Latest / Beyond the Summit with Amir Golshani / What Happens When the Global Economy Stops Growing? | Professor Tim Jackson

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What Happens When the Global Economy Stops Growing? | Professor Tim Jackson · Beyond the Summit with Amir Golshani

• Tim Jackson: if you were thinking of economics in a philosophical sense, as we started saying, it's growth if you measure it by the GDP. But is it really economic growth? Is it growth that contributes to a meaningful philosophy of our lives? Does it improve our well-being? can't really answer all those questions in the positive while we're so obsessed with that one indicator and that one idea that bigger is always better. Amir Golshani: Welcome back. Today's guest has spent more than a decade challenging one of the most powerful ideas in modern civilization, that growth equals progress. Professor Tim Jackson is an ecological economist, author of Prosperity Without Growth, Post-Growth, and the Care Economy. His work asks a bold but urgent question. What if the way we measure success is quietly destabilizing our planet, our societies, and even our sense of meaning. In a world obsessed with expansion, acceleration, and scale, he invites us to slow down and ask something deeper. What does it really mean to prosper? Professor Jackson, it's a real honor to have you here. Welcome to Beyond the Summit. Tim Jackson: It's pleasure Amir, thanks for inviting me. Amir Golshani: You have questions the assumption that growth equals prosperity. When did you first feel that something wasn't adding up? Tim Jackson: That's an interesting question with probably several different answers academically. I think probably 25 years ago or so, I started my academic work looking at something fairly straightforward, the economics of renewable energy technologies. And even that was almost accidental. I accidentally became an ecological economist. But as I looked into what were really sort of the micro economic questions about why we don't do the right things. I kept being drawn back to this idea of economic growth, which is so central to our politics and to our economics. And I began to see how this was increasingly driving decisions that were counter even to economic interests at the small scale. So I began, think at that point academically, certainly to kind of figure out that The idea of eternal economic growth on a finite planet just doesn't quite work in the way that economists might like it to work. There might even have been some earlier roots, know, this kind of idea of busy, busy, busy, expand, expand, expand from quite young, I would say, didn't sit particularly easily with me as an idea. And I felt it was missing out something in the human psyche, something in community life. and certainly something in relation to the planet that was too important to be missed out. Amir Golshani: I believe those moments feel important because it's not just economic, it's philosophical as well. Do you agree with that? Tim Jackson: Yeah, I do. For me, it starts with philosophy. mean, Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: there was a point at which economics was a branch of moral philosophy. And we kind of forget that, you know, economics became this sort of technological technocratic subject and began to drift away from its philosophical roots. I think that's a mistake because ultimately, the questions that economics is supposed to answer for us are broadly philosophical questions. So I think bringing philosophy back into it is essential. Amir Golshani: Right. Is the problem growth itself or our dependence on growth for stability? Tim Jackson: I think it is both those things to some extent, but even more so, it's our obsession with growth. It's a sort of predilection for growth at all costs that distracts us from what's important. And so, you know, if you're a politician and you have to deliver to your voters or you have to deliver to your party or you have to do better than the opposing party, you want to win an election, then you're looking for some magic formula. And the magic formula that we kind of settled on in the post-war years was this idea of an increase in what's called the gross domestic product, the GDP. That is economic growth. That's what economic growth is, is growth in this indicator. And if that's the thing that always matters to you, then you make bad decisions. You kind of make, you well, I'll have some drug dealers. I don't mind them too much because it contributes to GDP. Or I'll have a little bit of toxic pollution because that contributes to growth in the economy. because we have to clear up the mess afterwards. So that's a good thing, right? Or I'll have, you know, a big food industry that sells cheap junk food to my kids and makes them sick because it contributes to economic growth. Or I'll have a pharmaceutical industry to clean up the mess of the big food industry, selling cheap junk food to my kids because it contributes to growth. And so we end up making all these decisions that actually lead us towards what I quite often call a false economy. And the Herman, Herman Daly, was one of the earliest ecological economists, had a very good phrase for it. He said it was uneconomic growth. So if you were thinking of economics in a philosophical sense, as we started saying, it's growth if you measure it by the GDP. But is it really economic growth? Is it growth that contributes to a meaningful philosophy of our lives? Does it improve our well-being? can't really answer all those questions in the positive while we're so obsessed with that one indicator and that one idea that bigger is always better. Amir Golshani: Right, you mentioned too much obsession toward growth doesn't let us to look after the more important things. Can you name just if you want to focus on three things, three most important Tim Jackson: Mm. Amir Golshani: things that too much obsession with growth doesn't let us to take care of those important things. What are they? Tim Jackson: Yeah, yeah, I would say first of all health. You know, for me, prosperity is more about health than it is about wealth. And actually, Amir Golshani: I love it. Tim Jackson: it's not just for me, it is actually almost anyone you ask. When you ask Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: them what they think of as prosperity, health will come somewhere near the top of the list. And it has done for a very long time, you know, you can go back to the wisdom of the ages and find people saying the first wealth is health. There is no wealth without health. So this idea that health matters is really deeply embedded in a moral philosophy of progress. So that's one thing that goes missing, I think. And that's both physical health and psychological health. Another thing that goes missing quite obviously really is the impact of this growth on the future. And what's strange about that in a way is that You know, it's not just an abstract future. It's actually an economic future. If you if you focus too much on growth now and in the process you undermine your soils, destroy your climate, cut down all your trees, pollute your rivers, have plastic in the furthest corners of the Arctic and Antarctic. You're destroying the basis for your economy tomorrow. know, never Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: mind growth tomorrow, any economy tomorrow, if you've undermined all those things in the present. And then I think the third thing, which is a little bit abstract, but does go to the philosophy of it for me is that, you know, there's various elements of the human psyche. And one of them is definitely a kind of frontier mentality, a mentality of forging forwards and always going forwards and always expanding and always looking to the next best thing and being obsessed with the kind of novelty as an indicator of our success in moving towards that frontier. but it's not the only aspect of mentality, of our human mentality, of our psyche. There's another side which is more introspective, that is more concerned with an expression of our emotions, of our relationships with each other, or with our creativity, with a sense of finding some meaning and purpose in the world. And these things, again, I think are overthrown. by that frontier mentality, by the dominance of our obsession with growth. Amir Golshani: I really love that. So it is interesting when I wanted to start to launch this podcast, I was thinking about having the most impact on people's lives. I thought about health, wealth, kind of financial independence that without health, there is no way that we can create that kind of wealth. And these two can be foundation for freedom. And everyone's definition for freedom is different. That's why I created this to talk about these issues. I appreciate that. Tim Jackson: That's really interesting. Amir Golshani: There is import- Tim Jackson: There's a just pick up on that on that one point because you know, growth is supposed to be the thing that delivers us freedom, but it also constrains certain other freedoms and health Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: is often seen as something that's constraining our freedoms. But there's a counter argument to that as well, which is a very biological argument that you only have. the freedom to do the things that you can do in the world as long as the organism remains healthy. And for the organism to remain healthy, it actually has to regulate itself. So it's Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: a very paradoxical outcome that actually it's regulation that creates freedom to do the things that we are ultimately as human