The premise of Katherine Trebeck and Jeremy Williams’ new book The Economics of Arrival boils down to the following: (1) the concept of endless growth as the overarching goal of an economy is unsustainable and misguided; (2) the world’s richest countries (including Australia) have Arrived at a place where continued expansion is incapable of — and indeed antithetical to — the resolution of its social and economic problems; (3) if the benefits of growth were distributed more fairly, a decent standard of living could be universal; and (4) nation states should re-orient their economies around maintenance, qualitative improvements, sharing, fragility and adaption to natural limits, which they term making ourselves at home.
Trebeck and Williams’ critique of infinite growth, and in particular mainstream economists’ obsession with GDP as the metric for a nation’s overall health, is a familiar one to critics of neoliberal orthodoxy. However, the framework that they apply for disrupting this paradigm — and the nomenclature they propose for understanding and implementing a genuine alternative to ‘unaimed opulence’ — is both accessible and compelling.
You can read the rest of this article on the New Economy Journal website.
Jacob Debets 