Features

It’s Time to Bust the Myth That Endless Economic Growth Is Good for Us!

Published

5 years ago

2021/05/30

Sahan Weerasooriya

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” — Edward Abbey

by Selvam Canagaratna

Robert R. Raymond, writing in Truthout magazine on May 21 noted that in order to maintain the endless expansion and infinite growth that capitalist economies require, our economy demands ever increasing levels of extraction, production and consumption. In fact, economists and politicians generally believe that , meaning that the economy needs to double every 20 years — that’s twice as much of everything 20 years from NOW — and then twice as much as that 20 years later!

It’s not hard to see how this kind of exponential, infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet — and it’s no surprise that we’re seeing ecosystems collapse. However, it’s not just an environmental concern. In his latest book, Post Growth: Life after Capitalism, ecological economist Tim Jackson explores how the ideology of growth permeates our minds and our societal institutions in insidious ways which end up making us miserable.

Truthout

spoke with Jackson about why this ideology is so pernicious, why it is holding us back from truly flourishing as a species, and what a post-growth world might look like.

Raymond:

To start, I’m wondering if you could lay out the main arguments you write about in your book.

Tim Jackson:

The main argument in the book is that a world after growth and after capitalism could be a richer place. In some sense, both growth and capitalism, although they’ve contributed to progress, have also swindled us. They’ve sold us a false dream about what progress means and even about what human satisfaction means. And in locking us into an iron cage of consumerism, they’ve prevented us from seeing the depths of the human spirit and the possibilities for human fulfillment and for human progress.

One of the main points I wanted to make is the idea of limits — the idea that growth in the conventional sense is limited and the planet is limited — and turn that idea on its head and say that you [can] think of limits not as a constraint, not as a prison that keeps all of our possibilities limited to the amount of materials or the amount of money that we have or the possibilities for expansion of the economy, but actually as an idea of a doorway, a gateway to a different world.

We should think of limits as teaching us, not about what is bounded, but what is unbounded. Those unbounded parts of our lives, those unbounded possibilities, our endless creativity, our ability always to find places where we can dedicate our energy to human progress, to social connection, to relationship, and to a sense of meaning and purpose. That’s a core idea in the book, that beyond limits lies this expanse where there’s an even deeper fulfillment to be found.

In the book, you describe how our leaders have developed an “allegiance to the great God of Growth.” Can you describe why capitalism is reliant on growth? Is it an essential part of the system? In practical terms, what are some of the consequences of our reliance on infinite growth?

You can think of capitalism broadly as a system that privileges the idea of selfish profit-seeking behaviour at the core of the organization of our economy. And that profit-seeking behaviour is supposed to lead to efficiency — and sometimes does lead to efficiency, and sometimes even benefits society — but it works better in one set of activities than it works in another. It works quite well when you’re talking about the efficiency with which we use materials to build products and then expand our markets to sell them to other people. And the difficulty is that once you’re on that particular path, you’re almost immediately locked into a process that says, “Well, we get more and more efficient and we expand further and we invest our proceeds into technologies which make us more efficient again.”

And you find yourself very quickly in a process in which expansion becomes integral to the system itself.

Where this goes wrong is — apart from the planetary implications of accumulating more and more stuff and building more and more things and consuming more and more products — there’s an inbuilt inequality there because the few people that are able to accumulate, because they own capital resources, can make themselves much richer. But it doesn’t necessarily always trickle down to the poorest in society. And in fact, in the last 40 or 50 years, we’ve actually seen the opposite.

The rich got much richer and the poorest people in society found their wages stagnant, their livelihoods insecure, their work precarious — particularly in advanced economies.

How has COVID informed your understanding of our growth-based economy, and what has it revealed about the shortcomings of our current economic system?