beings capable of achieving even on a finite planet. So I'm really... taken by that idea that the idea of limits in some sense is the gateway to the limitless, to the infinite creativity of the human species. Amir Golshani: I love that these are really deep questions. You know, it takes time to reflect on and for the audience a lot to think about. Thank you for bringing that up. So if growth were to stall tomorrow, what breaks first? Jobs, finance, politics or something deeper? Tim Jackson: Well, you know, depends how you approach it. We've seen a lot of growth breaking actually. You know, what's interesting to me, having thought about this for a quarter of a century or something is as we come towards the crunch point, we've seen bad things happen when the growth that we expect starts to stall. And so all sorts of things can go missing in those circumstances if we're not paying attention in the right way. If we're still chasing after growth, but it's not arriving, we're chasing after a mirage, essentially. We're doing all Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: the things that we would do and might be even rational if growth were to be possible and were to be arriving. But actually we're living in a world in which that isn't possible. And in those circumstances, you know, the absence of growth looks a little bit like what we see in countries where there isn't sufficient investment where financial sectors take over, where poor people don't have any security, where welfare slips through the net, where there's not enough attention to the quality of people's jobs, where the people who own capital, for want of a better phrase, are always privileged over the people who have to work for a living as wage earners from somebody else. And gradually what that does is it creates a kind of tension in society, begins to tear society apart in ways which provide a kind of feeding ground for exactly what we're seeing in the form of a kind of populism that is attempting to throw over anything associated with the old orders and structures. I, you know, I'm sympathetic to some of the aims of that because I think some of the old orders and structures are deeply cynical. They're built in order to defend the interests of the people who have rather than the general welfare and they should have been overthrown some time ago. But when the populism that feeds out of that begins to turn on itself, begins to, we begin to turn on each other as people. I think that's already a symptom of what happens. when you have a society obsessed with growth, which is no Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: longer able to achieve that growth. So all of the things that you mentioned, jobs matters, investment matters, the social security matters, all of those things matter. The creativity that allows for the next generation of technology, that matters too. But the thing that matters most, it seems to me, is to have a kind of realistic goal for progress that recognizes not just environmental limits, but also recognizes economic limits. recognizes that this chase, this glittering prize that's been in front of us for 70 or 80 years of more, more, more, more, more growth actually is already undermining the structure of our societies. Our insistence on that political goal is like an own goal. It's like, you you suddenly turn around and you're scoring in the wrong net. I'm a soccer fan, so it's a soccer metaphor. But you see what I mean? You Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: thought you were driving in the right direction, but the conditions have changed. And now it turns out that everything you're trying to do to fix it is making the matter worse. Amir Golshani: Absolutely. All the things, all the problems that you mentioned are serious issues that millions, if not billions of people are dealing with. So what do you think would be the plausible solution? I know it's not an easy answer, but if there are practical ways to tackle these issues, what do you think those things would be? Tim Jackson: Well, one of the reasons I think why, it does go to my roots as a philosopher in a sense, one of the reasons that it is a philosophical issue is that it does matter where your priorities are, it matters what your vision is, it matters what you perceive of as progress. And the trouble with these structures, which is exactly what we've been talking about, these structures that are driven towards growth and built around growth, is that when growth begins to fade for whatever reason, They don't work properly anymore. And so we have built a growth dependency, but we have not built or been able to build a growth economy. So a growth dependency in an economy that doesn't deliver the levels of growth that we might want is a disaster. It's an absolute disaster. And it seems to me therefore that the starting point really is to say, well, we need to understand those dependencies. We need to understand why in this particular social system that we are now living inside and have been living inside and developing for the last 50, 60, 70, 80 years, why it's coming unstuck and where we can create growth independence, where we can create resilient social, economic, financial and physical systems and not to build those systems around this idea that the goal of society, the goal of progress is to become bigger and bigger, but to build it around something else. Now, what is that something else in the care economy, which you mentioned right at the beginning? The idea that I put at the center of that actually is that, you know, if if prosperity is about health rather than wealth, then the economy and economic structure and all those institutions that we were talking about actually have to be built around care rather than around growth. because it's care that provides the restorative force that brings us back towards health. It's like it is the most fundamental organizing principle of organic life. And it should play that role also in our institutional life, in our social life, in our economic life. We should actually devise things which are resilient in allowing us to position ourselves to restore ourselves to health. And that's physical health, psychological health. social health, societal well-being in some form, and even actually economic health. An economy which is subject to immense fluctuations and huge inequalities is not a resilient economy, it's not a healthy economy. And so actually taking that principle, and I know it sounds a little bit abstract, I can sort of talk a little bit about what it might mean in practice, some very, very good examples of that. But the core of it is actually to say if health is your North Star rather than wealth, you're not growing all the time. You're investing in something which is different, this restorative force, this idea of resilience, this forms of care, which bring us back into balance constantly, constantly, constantly. And when you're looking in that direction, then you have the chance to overcome those growth dependencies. You know that you can't, for example, build a social care system which the government underwrites the ability of the equity financiers to deliver social care and take all of the profits out of that and put them in offshore accounts somewhere else out of the economy. That is a false economy. It's a bad economy. It's an unhealthy economy. It makes you gross dependent because the government can only pay for that by increasingly having tax revenues from a growing economy to pay into the pockets. of private equity financiers who then offshore the money. It's a disaster. So if you design your system like that, and many countries do, including the UK, and suspect Canada to some extent as well, then you are creating not just a growth dependency that's ultimately gonna bankrupt the government, but you're creating an unhealthy society in which care has gone missing. And I mean, I could go on all day with this, you know, take food, for example. Why do we privilege big food companies? Because they promise us growth when we know that what they feed our kids is unhealthy. If we were focusing on health, we would look at the dysfunctional food system and we would actually pay so that every household in the country had access to healthy food rather than pay the very much bigger bill associated with chronic ill health. which is food related because we're eating bad diets. And again, it comes back. It's not economic growth. It's uneconomic growth. It's not a proper economy. It's a false economy. And everywhere you look, if you change the guiding lens, if you change the lens through which you're looking at this stuff, you see the problem differently. The moment the government just sees every problem as, we can fix this once we've got growth. Amir Golshani: I love everything that you mentioned and it takes me to the next question that if we put health and care in the center of importance rather than wealth, then who benefits? Majority of people. Then what about politicians and policymakers? How do we influence, you know, those people to see that if we change the priority, that will be to the benefit of everyone, including policymakers, not only, you know, just people. So this is the problem that I see because minority is taking all the benefits, financially speaking, and the majority is paying the cost for that, as you clearly mentioned that. How do we change this paradigm? Tim Jackson: Yeah, I mean, I think it depends how cynical you are about politics, Amir. And I think I would say this too, this is kind of short term and a slightly longer term answer. So, you know, from the short term perspective, it is still astonishing