Sustainable Development Commissions and Redefining Prosperity

Redefining Prosperity: This was brought home to me at the launch of the Sustainable Development Commissions inquiry, Redefining Prosperity, which explored the relationship between economic growth and sustainability. So this is what sustainability means, fumed one disgruntled Treasury official. Going back to live in caves. This visceral response served as a foundation for my work at the commission, prompting me to frame our entire inquiry as a careful attempt to unravel the dilemma of growth . Beneath the dynamics of unemployment and the pervasive logic of consumerism, it was disconcerting to find an even deeper cause, a kind of existential angst about our place in the world, according to The Guardian. Politicians love this kind of rhetoric. But is it too demanding to expect something better from science? Enlightenment thinkers never intended progress to be a relentless expansion of desire. They suggested rather that society could learn to improve itself through a critical attention to the world around us and to our own place within it. We learned over time that this scrutiny could never be entirely dispassionate. But neither should it substitute dogma for careful inquiry and Rethinking prosperity is a vital task because our prevailing vision of the good life and the economics intended to deliver it have both come badly unstuck. Financial markets are unstable; inequality is rising ; and despite the 500,000 or so people who took to the streets before Tuesdays UN Climate Summit in New York, tackling climate change still faces a frustrating lack of progress . If this were not enough, the proposition that more is always better has signally failed to deliver , particularly in the affluent west. But questioning these values is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. Five years of austerity policy has done nothing to assuage that anxiety. When David Cameron announced that he was putting his cabinet on a war footing in the global race for growth , you could almost smell the fear of failure that haunts us all: a fear so powerful we would rather throw ourselves on the mercy of global competition than stop for a second to scrutinise what truly brings us prosperity and revise our economics to fit it. A global race means an hour of reckoning for countries like ours, warned the Tory leader. Sink or swim. Do or decline. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.