One of the most striking lessons of the pandemic has been that it’s exactly those people, those precarious livelihoods, who turned out to be the most critical when it came to protecting our lives in the face of the coronavirus. That is, the care workers, the nurses, the teachers, the frontline workers, the people who delivered goods and services when we couldn’t get out, the people who cleaned … all of our homes and offices, the people whose livelihoods had been squeezed by. We forgot about the people who just sustained us, the people who nurtured us. So that economy of care was the one that had gone missing over several decades because of the way that capitalism has this locked-in drive towards expansion and profiteering and productivity.

That to me is a deep structural problem in the way that we’ve organized our economies. And we can think about taxes to redistribute the wealth that’s too concentrated, we can think about mechanisms or technologies to change the impact on the climate. But right at the heart of that is this mechanism that systematically demotes the importance of some of the most socially valuable people in our society. And I think that’s the biggest challenge that we have to face as we come out of the pandemic, and as we think about life after the pandemic, and as we think about life after capitalism.

What would a post-growth economy look like, for us in the West, but also for the Global South? There are some on the left who advocate for “growth agnosticism,” which is a stance that acknowledges that some parts of the world still require some form of economic growth. What are your thoughts on that?

I do think it’s important to be a little bit differentiated — there’s no one-size-fits-all vision. And I also happen to believe, and I think the evidence really supports this, that in the poorest places in the world some income growth is essential. When you look at the relationship between income and life expectancy, say, what you find is that as you go from having virtually nothing to around about $15,000 per capita, you get these vast increases in life expectancy and educational participation, you get a vast reduction in infant mortality and maternal morbidity. And even things like happiness increase very quickly from zero income to around about that $15,000 mark.

That’s real evidence that investing in and increasing incomes in the poorest countries is a good thing — there are places where incomes need to rise. And then you look at the data past that $15,000 per capita point across countries and you find a really bizarre phenomenon, which is that the prosperity gains, the gain in life expectancy, for example, the gain in terms of lower infant mortality, those gains really start to tail off, and in some cases, they even go into reverse. So, you get these perverse situations where you have very rich economies like the UK or the US with life expectancies which are lower than in some poorer countries. It points us in the direction of the kind of initiatives that Cuba, Costa Rica or Chile have taken. This data really tells us something critical. It tells us that prosperity — quality of life, life that we have to take and the places where they need to be taken.

It goes together with this idea, which is another core idea in the book, about balance. When you have a deficiency of something, then having a bit more of that makes sense. Growth makes sense. When you have an excess of something, having more of it actually takes you into a worse position. And the problem with capitalism is we tend not to see where that point of balance lies, we tend to miss it because it’s continually driving forward, continually expanding, continually lionizing the idea of more — when sometimes less is what’s needed.

We’ve been talking about a lot of really big concepts — a lot of interesting ideas of where we could go as a society and a lot of the challenges and difficulties that exist right now in the way that we’ve organized our economic systems. But to zoom in a little bit, what are some of the practical paths forward in order to begin moving towards that balance you’re talking about?

In my last book, Prosperity Without Growth, I presented a threefold distillation of this. First, establish the limits, because it’s the limits that tell you how you can afford to live. So we must make clear what the limits are: like the emission pathways that will lead us to a safe place in relation to climate, the limits of how much oil or gas we can afford to dig out of the ground, the limits around material implications of our lives, or how much can we afford to put into the ocean. We have to make those limits part of our accounting processes so that we can see the natural frame within which we live.

And then there is my second main theme which is to fix the economics, because the economics are profoundly broken in exactly that sense that we were talking about before. That, for example, the most important people in society are very poorly rewarded and mistreated by capitalism. And so, the economics that says that a financial sector worker deserves 1,000 times the income level of someone who is saving lives on the front line of the pandemic, is broken.

So, putting in place mechanisms that guarantee the basic services that we need in society, like health and education, putting in mechanisms that pay people decent salaries, putting in place mechanisms that perhaps provide, as we did in some countries during the pandemic, a kind of basic income that allows people to actually undertake care work in the home — unpaid work, that contributes massively to society. There are so many different ways of reconfiguring our economic incentives and they have to play a part in how we make this transition.