to me that you take that food example where you're paying, I mean, in the UK actually did the sums and it turns out you're paying. four times as much treating the symptoms, not even curing, but treating the symptoms of chronic disease from bad diet, four times as much every year trying to do that than it would cost for you to subsidise every household in the country with enough money to eat healthy food, to eat properly. And you could even train them within the same budget to... cook better, to understand better, to learn better, and to see for themselves the benefits of not eating stuff that's making us sick. And yet that doesn't happen. that, you know, that to me is extraordinary. It's extraordinary when you think of it from a treasury perspective, because at the moment, you know, balancing budgets and overcoming central government deficits and bringing down the national debt. is such a priority, it's making our governments again very, very brittle. If you're able to make progress in that sense, then you've got chance of being re-elected. But those chances seem to disappear almost progressively. Government after government is finding it more and more difficult to balance their books because they've got money flowing out in one direction. and they're not looking at the prevention, they're not looking at the institutional structure, they're turning a blind eye to the flow of funds which is ending up offshore somewhere. And that is a bad thing for an economy. And it seems to me that that is a powerful argument. It's an argument that you could take into, you should be able to take that into treasury. Now, if that, suppose you, you know, suppose I get a phone call just after we finished today and it's the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK phoning up saying, You know, I heard your podcast, Tim, it was fantastic. Come in and tell us, you know, that would be great. That would be fantastic. But I, you know, I've been doing this long enough to know that that is probably not going to happen. And, and there two reasons why it's not going to happen. One is that we, have this kind of institutional lock in, you know, we know what we're doing with growth. We've been there before. We've heard it for a long time. Every economist out there is going to agree with us. So we're just going to go on doing this growth based thing. Nice idea Tim, but sorry, you we haven't got time. We don't have the capacity to think about it. And my answer to that is we'll find the capacity. And this was when Prosperity Without Grace was published. I was an advisor to the UK government and I had some meetings inside Treasury at that point. And my big argument there was find some capacity. Give me or give yourselves. three or four desks inside treasury somewhere thinking about this seriously because this is not just tomorrow's problem, it's today's problem. Let the rest of treasury go on with its conventional models, its conventional ideas, but somebody somewhere for goodness sake inside treasury start thinking about this stuff because if it doesn't bite us today, it sure as hell gonna bite us tomorrow. Amir Golshani: What was the reaction? Tim Jackson: It was bad timing, I have to say it was around about the time of the financial crisis back in 2008, just after the financial crisis. And shortly after that, the government that presided over the financial crisis was out and a new government was in. I had some interesting conversations. I actually had one conversation with the man who was chancellor at that point in time, Alastair Darling, who sadly passed away last year. He was a very sensible, considered guy and he listened to what I had to say and he said, yeah, what is it going to be like? Is there any other country in the world that's doing this? What's it going to be like if we go to the G7 meeting and our GDP has slipped down the rankings? So it was a very, it was politically astute, but in some sense, you know, it gave you an insight into a mentality that is building its indicators around a kind of a, I don't know, It's a little unfair to say, but it's a bit like a pissing contest. My GDP is higher than your GDP. And so it was a signal to me of institutional capture. And I never got as far as I wanted to with the give me a couple of desks to do something differently in my country. There was an initiative which I was involved in in Austria, actually, which was called growth in transition, where they tried to do something along those lines for a short time. It hasn't gone very far. There's been other initiatives in the European Parliament. that have talked about it, but still we're not really grasping the nettle. We're still holding on to that idea that growth will come back. It will save us and then everything will be all right because we can fix all these other problems. We can fix climate change. We can fix house. We can fix the food industry. You know, we can fix all of the pollution in the soil. Everything's going to be fine as long as we get growth back. And it is in some sense, it's quasi religious that but I do want to I just wanted to point to the second thing. which to me is equally important. It's not all well-intentioned people who have the best outcomes for all of us at heart. There are people within what is entirely a dysfunctional system for whom the system is functioning. It's doing exactly Amir Golshani: You Tim Jackson: what they want. It's channeling money into the pockets of shareholders and sometimes into the offshore accounts that they hide the money from the national economy from. But at any rate, it's channeling money into people who benefit from the system. So we have to recognise actually that there are, even though the whole thing seems dysfunctional, there are people who are able to benefit from it. It's not entirely about institutional design. It's not entirely about the force of habit. It is also about people powerful enough to change the rules of government to suit their own needs. to stand in the way of the prosperity of everyone in order to ensure the prosperity of themselves. And that's a place where justice has to come into account. Amir Golshani: I believe you did a great job, but by emphasizing that this is an urgent matter for today, not even for next generation. And if we can show those policymakers and politicians that this is the priority, at least let's this kind of initiative start, you know, alongside the conventional method that they're doing, you know, things. So that would be, that would be the beginning of a movement. I really love that, you know, so you have already started that. You so it means that something is happening sooner or later when something starts. It's more difficult to stop it. You have reframed prosperity in a way that feels more human than numerical. How do you define prosperity today? Tim Jackson: I think to define it in some sense as health is the best way that we have. And I think it's very important though that we have a sense of what health is. Health is not a kind of static state. It's not something where you're either healthy or you're not healthy. It's actually a process and that process is about coming into balance. And at the level of the individual organism, it's actually very, very straightforward. Health is the ability of the organism. to bring itself back into these balances that define optimal functioning of the body. So, you know, the blood pressure, the heart rate, the body temperature, all of these things are constantly, constantly regulated within our body. And we don't even know it's happening. It's just happening. It's a part of what I call, when I think about care, I think I call it this restorative principle, this principle. that operates as the foundation for organic life, bringing things back into balance. And actually it's a strange phenomenon because actually even disease, what we think of as disease is ultimately a part of the process of health. It's the being out of balance that manifests itself in disease. And quite often what we see, the symptoms of those diseases is the body's attempt to bring us back into balance, the congestion. when you have a cold is a part of that control. It's a part of that bringing the body back into balance. We think of that as illness and I wanna get rid of this congestion and you can buy lots of drugs that will try and simulate being free of congestion. But actually, the main thing from the body's perspective, from the health perspective is that ability to bring it back into balance. so that idea I think is a very, powerful one. And it's also... one which enables us to see that in so many respects we're out of balance and we've given up the mechanisms that bring us back into balance because we're pursuing the wrong kind of prosperity. We've just got this North Star which is dragging us almost oblivious to our own fate into all kinds of disasters, ecological disasters, psychological disasters, disasters of huge mental health crisis, huge chronic non-communicable chronic disease crisis, and a fragile politics which is causing us to turn on ourselves. And these things are all about being out of balance in some respect and not just being out of balance, but driving ourselves out of balance by certain kinds of economic and political obsessions. And prosperity therefore is, it's a little bit... ethereal in a sense, but it's also incredibly solid and it has an incredibly strong physiological pedigree. And it's this process of seeing where balance lies and putting in place restorative forces that constantly allow us not to just remain flat and nothing is happening. The world of health is not a world in which nothing happens. It's