Abstract
The world must slow down. This may sound bizarre at a time of crisis but when the present one is over, to avoid the next one being even bigger, we’d better not try to aim for an exaggerated pace of growth as this can trigger an utter loss of balance. The rate and limits to economic growth is the fifth of the Great Issues for the Future. Why? Perhaps technological progress will indeed prove to be so powerful that we can walk into the future the same way we went through the past: more and faster, but with a falling material intensity and declining energy consumption? Perhaps the economic and environmental Cassandras are wrong to foretell that we will run short of one thing or another?
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Notes
Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2011).
Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth (Washington, DC: Potomac Associates Book, 1972).
Donella H. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004).
Diane Coyle, The Weightless World. Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy (Oxford: Capstone, 1997).
The relationships between income and life satisfaction are discussed by Carol Graham, Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: Development Center of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2001).
Tim Jackson, Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (New York: Earthscan, 2009).
Jørgen Randers, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012).
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).
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© 2014 Grzegorz W. Kolodko
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Kolodko, G.W. (2014). The Social and Ecological Limits to Growth. In: Whither the World: The Political Economy of the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137470256_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137470256_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49971-7
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