And then my third strand is to change the social logic. We live in a logic that dysfunctionally encourages us into endless anxiety in order to promote the sense that we are only complete if we go out shopping, if we consume, and that our only satisfactions are to be had through that role in society. It’s a poor understanding of our psychology. We deliberately inculcated it — we’ve encouraged that view of ourselves in order to have the people that we need within the system to [continually] go out shopping so we can continue to make stuff so that we can keep the economy going. [A new] social logic demands that we think differently about who we are; it demands that we reframe our idea of ourselves.

There’s a huge potential lying there waiting for us to lead more satisfying lives, lives of action and creativity and engagement and social concern that are deeply fulfilling and that offer us this space where we are no longer trashing the planet for the sake of the next latest material craze. So, in other words, I’m passionate about this idea that beyond capitalism is a richer world, a more fulfilling world — as well as one that is less damaging to the planet and to other people.

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Features

Eastern University and the making of a culture of peace

Published

21 hours ago

2026/09/29

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Jehan Perera

There is an important change in the way peace is being understood in Sri Lanka. The notion that peacebuilding is not simply the responsibility of governments, politicians and peace organisations, but is also a responsibility of educational institutions, appears to be permeating the consciousness of at least a section of the academic community. This was visible on International Peace Day at an event held at Eastern University by the Faculty of Health-Care Sciences. The event was unusual not least because the medical and nursing faculty of the university had decided that peacebuilding was relevant to its academic and professional responsibilities.

Peacebuilding has too often been treated as something undertaken after conflict, when the fighting has stopped and the immediate task is to rebuild relationships between communities. But peace cannot be sustained by governments and peace organisations alone. If it is to become long lasting, the values and practices of peace have to become part of the institutions through which a society educates its younger generations. Universities and other educational institutions are therefore important to peacebuilding. They are among the places where the foundations of a culture of peace can either be built or neglected.

The experience of the Faculty of Health-Care Sciences at Eastern University provides a practical example of what this can mean. Led by its Dean, Prof Thillainathan Sathaananthan, the faculty organised an event which went beyond the ordinary academic scope of a medical faculty. University academics are experts in writing project proposals and applying for research grants. On this occasion, the members of the Faculty of Health-Care Sciences used those skills to apply for a UNESCO grant that they won to conduct an International Peace Day event. The significance lies less in the Rs 200,000 grant than in the decision to use the university’s institutional capacity and resources to invest in peacebuilding. The event at Eastern University needs to be understood as more than a successful university programme. It represents a possible paradigm shift in peace thinking.

Institutional Commitment

The Peace Day event obtained the support of the university administration, including Vice Chancellor Prof P Peratheepan, and reached out to secondary schools in the vicinity to mobilise their attendance. The event itself was meticulously organised. There were cultural items including traditional and modern dance and song in the three languages, performed by combinations of solo, duet and multiple singers, dancers and actors drawn in part from nearby secondary schools. There was a panel discussion by senior academics on the general theme of peacebuilding and how to prepare for it. A discussion among the students followed, where each student spoke on behalf of a religion that was not theirs. This is significant because peacebuilding cannot remain an idea discussed by specialists at conferences. It has to become part of the way institutions educate and prepare people for life in a plural society.

The Faculty of Health-Care Sciences at Eastern University has provided a model through its Peace Medicine course modules that were introduced to the curricular as a compulsory core course over 10 years ago. Two senior academics, Dr Kuveriel Eliyas Karunakaran and Dr Thillainathan Sathaananthan, have written a book on “Peace Medicine- A Health Care Concern” that was published five years ago. Its Peace Medicine Module integrates principles of medical ethics, compassion, equity, social justice and community engagement into health education and practice. In his introduction, former Vice Chancellor of Eastern University, Prof T Jayasingam noted “This book is an introduction to a theme which had already been operating in the Faculty of Health Care Sciences as a course.”