a world in which things are constantly moving the whole time moving. But always around a point of balance. And that I think is a, that's a very powerful metaphor and one that has a huge amount of explanatory work to do in us finding our way to something meaningful as a sense of prosperity. Amir Golshani: Right. Yeah, finding something meaningful, definitely. And another thing that I believe can be really helpful is that every individual can properly define the term enough. So what would be enough for me to be able Tim Jackson: In a sense that is... Amir Golshani: to to be able to make balance in other important areas, not just chasing something to get me out of balance, you know? Tim Jackson: Yeah, I think in a sense, I what I feel I'm here is that you're you're kind of articulating or it's a different way of articulating almost the same thing. That Amir Golshani: Exactly, Tim Jackson: enough is the point of balance in a sense. And when you you know, when you have too little, then actually growth becomes a legitimate objective. You know, if you have too little nutrition, then sure you want some growth. If you have to, you can't even survive because your income is so low. Of course you want some more. That brings you up to a point of balance and it brings you to a point of enough. But then Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: the trouble is that our systems are just driving growth. The only dynamic we know about is more, more, more. So two things happen when that's the case. One is that you, don't even bother looking for the points of enough because you think more is the place to be. And the other thing is that even if you happen to notice that you've reached the points of enough, you can't possibly stop because your system is still geared towards more. You're going in one direction faster and faster, as hard as you can. And even if you bother to see that enough is a worthwhile objective, you haven't got a hope of Helen turning around when everything is geared towards having more. it's a very good, it's a sort of a synonymous, I would say, kind of explanation for what I'm driving at. And obviously it has the virtue of being quite a lot simpler because we understand enough as a concept, even if we don't understand it as a goal. Amir Golshani: Right. So it is really interesting because it reminds me that that fisherman's anecdote. Have you heard of it? That a wealthy, you Tim Jackson: Remind me. Amir Golshani: know, yeah, corporate guy, you know, went to a village, you know, so a fisherman was fishing, you know, getting one fish, you know, to take for family. And then he offered him, you know, so to get more, you know, boats, maybe more equipment, you know, to get more fish. I said, OK, then what? then to make more money, then what? Then to buy a bigger house, then what? Then actually to, and overwhelmed him and said, okay, so then what? Then to retire and actually get to a nice and cozy place and start do whatever you like. I said, I'm doing that now. I don't need to do that. You know? Tim Jackson: Yeah. Amir Golshani: So, and he defined his enough for himself, you know, to get one fish a day, you know, and to spend quality time with his family. That's very simplistic way of explaining, you know, the whole thing. Tim Jackson: Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, think that was something that was from the ecological economics community has been in their lexicon for a while. I hadn't heard the story for a while, but it's a nice story. Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: mean, as you talk about it though, and you think about it from the fisherman's perspective or from the guy who's trying to teach the fishermen to have a different perspective, I think this... There is one thing which is sort of slightly troubling, is that enough is also, is a psychological concept as much as the material. And in particular, the thing that rips up the concept of enough in a material sense is insecurity of one form or another. So if there's political insecurity, if there's economic insecurity, if there's psychological insecurity, then enough is an almost too tenuous concept. Yeah, sure, I've got enough fish for today. I've got one fish for today. But what if they stop coming tomorrow? Or what if you know, my brother arrives from out of town and I have to feed him and his family because they've been thrown out of their house. Or, you know, what if everyone turns on me suddenly and I've got nothing to barter with and nothing to trade with? So and it begins to what you begin to see then is is not an argument against enough, but it's an argument that that psychological dimensions of enough are also important, the sense of a society being a secure place to live. the sense of a family being a secure place to bring up your kids, a sense of actually, you know, ultimately an almost impossible sense Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: that your life is gonna be secure forever because, and this is one of the most fascinating things in my journey that I've found is that if you take house, for example, house goes on for as long as it goes on, but it doesn't go on forever. Ultimately it stops. And so there's, you know, in part of our psychological insecurity is a deep knowledge that it's gonna one day stop, that it's all gonna be over for me or for my loved ones or for my friends and sometimes even for my kids, God forbid. And that is an awful thing to contemplate. And so there's a wonderful theory called terror management theory because this is a kind of a terror. The ultimate insecurity of our own mortality is a kind of a terror. And we respond to it psychologically in a number of different ways. But one of the ways is to try and repress that knowledge. But what psychology has begun to show to us is that when you suppress that knowledge, certain key things begin to happen. One of them is that you Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: become very, very attached to your own zeitgeist. And if your zeitgeist is a zeitgeist of growth at all costs and materiality is the essence of progress, then you turn towards those things to try to get to endlessly to try to get back to this security, which is elusive because those material things are not going to provide you ultimately with that security. And, and, and so the thought that comes out of terror management theory and the thought that comes out for me, and it's something I get to ultimately at the end of the care economy is that, you know, psychological health matters and if security of some kind is a part of our psychological health, then we actually have to sort of face into some of that darkness. We have to face into the sort of inevitability of our own mortality, rather than chasing a kind of fictitious mortality, immortality that we try to achieve through growth at all costs. So it is again, know, to go back right back to the beginning of our conversation, it's a deeply philosophical challenge. to our current vision of prosperity. It involves a turn into our innermost hearts, asking the deepest questions that provoke the most security in order to have a reasonable response to the terror that we live in day to day. And some of that can be ameliorated socially. We can have more secure societies. We can have more secure families. Some of it actually is about having something as a sense of meaning and purpose. Amir Golshani: Right. So that being said, what point does more income stop translating into more well-being? Tim Jackson: Well, I can give you a statistical answer to that. When we by looking across countries, or I can give you another statistical answer by looking inside a country, and they're actually different answers. But in some sense, it isn't a precise, I don't think the statistical answers are particularly useful. I'll give you one anyway, because you asked. But basically, if Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: you look across countries, and the data is a little bit older now, so the income levels are probably a little bit higher, what you find is that some of the real indicators of prosperity like happiness or life expectancy, let's take life expectancy because that's a fundamental indicator of a healthy society. If you have good life expectancy, that's health in some form. If you have poor life expectancy, it's not very good. And interestingly, when you look at the statistics across countries, what you find is that the average life expectancy practically doubles as the average income in that country goes from virtually nothing to around about 15, 20, $25,000 per capita. And after that point, it stops having the positive effect on life expectancy. And sometimes it has a negative impact on life expectancy. So my answer to you would be, yeah, round about that. If you're looking across countries. It's more complicated than that, though, because we know that income, Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: you know, relative income matters to people. And so when you look inside a country, that number can sort of creep up to one hundred thousand dollars per capita, which might not be particularly, you know, massive. might seem might not seem massive to the people who have got it. Obviously seems massive to the people who living in sub-Saharan Africa. You know, three, four, five thousand. dollars per year. But the questions in a sense, you know, you can get lost in the statistics of that. But you can't get lost in the idea that that income doesn't necessarily create prosperity for you. And it doesn't necessarily even create basic aspects of health for you. Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: And and and so in a sense, the argument to replace this idea of prosperity as wealth with prosperity as health is to look in different places. Yes, life expectancy really, really matters. But it also matters Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: how that's distributed across your society. Do poor people die younger? Yes, they do. Are they less healthy than rich people? Yes, they are. And what that tells you is that your society is privileging wealth. It's not looking after poor people. And if your prosperity is really about health, then you should be looking after the health of poor people. as much if not more than you're looking after the health of rich people. Amir Golshani: Absolutely. When we talk about prosperity, we also talking about freedom. What does freedom mean to you in economic terms? Tim Jackson: Well, in economic terms, think freedom in economics, think freedom in any terms is the ability to flourish, the ability to live as well as you can within the conditions of a finite planet. And in particular, to have the freedom to explore the freedom to create, the freedom to dream, the freedom to aspire, the freedom to find and look for, search for meaning and purpose in your life. Those to me are the fundamental freedoms and they are not the freedom to enjoy the relationships that you can have with other people. This is also, you know, with deeply social animals. And yet Amir Golshani: All right. Tim Jackson: we live in a world which is kind of disrespects that sociality and insists that individual power, individual wealth, individual success are the goals that everyone should strive for. And those goals are actually undermining the kinds of freedoms that I'm talking about. Amir Golshani: Absolutely. I love your definition. I have a very important question to ask. a society that depends on endless growth ever truly be free? Tim Jackson: No, I believe it can't. I think the evidence is there that it can't. You we are prisoners to that obsession and our politicians are prisoners to that obsession and our lives have become prisoners to that obsession. And so the freedom, know, the free, in a sense, the question of freedom and the question of limits are deeply related to each other in a material world. There are real financial, real material limits. are things that we can't all have in the same proportion because the resources simply aren't there. But what that does is it points us to the places where there are no limits to creativity, to expression, to relationship. It points us to the places where prosperity truly lives. those are freedoms. They are freedoms in the sense that they are not bound by limits. Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: But we have to claim that right. think we can't assume that it's going to be there. There used to be the old idea from Maslow, although Maslow himself moved away from Abraham Maslow, a psychologist back in the 1970s, talked about a kind of hierarchy of needs with material Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: subsistence needs as being the first ones, and then some social needs once your material needs are satisfied. And then when you feel social and material needs are satisfied, then you can afford to be creative and aspirational and self-actualize is the terminology that he used. And there's nothing wrong with that category of needs. But what's wrong is that it's a hierarchy. What's wrong is that you can't get to those self-actualization needs until you've satisfied these so-called lower order needs. And Maslow himself at the end of his life actually saw the map of that territory as being very, very different that we have material needs and we have these other needs and they are of equal importance. And yet What's interesting about these other non-material needs is that they're not inherently dependent on material things. If you set up your society, if you set up your life in a way that allows you to pursue these non-material needs in less material ways, then you can go as far as you want with them. They are essentially limitless. And that becomes then a really meaningful pragmatic task to set up society in a way that... actualizes those so-called higher level needs and prioritizes them even. Not to say that you neglect material needs, not to say that you neglect the needs particularly of the poorest in society who can't afford to feed themselves, I'm not suggesting that at all, that is still a critical problem. In fact you could say it's the essence of those higher needs. How could you possibly call yourself prosperous? However much money you've got, however much material you've got, even if you've got all this self-actualising potential, how could you call yourself prosperous while people, ordinary poor people suffer in slums with insufficient food, with poor quality food, with not enough access to healthcare? How can that be called a prosperous society? And I think, you know, in any meaningful sense, it's not. And so it's Amir Golshani: No. Tim Jackson: not a kind of, know, as individuals, lift ourselves out of the swamp in order to achieve our own individual power, our own individual good. That's not going to work in a society where people are continuing to suffer. Amir Golshani: No, absolutely right. then people postponing at individual level things for later. That later never comes. You Tim Jackson: Hmm. Amir Golshani: know, let's say, you know, a simple example would be, you know, so if you miss seeing your child, you know, growing up, then that time is gone, you know, so you Tim Jackson: Right. Amir Golshani: never can take it back. So equally important things at the same time, you need to. balance your life in a way that put all important things all together. They're integrated, they're not separated from each other. Absolutely. Tim Jackson: Yeah. Amir Golshani: So how about a post-growth society? Does it expand freedom or constrain it? Tim Jackson: I think it expands freedom. I think it expands those freedoms that are true freedoms, the freedom of our inspiration, of our creativity, of our innovation, of our relationship. Those are the freedoms which don't inherently depend on material stuff and that therefore not limited. And in order to achieve them, and it goes right back to that metaphor of physiology, There was a guy called Walter Cannon who was one of the fathers of physiology pointed out. He was the man who coined the phrase homeostasis, which is this process the body has of bringing you back to these limits the whole time, bringing you back into balance the whole time. Process of coming too much, yes, we'll regulate down, too little, we'll regulate up. And your body constantly doing this all the time. And what he pointed out was that the regulatory systems of the most complex organisms are much, much more intensive than the regulatory systems of, let's say, an amoeba. Amoeba just regulates a little bit of the sugar balance across the boundary. That's it. That's all there is. And for an amoeba, that's enough because it doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't do anything. It doesn't have any freedom. This complex organism of human beings is able to have these freedoms because it has this attention to balance, this attention to a regulatory system that constantly brings us back into balance. And it's this, again, this idea that through regulation, we achieve freedom. And we achieve real freedoms because they are meaningful freedoms in a finite world. Whereas the freedoms that were sold through the dream of Western progress is not a meaningful vision of freedom in a finite material world, because there just isn't that kind of material wealth to go round and you can't go on creating material impacts on the ecological environment without undermining it. So one way or another, we reach those material limits. But if we think in terms of this metaphor, this homeostatic metaphor, then, you know, our regulation becomes the route to our freedom and our freedoms. are freedoms which are not limited, even in a finite world. Amir Golshani: Right. So you mentioned because of many insecurities that we have in our society because of its setup, people try to hedge against mainly financial insecurities. Can we think of financial Tim Jackson: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Amir Golshani: independence not as accumulation, but as resilience and well-being? Tim Jackson: Yeah, I think we can. mean, I think again, you this is, easy to say that you can, you know, particularly if you, you are fortunate enough to, you know, to have a reliable income and that it does give you the ability to become or be seen as a decent person in your society, then it's much easier to say that than when you are. excluded when you have no job or you have no structure, when you have no purpose, when you don't have sufficient to live, or you don't know where your kids meals are coming from tomorrow. And what this, you what I think this tells us is that the problem is not an individual one. It is a social one. It brings us back to that idea that prosperity itself is social. What good does it do me to say that I am well off? that I am prosperous when all of those around me are suffering. What good does it do, you know, even actually to be healthy while those around me are unhealthy. It's not a balance. And therefore to some extent it's not resilient. And therefore from my own definition, it's not really health. So we constantly brought back to the idea that, you know, to be well, to be prosperous, to prosper in society as an individual. is an impossible task if society itself is not well. To be healthy in an unhealthy society