 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Circular Metabolism podcast. I'm your host, Ari Steed, from Metabolism of Cities. In this podcast, we interview researchers, thinkers, policymakers, and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our cities and how to reduce their environmental impact in a socially just and context-specific way. In the last episodes, we explored some alternative societal and economic models, such as degrowth, living well within limits, perma-circularity, and we continue our quest by looking into post-growth. Today is a special day. I have the pleasure to talk with Tim Jackson about his new book, Post-Growth, Life After Capitalism, which I had the opportunity to receive from a political press. And I wanted to introduce Tim, because you are, of course, a very versatile person. You are an ecological economist, but you also are a writer and a play writer. Since 2016, you have been the director of the Center of Understanding Sustainable Prosperity, so CUSP. And you have degrees in mathematics, in philosophy, in physics, so quite a happy mix that I'm very curious to talk about later on. I'm glad you think that's a happy mix, Ari Steed. It's perhaps a rather strange mix for an economist. Well, I think this tells a lot about how you write, as well. And you are the author, of course, of Prosperity Without Growth, which is a book that has influenced a lot of people, including me. So I read it 10 years ago, back when it was a report before it was a book. And it helped me kind of explore with the relationship between material flows, GDP, prosperity, and how they're interlinked. And so I had the pleasure to read this book, which it's a mix between history of economy, capitalism, science, philosophy, and a manifesto of how to build the next economy. So it's a really inspiring book. And you can find quotes of the Beatles, of Boltzmann, of Aristotle, Shakespeare, Stuart Mille, and many others in order to better understand what the good life is and what motivates us. So with all that being said, thank you very much, Tim, for being part of this podcast. And congratulations on your inspiring book. Thank you. Could you perhaps just give a short introduction of yourself, tell us a bit more about the rationale behind this book? Yeah, I guess in a way, I started out with secular economy and writing about secular economy, I guess kind of back in the late 1980s, early 1990s. I wrote a book in the mid 1990s called Material Concerns, which really tried to draw together a lot of the technological understanding of a secular economy and situated it in our sort of search for the good life as well, if you like. And it was really out of that work and out of my sort of exploration of the limits of technology that I began to question the economic model more and more. And I found myself in the early 2000s as economics commissioner on the Sustainable Development Commission, which reported to the UK Prime Minister. And I sat down very with the chair of that commission and said, you know, what should I best spend my time on while I'm in the commission? And the results of that actually was prosperity without growth. It was kind of, we both decided it was a good time to have a serious look at the most obvious tension that we face as a human species, which is an expanding economy into a finite planet doesn't go. And it's almost so simple, you know, that kids can understand it and certainly lay people can understand it. It's generally harder for politicians and economists. Because of the devil by somehow, yeah. Yeah, but also because economists have a very different view, they're not rooted so much in the physical world and they think that economic value isn't necessarily rooted in the physical world either. And they do points up to a point that's true. Value is not the same thing as material throughput. And therefore, if you can continually dematerialize your economy, make it lighter and lighter, then you do have a chance in principle, you have a chance of expanding your economy without trashing the planet. The difficulty is we've never done it. The challenge of doing it is absolutely enormous. And almost all of the triggers of the economy push in the wrong direction. And so that's really, you know, when I came to write Prosperity Without Grace, that was kind of the analysis that I developed during that. I had lots of mathematics in there, lots of looking at statistics, lots of thinking about the data, lots of empirical work. It was written as a policy report for a prime minister. Now, I'm not saying that prime minister was very happy to receive the report. He wasn't at all. In fact, just before it went out, I had a phone call from someone close to the prime minister's office. He told me that he'd gone ballistic. So it was not a welcome report at all. But nonetheless, it set out a, it began a sort of conversation actually. I think that people have been wanting to have. So even though, you know, our policy paymasters, if you like, were not very pleased to see the report and kind of wished it would go away, there came an enormous audience for that report suddenly out of nowhere after a week or so of complete dead silence, deafening silence in which the policy makers tried to pretend it wasn't there. And after that, it just got downloaded, you know, over and over again by all sorts of people all over the world who wanted to have that conversation about whether a growth-based economy is really the right direction of travel. What else is there? How do we manage that tension and really think differently about the kind of society that we want to have? But as I say, it was a policy report to policy makers. And so it was written in policy language. And a few years ago, a couple of years ago, I had a conversation with someone for whom, like you, that report had been very influential. He sort of said to me, that Tim is absolutely great. This kind of changed the way I think about my work. In fact, he left his job because of, not sure he thanks me for that, but he left his job from having read the book and sort of said, but I think you need to make this more accessible to more people. And so post-grace is partly about that. It's partly actually a response to that conversation and a sort of recognition actually that the policy language is not always the most accessible for ordinary people and that actually there's another job to be done, which is to think about our lives from the perspective of ordinary everyday people who don't think in policy terms, don't want data. I remember my mum saying to me at one point, well, there's a lot of graphs in it, aren't there, Tim? And I was like, yeah, mum, that's the point. But actually, for someone who was an intelligent human being who could understand the philosophical points, actually those that way of talking gets in the way. And I wanted to bypass that. I wanted post-grace to be a book which talked about ideas and talked about philosophies, but did it in a way that told stories that people could understand and that connected them therefore