Doctors, nurses and health workers know better than anyone the harm that war and violence does. They are the people who treat the wounds and trauma that violence leaves behind. In a hospital, a patient is not asked what their religion or ethnicity is before they are treated. Health care is one of the places where peace is practised every day. The Faculty has therefore found a way of connecting its professional responsibilities with the wider social responsibility of peacebuilding. The question is whether this experience can be replicated throughout the country, at universities and at other educational institutions, so that peacebuilding becomes part of the consciousness of education itself. If that happens on a sufficient scale, it can begin to generate a culture of peace that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.

Local Action

The Eastern University event corresponded closely to the United Nations theme for this year’s International Day of Peace, “Invest in Peace – For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day”, which honours the “everyday architects of peace”, people driving local action, laying the groundwork for stability and building lasting peace from the ground up. The emphasis on investment is important. An investment means that something is put in: time, courage and resources. There is no more violent conflict in Sri Lanka today. But the absence of war does not automatically produce a culture of peace. The factors that fed the country’s conflict have not disappeared from the world. Racism, corruption and the violation of laws and human rights are the raw materials of conflict. So too are unresolved grievances, discrimination and the failure to recognise the suffering of others.

A country that does not deal with its past does not escape it. The past can return in the next generation. This is why the experience of Eastern University needs to be replicated countrywide, both at universities and at other educational institutions. The objective should not be to turn every academic discipline into peace studies. Rather, peacebuilding needs to become part of the consciousness of education itself. Eastern University shows that a medical faculty can develop Peace Medicine. A law faculty can examine the relationship between justice, rights and peace. Faculties of education can prepare teachers to work in diverse communities, while the humanities and social sciences can examine the different narratives through which communities understand their histories. Every institution can find its own way of making peacebuilding relevant to what it teaches.

Sri Lanka has had many declarations, pledges and programmes in the past. What matters is whether these produce changes in behaviour and institutional practice. Peacebuilding requires confronting difficult issues rather than avoiding them. It requires respect for different identities, but also engagement across those identities. It requires dealing with grievances in the present while also addressing unresolved issues from the past. It requires truth, accountability, reparations and guarantees of non-recurrence. It requires people to learn that the rights of another community do not diminish their own rights. The International Peace Day event at Eastern University was evidence of a change in the way at least some academics in a part of the country deeply affected by war are thinking about their responsibilities. Peace needs to be invested in and the most important investment will be in the minds of those who will inherit the future.

Features

Quality assured education commodities

Published

21 hours ago

2026/09/29

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Ahilan Kadirgamar

I have always noticed the little paper tags that are inside the packaging of some products that say quality assured or quality control. I often wonder who might have checked the product and stamped that tag, but I also forget the tag soon enough. Decades later, when I entered academia, I was taken aback by the emphasis placed on quality assurance in our universities. It is not something that could be forgotten and done away with; the entire university system is obsessed with quality assurance.

Beginning with the staff induction programme, quality assurance is drilled into the newly recruited lecturers. It is the norm, not seen as doing any harm and only trying to improve quality. It is accepted as given, and not questioned. Quality Assurance Cells and Committees are omnipresent and hover above the Departments and, at times, even the Faculty Boards. Quality Assurance reviews are feared by the Deans and Vice Chancellors. University life itself seems secondary to the rule of quality assurance. What do we make of this system of quality assurance and what are its implications for our university system?

Corporate speak

Universities globally have been going through major changes with neoliberal education policies. In many countries, universities increasingly became corporatised to be run like businesses in the 1980s. As state support for universities declined, cost cutting became the norm. They started hiring adjunct or part-time staff. Many public non-fee levying universities around the world began to charge fees. Decade by decade, tuition fees became more and more exorbitant, forcing students to take student loans. The total student debt in the United States now stands at close to US$ 2 trillion; which is about 20 times the GDP of Sri Lanka. As the higher education landscape transformed in the West, university administrations began to recruit Presidents, Vice Chancellors and administrative officials with corporate backgrounds and experience.