is an enormous challenge and you're constantly fighting a system that is creating psychological ill-being, as opposed to wealth around you. I suppose in some ways that's kind of... where I feel that motivates the work that I've done over so many decades is, you know, there comes a point at which your own health, your own psychological health has to be engaged in a kind of a struggle to create the society in which you could be healthy. So, Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: and actually, you know, sometimes that has health costs in itself. But the point is that our search for individual health is always going to be thwarted by a society that is itself deeply unhealthy. And so our route through that has to also engage us in an activism in creating a healthy society. Amir Golshani: I love it. So your latest work, care economy places care at the center. If you built the economy around care rather than extraction, what would change first? Work, finance, education? What? Tim Jackson: Well, I think ultimately it would all change. mean, one of the things that even taking care at its most basic meaning, our understanding of care, as in the care sector, care workers, care work, the work of health care, that would change. would you instead of being a kind of luxury, kind of cherry on the top of the economic cake that you can only afford to put there once you've built the foundations of growth, it would be totally inverted so that you would. you would know, you would know instinctively and you would invest accordingly in the idea that without that health, your long-term prosperity is a mirage. And so we would, for example, look after our care workers properly, give workers time off to care for the elderly, for the sick, for their kids when that was needed, invest in the infrastructure of care and think of it not as a... you know, as a sort of necessary cost on society, but actually as the foundations for the economy itself. And that's long overdue, you know, the work of care and, and it's highly gendered, of course, it's, it's, it's a kind of casualty of a still very patriarchal society, that care work is so undervalued. But that that lack of valuation of care now constitutes what I think of what I think we can legitimately call an unpaid debt, a huge unpaid debt to the people who care, to the work of care, to the institutions of care. And that needs some kind of reparation. So you would, you know, shift your financial structure accordingly. Your government finances will work differently. The way that you set up working time would be would be different. The conditions of work would be different. You would also engage. And I'm not this is not an argument for an unlimited budget for the health care sector. because as we already spoke about, some of that healthcare sector is just running after the impossible dream that's being undermined Amir Golshani: All Tim Jackson: by an unhealthy food system. So you would also have to say that, you know, if you want this care to work properly, you have to look towards prevention, you have to look towards the conditions of health, you have to look towards the social determinants of health, you have to restrict the commercial determinants of health that are actually undermining us and creating this false economy that I talked about. When you you ask me that question, when anyone asked me that question, I kind of feel like this is this is such in my mind, at least, and in the sense that I'm trying to build of the care economy. It's you. It's almost like someone's asking you, well, there's not much you could do differently is there? Because until we've got money, we can't pay for the care system. So we can't put any more money into health care. It's already sucking up too much of the national budget. And I want to just turn that totally on its head. want it to... The number of things that you can and should be doing with this new compass, with this different compass, is almost infinite. You could go into any department in government and just ask the question, are these policies, are they really contributing to prosperity as health, or are they just trying to mop up the costs of our endless pursuit of prosperity as wealth? And when and sometimes you do need to mop up those costs. Sometimes there are real things that need to be done because we've created this damage in the past. But you can't allow your entire policy agenda to be driven by the need to clean up the mess of the past. You have to have, like I was calling for in Treasury, those few desks, even if it's only a few, beginning to build a different kind of vision, beginning to build that prosperity yourselves, beginning to allocate resources there, beginning to. recognise the unpaid debt, beginning to treat it as a financial investment rather than the current expenditure, for example, which would then allow you to change the rules under which government could spend into the care-based system because it treats financial investment expenditures differently from current expenditures. And that again gives you more freedom for government to do things differently. So it seems to me that I haven't really answered your question which would happen first, but what I guess I've suggested is that there's so many things to happen. Amir Golshani: No, I love it. Of course, and I really hope that some politicians and policymakers watch this episode. That would be great. So Tim Jackson: Yeah, I hope so too. That'll be good. Amir Golshani: let's talk about capitalism. I recently Tim Jackson: Uh-huh. Amir Golshani: had an episode with Seth Levine about capitalism and evolution of capitalism. Brilliant mind. That was great. Can capitalism, in your opinion, evolve into a post-growth system or does it structurally require expansion? Tim Jackson: It does structurally require expansion. I'm not arguing there's nothing capitalism couldn't do to change in the directions that I've talked about. I think there are things, but when you look at the imperatives that come through capitalism, when you look at the structures, and in particular the incentive structures, those structures do tend to drive in a particular direction. And the one thing they drive towards is the privatization of benefit and the socialization of costs and that what we've been talking about in relation to care and it's also true of environmental damage can be thought of exactly in those terms as a kind of privatisation of benefits, socialisation of costs. And when you build your institutions and your structures around that idea that it's legitimate to privatise those benefits and OK to turn a blind eye to the socialisation of costs, then you are making it incredibly difficult. to reach anything like a post-growth or a care economy. And unfortunately, those two things, privatization of benefits and socialization of costs are, if not written into the DNA of capitalism, they are very, very close to the heart of the capitalist institutions that we've inherited. So I don't wanna rule Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: out the idea that, I mean, in some places I do, mean, post-growth, which you mentioned as a book. but the subtitle is life after capitalism. It was a kind of invitation to think, know, capitalism is a socialist, a social, capitalism is a socialist system is a great line, but I'm not saying it. What I'm saying is it's a social system. And as a social system, it's got a finite shelf life. You know, we are not always gonna be living under capitalism. And so maybe it's worth spending a little bit of effort thinking what might come next. What would be the characteristics of that? Would it be more cooperative than competitive? Would it have less inequality in it? Would it be driven less by material goals? Would it have a vision of prosperity that looks slightly different? And what post-growth does really is it goes kind of up through all of those possibilities of what could be different when we allow ourselves to escape from the current social system, which is almost ubiquitous. Amir Golshani: Or maybe capitalism that is fundamentally evolved in a way to be able to meet the needs of the new era. Tim Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. Amir Golshani: Yeah. What would responsible enterprise Tim Jackson: Thank Amir Golshani: look like in a care-centered economy? Tim Jackson: Well, I think it would be reflected in all sorts of things. mean, one of the things, and I used to do this a lot with my students is to say, you know, what's the social, what's the social purpose of your enterprise? What is it that you're doing as an enterprise? And that already is, it's a very, it's a deceptively simple question because ultimately, you know, there's a, there's a vision of what enterprise is, which is that it's not social at all. The business of business is business is the Milton Friedman's kind of famous quote along with. And business means profit. And so your enterprise is what? It's a vehicle for profit. But actually, you know, there's another way of thinking about what an enterprise is and to think of it instead of a kind of profit-making vehicle as a service to society. And that's also, that's an interesting proposition, not just because it changes the way we think about enterprise. It's also an interesting revision because when you talk to entrepreneurs, particularly small medium sized entrepreneurs and one of my students did this, what you find is that what motivates them, yes of course some of it is we've got to remain profitable and we've got to have that means we've got to have profits but ultimately what motivates people is to be decent citizens in a good society