Why economic growth promises are a lie, say rebel economists
UK governments have tried many approaches to boost the economy: spending more, spending less, cutting red tape, Brexit, levelling up. Yet none of them managed to raise growth per person. In the latest episode of Radical Thinking with Aditya Chakrabortty, rebel economists Karel Williams and Sukhdev Johal argue that chasing growth is a fool’s dream and won’t improve your life.
Chakrabortty has championed their work for years in the Guardian. The conversation explores what comes after growth for towns and suburbs, drawing on a 2016 report from south Wales. They describe a UK that is highly unequal and increasingly stagnant. Williams and Johal are part of the Foundational Economy Collective, which puts its analysis into freely available working papers, bypassing the slow and costly academic publishing system. One working paper examined the cost of living crisis. More recently, they focused on the broken water system of England and Wales in their book Murky Water: Challenging an Unsustainable System.