Such corporatisation of universities in the West has since been imported into countries like Sri Lanka, introducing a new corporate vocabulary, including quality assurance, graduate competencies, programme outcomes, intended learning outcomes, etc. University teaching has become secondary to documenting so-called outcomes. The teacher-student relationship, the environment of the lecture hall and even administering the university have been over-determined by the processes of ensuring quality. How did such major changes come about in such a short time? Indeed, academics of just two generation ago, would never have heard of these terms and processes in the Sri Lankan university system.

World Bank Trojan horse

Since the early 2000s there have been a number of World Bank projects that have drastically changed the character of Sri Lankan universities. Quality assurance as a central agenda within universities, and many other changes to the working of our universities, came through these World Bank initiatives. The Improving Relevance and Quality of Undergraduate Education (IRQUE) project and Higher Education for the 21st Century (HETC) project were two such earlier projects that set up the Quality Assurance and Accreditation Unit (QAAU) under the University Grants Commission (UGC) and established systematic quality assurance reviews for state universities. The public often thinks these are grants from the World Bank to modernise our universities. However, they are not grants but loans.

The most recent such project, Accelerating Higher Education Expansion and Development (AHEAD) is a US$ 100 million loan from the World Bank implemented from 2018 to 2023, which consolidated the quality assurance structures from the earlier projects. Furthermore, these projects are implemented with tremendous arrogance, prioritising their implementation over all other concerns in the universities, when the project over six years for example accounts for just one fourth of our budget allocation for universities this year.

The AHEAD project drastically changed course curricula, sought to increase student enrolment in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) disciplines, commercialise the university research agenda and create university-business linkages. All of this was pushed to supposedly help us face development challenges. We have heard the ideological attack on our universities and even students claiming they are “unemployable graduates”. These changes to our higher education system were supposedly going to create jobs and increase employment.

The irony of the AHEAD project is that just as it was ending in 2023, apparently after having reached its targets, the Sri Lankan economy was collapsing. The World Bank often gets the direction of causality wrong. It is the economy that creates jobs for graduates, and not the training or kind of graduates that create jobs. It is decades of World Bank policies, and those of its ideological twin the IMF, that have led to such high youth unemployment, not only in Sri Lanka but also in many other countries in the global South.

Sri Lanka entered an IMF agreement in March 2023 and started a new Country Partnership Framework with the World Bank in June 2023. These programmes have little to say about, and actively discourage, government initiatives that aim to create an industrial policy or an employment creation policy. Instead, they push for austerity measures, which not only restrict the allocation for education among other sectors, but also end up contracting the economy to the detriment of increasing employment. Their goal is the commercialisation of higher education, to make universities into businesses and run them like factories.

In this context, the ideology of quality assurance is powerful. The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), whose different standards are necessary for marketing, is the institution that came up with the concept of “quality assurance”. It promoted quality assurance as a process of identifying defected products. Therefore, when the World Bank promotes this conceptual framing, our students are, in fact, seen as products on the assembly line, with quality assurance processes aiming to prevent the release of defected products from the university system. For the US$ 100 million we borrowed for the AHEAD project and the many more million dollars in similar World Bank projects, there is no evidence of increased employment of graduates.

Commodity fetishism

Over a century and a half ago, Karl Marx critiqued the economic analysis prevalent at that time that associated some inherent or monetary value for commodities without considering the social relations that underlie the production of those commodities. Marx called this commodity fetishism. Furthermore, he theorised that such commodity fetishism was also a reason for the alienation of human beings from the world. If our labour and what we produce is seen devoid of the social relations that underlie them, we lose our connection with the people and the world. In this process we become alienated from what we produce and the world.