in which they can provide a service. So this idea of shifting from enterprise as a profit making endeavor which you know just by digging stuff up turning it into products that you can sell to people, hoping they'll throw it away as fast as possible because that will generate you most profits. You move towards this idea that actually ultimately enterprise is about service. It's about people in the service of other people. And to be able to make that work, to have the structures that make that work, the support that makes that work, actually, and the research of my students sort of indicated this. is in line with the deepest motivations of entrepreneurs. It's not counter to them. Amir Golshani: Right, beautiful. So many argue renewable energy will allow us to grow cleanly. Do you believe green growth is realistic at a scale? Tim Jackson: You know, I mentioned to you before that, you know, when I first came into this, I was looking at the microeconomics of renewable energy and thinking, yeah, I this makes sense. This all stacks up these renewable energies. We don't need to be building huge, big power stations. We don't need to be polluting the atmosphere with coal fired power stations. These technologies kind of work. And that argument has a lot of strength to it. I mean, it's also true that when you you know, cover your land with windmills or with photovoltaic cells and you cut down forests to do it, you're creating environmental damage. It's also true that when you build photovoltaic cells, you need rare earth metals, which mean you're digging them up somewhere. It's also true that you can't make that work without batteries. For example, electric vehicles is a classic and that those batteries themselves depend on rare earth metals on select metals, which are being mined increasingly intensely in places where the impacts fall outside of the rich developed countries that can afford to buy EVs. So none of these things would come without any kind of damage. But I do feel, and I've felt this in the entire 40 years that I've been working, that we have better technologies than the ones that we instinctively have employed over the last 100 years. And therefore that is a strong idea. You're asking, can that in itself give us back the idea of growth? I don't believe it can. I mean, I believe that there are bubbles of value in renewable energy technology that people can profit from. That's probably without question. And it's been shown to be very, very financially rewarding for some companies and countries who have managed to do that. But that Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: doesn't answer all the questions. and you're still driving things forward faster than you can correct them by substituting fossil fuels with renewable energy. And what we know, you know, just in relation to climate change is that the aggregate level climate emissions are not coming down in the way that they need to be coming down, even with the attention we've given to renewable energy. And of course, that's now going backwards as well. And I think one of the reasons it's going backwards and in quite explicit reason, it's going back. in some countries and some political leaders is because it represents a threat to growth. So yeah, we can get much more growth out of the economy if we invest in things which drill, drill, drill, baby, and we don't worry about the consequences. And that's Amir Golshani: Absolutely. Tim Jackson: a classic example really. But I think your question is a good one. And my answer is a little bit nuanced by the fact that actually I was in my early career very much of the advocate for these kind of technologies and then began to see that the limits of the growth based model in which they're situated were the real, where the opposition to renewables was, but also where the opposition to all the damage that's created, whether it's a renewable energy fired economy or a fossil fuel economy, was this driving ambition towards end this economic growth. Amir Golshani: Yeah, this is very clarifying. Growth debates often intersects with population and migration, which is a big deal these days everywhere in the world, especially Tim Jackson: Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Amir Golshani: Europe and North America. know, how should we think Tim Jackson: Yeah. Amir Golshani: about immigration within a post-growth framework? Tim Jackson: That's a very interesting question. mean, there was one when I was when I was when Prosperity Without a was published in that administration, there was a very interesting foreign minister at one point called Peter Hain in the UK. And he wrote a book called The End of Foreign Policy. And what he sketched was a world in which foreign foreign policy was all about territorial ambition. And he showed he traced the chain of logic which showed that that led to, you know, unbridled growth in some places unbridled poverty in other places, ecological destruction in some places. And, and he pointed to the fact that actually when you have that ecological destruction, some of it which is caused for example, by climate change, some of it, that climate change is caused by your own emissions. And then the end result of that is uncontrollable immigration, instability in political regions where the impacts of our economy, our own economy, are being first felt. And you know, we destabilised the Middle East endlessly in pursuit of fossil fuels and we've seen the consequences of that in uncontrollable migration, a huge human suffering. whose responsibility doesn't entirely lie in despotic leaders in individual countries, it lies in part in a new world order that created conditions that were punishing in certain parts of the world. And so, you know, I haven't answered your question there. What I've said is, I guess, that in the growth-based economy, migration is one of those social costs in the chasing of privatisation of benefits. We've socialized some of those costs in destabilizing huge areas of the world where we've now created migration problems. And those migration problems are coming back to haunt us. So in a post-growth world, where do we go with that? I I do think, I suppose, you if I'm going from the point of view of my most recent book, you take the ethos of care, the ethos of care is to restore balance. That balance has to be about a sense of care for people as people. and for understanding that we should see people as people and not simply as invaders to our shores who are somehow nothing to do with us when in fact many of the problems Amir Golshani: All right. Tim Jackson: that they're trying to escape from, we were architects in those problems. We cannot afford that luxury. It's not a luxury that is moral in any sense. And so we have to look to ourselves both in terms of our responsibility for those people and towards those people. and also in terms of revising, changing, overturning some of the disastrous structures that led to that destabilization. And so I think rather than sort of saying, know, post-growth world, actually, I mean, there are some obvious things to say, like in a post-growth world, we will probably need some of those people to keep our social systems going. So just changing the idea of who can come into the country and who can't. could well be a recipe for disaster. But I'm not really making proposals at that level. I'm rather saying that there are responsibilities that arise from our own implication in the causes of the stability and the instability that's leading to those being problems that we have to take seriously. And they have to shape the way that we respond. Our sense of decency, human being to human being, our sense of decency in the structure of our institutions and our society not to go out and create those kinds of problems, to act as ambassadors for something which might be called a kind of post-growth diplomacy, if you like, which is no longer about Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: territory and the grabbing of territory. It's about principles of balance and care. Amir Golshani: I love that. We are entering an AI driven era or we have already entered that, let's say. Does artificial intelligence weaken or strengthen our dependence on growth? Tim Jackson: Ha, I think I can answer this because I had a conversation with ChatGPT about it the other day. And interestingly, know, kind of between us ChatGPT and I managed to frame this as there is no clear answer. And of course ChatGPT might well have been defending its role in AI. I suspect that's probably something of that. But I also think that there is a point that there's no clear answer to that question. much will depend on how AI develops and how it's used. So it kind of to me, you know, I'm in a sort of ambivalent situation and part of me wants to throw out the idea of AI as being a kind of meaningless technological innovation in a society that's out of balance and AI is pushing us further out of balance. But actually, you know, there are some things that some forms of algorithmic and digital technologies, which is what Jack GPT wanted me to call that category, could be of benefit to humanity if they were used in ways which were within the principles of care, within the principles of balance. And I think so it's not an easy question to answer. Under the existing structures, I think my tendency is to think that pretty much the the implications of AI in an unbalanced world, in a world that's striving for these territorial ambitions, a world that's striving for economic dominance, in a world that's situating economic gain above every other kind of relationship of human being to human being, in that