How Scotland Can Escape the ‘Great Car Economy’

Roads to Nowhere: can Scotland Escape the ‘Great Car Economy?’The use of the term “movement” to describe mass political organisation has its origins in the mid-19th century. At a time when enormous industrial growth had created a vogue for speed and motion, the metaphorical link to transport was clear. Amidst all those new railways, steam packets ploughing the oceans,...

Marie Kondo and the Anthropocene

The Netflix craze of the year is the comforting appearance of Marie Kondo bringing her domestic Zen presence to Western homes.  De-cluttering as crisis-management, a sort of pious lifestyle comfort-viewing for the existentially distressed. It’s the world being sorted by folding towels properly.But there’s a deeper current at play, and that’s the crisis of accumulation....

An economy for Scotland that’s better than growth?

Katherine Trebeck, author of The Economics of Arrival on why Scotland needs to embrace a de-growth agenda.In 1983 President Reagan declared, ‘There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits to human intelligence, imagination and wonder’. That was an era when students were striking against the risk of atomic war, when celebrities sang that aid and charity...

What We Might Find in Making Ourselves at Home

In everyday economics, there is no such thing as enough, or too much, growth. Yet in the world’s most developed countries, growth has already brought unrivaled prosperity: we have ‘arrived’. More than that, through debt, inequality, climate change and fractured politics, the fruits of growth may rot before everyone has a chance to enjoy them. It’s high time to ask where progress is taking us, and are we nearly there yet? This is an extract from The Economics of Arrival – Ideas for a Grown Up Economy by Katherine Trebeck and Jeremy Williams.