We are now in a world where our students themselves are fetishised as commodities for the market. Universities are no longer communities concerned about knowledge and human growth, but mere factories producing commodities, which have to be produced without defects to be marketed. In this way, quality assurance has become the cause for the alienation of students, academics and our universities themselves, from the larger relationship with our economy and society.

Our university system does need reform. It is grossly underfunded and not providing the financial support and facilities for our students. Universities have become hierarchical spaces without the academic freedom and democratic ethos necessary for producing knowledge. Academics and students need to engage more with their communities to make their learning and research meaningful, not to mention their contribution to and integration with society. However, when it comes to even questions of governance and regulation of the universities, such concerns are merely reduced to improving quality. In our contemporary times, this singular focus on quality assurance, as opposed to addressing the larger structural issues, is crippling our universities. There may be no way out, but to put back quality assurance where it started, those little tags on goods, to perhaps be noticed but quickly forgotten.

Ahilan Kadirgamar is a political economist and Senior Lecturer, University of Jaffna.

(Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies)

Features

Thailand’s biggest new global star …

Published

21 hours ago

2026/09/29

Sahan Weerasooriya

The entertainment scene, globally, is agog with excitement, and, why not!

Yes, a new global star has emerged … from Thailand, and she hit the headlines by winning America’s Got Talent.

Rattikarn Amloy, known to millions by her stage name Nene Royal, was crowned the winner of America’s Got Talent (AGT) Season 21 at the live finale at Pasadena Civic Auditorium, California, taking home the USD 1 million grand prize.

The 16-year-old rocker, from the holiday island of Phuket (I’ve been to Phuket, courtesy Tourism Authority of Thailand), has struck a power chord around the world, and is the first Thai national ever to win the hit NBC show.

She beat nine other finalists, including runner-up magician Geno Ploeger, after a blistering final performance.

Nene’s story is pure rock and roll fairy-tale. She says she picked up a guitar at age seven, fell in love at the first chord, and taught herself mostly by watching videos online. That dedication earned her a music scholarship to Kajonkiet International School Phuket.

Her audition at America’s Got Talent — a swaggering, shredding rendition of The Cranberries’ classic ‘Zombie’ — exploded online, amassing over 200 million views across AGT’s platforms, more than any act this season.

She kept wowing: ‘Hysteria’ by Muse, then ‘Black Hole Sun’ by Soundgarden which earned her Spice Girl Mel B’s Golden Buzzer, sending her straight to the live shows.

For the final, she unleashed ‘Seven Nation Army’ by The White Stripes. Judge Howie Mandel shouted: “You should win. Give her the million, America.” Mel B praised her “mysterious, mystical stage presence”.

And for the grand finale, she lived every teen rocker’s dream — performing on stage, alongside US rock giants Linkin Park.

When host Terry Crews announced her as winner, the teenager collapsed to the stage floor in tears. “I’m very happy and you know I’m emotional right now,” she said.

And Thailand erupted. Her school held watch parties, posting: “You did it, congratulations, champion. We are so proud of you.”

Even Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul sent a personal congratulation. He had earlier hosted Nene at Government House in July, where she played guitar while he sang a Thai rock song. His office said her talent “brought pride to Thai people.”

Corporate Thailand also rallied behind her — Charoen Pokphand Foods, owned by billionaire Dhanin Chearavanont, even rented a giant billboard in Times Square, New York, to cheer her on.

With her blistering guitar solos, rock-ballad shrieks and fearless spirit, little Nene Royal has just become Thailand’s biggest new global star.

What’s more, this amazing teenager will be bringing her powerful vocals, guitar skills and signature rock-metal style to the stage, as opening act, before one of the world’s biggest rock bands, America’s Avenged Sevenfold, in Singapore, on 13 October.

Unfortunately, we are still to see a local artiste, grab the spotlight, on a global scale … like Thailand’s Nene.

Yes, they do shine, but mostly on social media, and that, too, with the aid of AI (Artificial Intellegence).