kind of world, then AI does have the potential for a huge amount of danger. But if you just look at some of what is possible, I mean, another interesting excursion into chat GBT that I had was was talking about the food system, you know, and I, I punched in, I just gave it the food system revision. I can't remember what it was called. The UK had a review of some kind, which spent 10 months doing and at the end of it, it said, it got to a point where it said we're not yet at a point where we can do any policy policy prescriptions from this that needs a further inquiry. It's like What, who have you been talking to? And I kind of thought just as an experiment, I'm just going to put this into chat GBT and see what it comes out with as a list of policies. And within nanoseconds, the AI managed to develop a list of policies that all of which made sense in terms of regulating Amir Golshani: Hmm. Tim Jackson: bad behavior in the food industry, creating the right incentive structures, stimulating growth in community farming, creating the conditions of organic agriculture, blah, blah, blah. You you could Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: You could just take it and it would be a set of policies. And it took nanoseconds and the government's own report had taken 10 months to say nothing except Amir Golshani: haha Tim Jackson: that they needed more time. It's just so, so can AI do some things for it? Yes, it can. Of course it can under the right circumstances. Amir Golshani: Absolutely. thank you for sharing that. That is really interesting. You you're right. Absolutely. Your ideas are compelling, but politically challenging. What is the biggest obstacle to moving beyond GDP? Tim Jackson: I mean, it's clearly, there's huge obstacles everywhere. One of them is a financial system that is geared towards growth, incentivized towards growth, which has undue control over political processes, I would say. So I think that is a big, a a big obstacle. I would say also that behind that as an institutional obstacle lies a kind of religious, semi-religious allegiance to the idea of growth. And that's something that you can't necessarily fix just by talking about changing a few rules or roles in the financial system. That's something that has to also happen at a cultural level. there are institutional objectives, but they're kind of deeply seeded cultural objectives. Sometimes I see us as being on a kind of journey, a cultural, psychological, philosophical journey, which... you know, you can trace back and back and back to the beginning of Western civilization, the birth of Christianity, the development of benevolent, omniscient deity, the fall of that concept as being anything to organize society through when it was thrown out by evolutionary theory, the building of capitalist ideas off the back of that, which in some sense had good intentions because that structure of a know, religious deity creating the structure for society had become fragile and domineering. And the early capitalists, the early capitalists wanted to free us from that. They wanted to read democratize society. And in place of that redemocratization, of course, we came, we began to undermine our democracies through the undue influence that huge wealth generated by capitalism had on political structure. And then we found ourselves in a position where actually our industry was so successful that we created so many goods that could not be sold to people because there was no demand for it. And we led this crisis of overproduction in the 1930s, not to mention the two world wars that bridged that. And then after the second world war, we're going to stabilize this. We're going to have a rules-based order. Things are going to be okay now. We're going to fix ourselves and our problems. And we... we develop this kind of fully fledged growth oriented capitalism, which has led to all the problems that we've talked about today. But underlying it all, there is this story of a kind of a search, know, a search for something that gives us a sense of meaning and purpose. A search for something that offers the security that our own intimate knowledge of our own mortality systematically takes away. And we tried to, you know, we tried to organise religion, we tried nihilism for a while, that led to bad outcomes. We tried this new, wonderful idea that paradise is a plethora of material riches on earth that capitalism will deliver us and the growth is leading us towards all of it has gone wrong. And we're left in a different kind of desert. We're left in a kind of emptiness, still clinging to false gods. And so I do think Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: a part of the turn is a sort of turn again to get to be philosophical as a turn towards a search for meaning. Amir Golshani: Absolutely. Tim, you have explored growth, care, limits and freedom. When you hear the phrase beyond the summit, what does it mean to you? Tim Jackson: I, I, that's interesting because I, I wonder the same question when I saw the title of, of, of your, of your podcast and saw the invitation the first time, what does he mean by that? Because, you know, I have a picture in my mind of Trump in Davos in 2020. And I don't know if you saw the 2026 speech that Trump gave in Davos, which was just like totes, a man totally out of control, a man who was I would say mentally ill and certainly not mentally healthy. In Davos in 2020, he didn't give that impression. He was much more controlled. He read mostly from the script, which he didn't do in 2026. And he gave a speech which was kind of fascinating because, and he even mimicked it when he was giving the speech because he was talking about the frontier mentality. And it was interesting point in time because in Davos 2020, a couple of the speakers actually talked about post growth. One of them was the Prime Minister of Austria had actually introduced the idea of post growth into the plenary floor at Davos, which is the World Economic Forum, whose whole rationale for 50 years had been about economic growth. And then all of a sudden there was this Austrian prime minister talking about post growth because it was in the air because people were talking about. And okay, so the Austrian prime minister only introduced it more or less to damn it outright as being impractical. But Trump's vision was slightly different. Trump's response was actually this, these are the, I can't remember what he's exact saying, was it something like these are the wisdom of past doomsayers that we should ignore because they have no idea. And then he went into this kind of peeing of, praise for the frontier mentality and he was stood on the stage and was looking out into the horizon and this idea that he's and this is why your the title of your podcast is so kind of ambiguous potentially because he's looking beyond the summit he's looking to the far horizon and this frontier mentality towards the far horizon is where his attention is fixed because that is where glory lies. Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: Now, I don't know if this is the time for me to ask you whether that's what you mean by beyond the summit, but I do it what I suppose it occurred to me is that there several a couple of other ways of thinking beyond the summit. One of the one of them is that the summit is a material thing. It's a material place beyond the summit is not necessarily material. It's it's immaterial goals. It is potentially that glory that the frontier mentality is yearning for. but it's a very different kind of glory than the one that Trump is trying to instantiate in material wealth. And I think in that sense, it's a much more, let me say defensible, but also inspirational idea that beyond that material summit, there is a glory that we are to some extent, the inheritors of or potentially the inheritors of. And then I suppose there's another one which is, you know, another interpretation for me potentially. I'm just guessing here. I mean, I don't know what you're, I'd love to hear, I'd love you to tell me. Amir Golshani: Right. Tim Jackson: But I guess another, you know, another sort of similar idea is that beyond the summit is you don't know where you are. You're in uncharted territory. Amir Golshani: The reason that I actually ask people because I leave it open for individual interpretation, know, so because everyone Tim Jackson: Hmm. Amir Golshani: has got their own way of looking at things. For me, the whole journey is climbing a summit. But Tim Jackson: Yeah. Amir Golshani: when you get to the peak, to the summit of this journey in life, so for some people can be, you know, the highest achievement in their career. you know, whatever it is, then what is beyond that? Are you getting back? Are you moving forward? What Tim Jackson: Yeah, that's very interesting. So how do you get down again? Amir Golshani: are you looking for? And then searching for meaning Tim Jackson: Yeah. Yeah. Amir Golshani: in life is the ultimate purpose that I came to this. Because it's Tim Jackson: Yeah. Yeah. Amir Golshani: not, as you mentioned, it's kind of not black and white to say it means this or it doesn't mean that, you know? So it's... Tim Jackson: Hmm. Amir Golshani: Everyone can look at it in different way, but I really love your definition. Tim Jackson: Yeah, that's fascinating. Thank you, Amir. Amir Golshani: Yeah, Tim, thank you for reminding us that prosperity isn't just about having more, but about living well with care, with courage, and with responsibility. It's been a true honor to have you on Beyond the Summit. Tim Jackson: It's been a lovely conversation, thanks, Amir. Amir Golshani: Thank you.