecological footprint and put care for people at the heart of policy. It’s more democratic and more fair. It would also improve everyone’s quality of life by giving them more time for leisure and lessening their obsession with waged work and consumerism, which wastes society’s resources on things that we don't really need.
Tactically speaking, how do people think sustainable degrowth could look, and how does basic income fits into the framework of degrowth thinking?
Most of the world’s political and economic effort over the past 50 years has gone to creating a massively intricate network of trade in goods. We have built our economies around this. As a result countries in the Global North can have bananas and mangoes all year round, while other countries – like my home country of Chile – have become heavily dependent on the export of food. This co-dependency is detrimental to both our environment and our economies.
