Economics for Rebels

Today’s guest, Robert Costanza is hardly unknown to anyone who is vaguely familiar with ecological economics. While we could fill entire seasons discussing the topics he has covered in his works, in this episode we are discussing his latest book: Addicted to Growth: Societal Therapy for a Sustainable Wellbeing Future where he applies the analogy of addiction to our contemporary problems. Humanity is addicted to economic growth and like true addicts, even if we accept that it is ruining us by fuelling climate change, mass extinction and a wide range of social crises, we don’t want to quit. With today’s guest, we discuss if and how we can find the appropriate therapy to collectively come off the substance. Hosted by Alexandra Köves. Edited by Aidan Knox.

Ecological economists face true hardships when coming up against the long-lived myth of how markets can solve everything: from personal and collective wellbeing to ecological sustainability. But – of course - only if we leave them alone to work their magic. But how has this myth been created and why does it hold so strong despite all evidence underpinning its effectiveness? Our guest today, historian Naomi Oreskes will explain us in this episode. Hosted by Alexandra Köves. Edited by Aidan Knox.

Some key mainstream critiques of postgrowth economics revolve around labour, and what the labour market would look like in a postgrowth economy, with the common perception being that economic contraction tends to be associated with unemployment, and therefore that a postgrowth economy is socially unsustainable. But, if we are to transition to a postgrowth world for ecological reasons or because of secular stagnation, ecological economics needs to present a compelling story about what people’s jobs and lives could look like in this world. This episode’s guest Dr Ben Gallant is an expert in understanding and modelling postgrowth futures for the labour force, here to guide us through what employment in a postgrowth economy could look like. Hosted by Sophus zu Ermgassen. Edited by Aidan Knox.

Ecological economics is about understanding the entanglement of economic, political, social, and ecological systems and about finding ways to reduce the economy’s overwhelmingly aggressive power and dominance above allothers even if it is a supposed to be just a subsystem of them. While on an unreflective level we know that geopolitics is governed by economic interests, all too often we try and understand wars and power games only in terms of political or social processes. As an example, the monstrous war in Gaza has been predominantly explained by settler colonisation or Israeli lobbying power but has rarely been discussed from the wider perspective of how our dependence on oil fuels such atrocities. Our guest today, Adam Hanieh explains how the fossil fuel industry influences our geopolitical realities. Hosted by Alexandra Köves. Edited by Aidan Knox.

It is often argued that it was market-based capitalism that made agriculture so efficient that it enabled the eradication of hunger globally. This claim is shadowed by the incredible environmental degradation that was caused by industrial agriculture in the last centuries. Hence, due demand arises that we should keep the world fed through sustainable means. Our guest today, Pablo Tittonell claims that this is possible through agroecology where we combine agricultural and ecological knowledge to create food while taking care of nature’s amazingly creative and generous provisioning and regenerative systems. Hosted by Alexandra Köves. Edited by Aidan Knox.