A Rising Tide Won’t Lift All Boats: moving from growth to wellbeing - blog series

So often the subject of consensus support across the political spectrum, the media, and much of civil society, economic growth as a policy objective receives insufficient scrutiny in mainstream political debates. Given the extent to which the current UK government has privileged growth within its narrative of change, such scrutiny has never been more crucial. For a number of reasons, a policy agenda centred around growth will not address the intensifying social and ecological challenges of our time. 

This three-part blog series offers a critical analysis of economic growth as an objective of government policy, beginning by considering some of the social and environmental harms caused by growth. It then explores the decreasing feasibility of growth in the current economic context, and the current UK government’s confused and financialised model of growth.