I’m in the midst of doing research, teaching, and outreach activities on a set of questions around economic growth and its relationship to what we value. My research team has Tim Jackson visiting tomorrow, who will give a talk on postgrowth economics and also talk a bit about his new book, The Care Economy. The main claim of that book is that the economy should not be about welfare understood as GDP per capital, with the corresponding economic policy goal being economic growth. Rather, the economy should be about people’s health (using the WHO definition, which I interpret as ‘well-being’), and hence economic policy should be about what we do to preserve and improve our health, which is care – care for ourselves, for others, for the planet including its ecosystems that allows us to live well.

Now, contrast this with the first “mission” taken from the election manifesto of the Dutch VVD, which is the Dutch right-wing party, which sees itself as the defender of classical liberal values, democracy, rule of law and so forth. (note aside: many critical commentators see the VVD increasingly as a populist extreme-right party, but I won’t look into that yawning gap now).

The first mission of the VVD is: Radical Economic Growth. [click to continue…]