to what I think is actually a long, long train of thought that there are better ways to live. There's a different way of organising society that it isn't just all expand, expand. And neither is it all fight, fight, fight. It's not all about competition. And I wanted post-grace to really to draw those together and to present, if you like, a portrait of a different way of thinking about society. But it's funny, yeah, I think that the prosperity without growth also helped people like me which were very data oriented, very dry to get a glimpse of hope out of, because we have reports since the 1970s with limits of growth and all of that that tell us that we're, well, we cannot continue in the same way. So that was a given, but you added the word prosperity. You added the word wellbeing. You added some extra notions that give us hope that tells us, well, we're fighting for something. We're not just fighting for, well, we're fighting for survival, but we're also fighting for the good life and we're fighting for something optimistic at the end of the day, which I find very reinvigorating. And I think in this, you also help people that are not interested into data, as you said, to understand that there are figures behind this. It's not just wishful thinking. It's not just an optimist writing a manifesto to do civil disobedience. It's more, well, even if you kind of call for it because we are stuck in within a system, there is science behind it. And I think- No, I think that, I agree. I think that's really important too. I think it's, to me, it's sort of, and it is partly because of what you said about where I come from, I'm a kind of mathematician on the one hand, but I'm a playwright on the other. And actually, I think you kind of need both those things to kind of make progress and to deepen our levels of thought about where we're going. So where did your obsession with growth started? You know, you have- Yeah, you call it an obsession, Harry, Steve. I'm not sure how obsessed I am with growth. I mean, actually, I'm a big fan of the GDP. It seems a really weird thing, but I think it's a clever construct from an intellectual point of view because it brings together so many different parts of our economy, fits them into a puzzle. And if you wanna understand how an economy works, then the GDP can tell you something about it. And I think what's gone wrong is the idea that the GDP and the growth in the GDP is the only thing that we should be aiming for. And I suppose, you know, in my early work, interestingly, in some of the early work, I remember a report that I did very, very early on for Friends of the Earth. I basically hinted that we had to present our solutions in the context of a GDP that was growing. You know, you can go back and find it was written in 1999. It was a piece of work on the relative carbon intensities of different energy technology. And basically what we said was, you know, you can reduce this carbon and stay and still keep your 2% growth target or whatever it was at the time, I don't remember. And so I did start out accepting that dogma. And it was really only when I began to think about why things weren't changing that I began to question the dogma. I began to go back to that and say, you know, is that correct? And then one day, you know, I stumbled on the index of sustainable economic welfare, which Daily Herman Daly and John Cobb had put together with Clifford Cobb in their book for the common good. And it really, it was to me, I mean, I am someone who likes those kind of pictures and responds to those graphics. And it was a very, very clear picture. It was a picture of GDP going up and up and up over 50 years. And of the index, which they had constructed to reflect welfare going up for a certain time and then beginning to flatten off and actually decline over the years. And it was such a graphic illustration, that division of those two lines. Yeah, GDP can go up and up and up, but actually wellbeing is not doing the same thing. And so one of my first instincts was, you know, I wanna do that for the UK and I did it for the UK. And then we did it for Sweden and we contributed to a collection of indexes of sustainable economic welfare. Lots and lots of lovely graphs, Mum, which began to show the same thing that although we were getting more GDP, we're getting bigger economies, that wasn't making the world a better place. And that I think was the point at which I began to then understand that we had to confront that as a societal challenge and take it seriously, not just to say, you know, that's it, we don't need growth anymore, forget it. But because that's not a solution either in an economy in which everything is built around growth. So we have to in a sense see it as a task, as a task to unpick our own dependency on this growth in the GDP and to figure out how to do things better. A lot of that actually was in prosperity without growth and the kind of thinking about the economy, thinking about enterprise, thinking about investment, thinking about the money system itself, thinking about all of those things and how you do them differently. That was kind of laid out in principle in prosperity without growth. And it's part of what CUSP, my research center, is pouring in all sorts of ways, economic ways, philosophical ways, sociological ways, psychological ways, political science research that we do there. It's all dedicated to this task of actually teasing us out of this gross dependent society and thinking about a different build things. And then post-growth, the book is a kind of homage to that idea written hopefully. And, you know, from what you said, I've been partly successful at least in a way that people can grasp it as a story, as a meaningful story and as the beginnings of a conversation about a different kind of society. And so in a way, kind of, if you like, it was never an obsession with growth. It was, first of all, it was, yeah, growth is kind of the frame in which I have to do my work. Second is why is it the frame I have to do my work? Third is actually we're in a really difficult societal challenge here. And fourth is, you know, a place where, even though I've called the book post-growth, actually it's a place of flight where we can flee from the assumptions of the past and free ourselves to imagine a different kind of future. It's funny because I really enjoyed also the side stories kind of things that you have all around the book. And so you start with the story of, was it Robert? I always forget. But Kennedy, yeah. Yeah, Robert Kennedy. And it was in 68, of course, at the same time in France, you had a massive movement as well. And he was a proponent of post-growth, which was mind-blowing for me that someone from the US would be someone like that. And as someone running for president. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I was just, you know, I remember very distinctly, we were in the middle of doing, I think it was the UK index of sustainable economic wealth. Somebody discovered a recording of that speech at the University of Kansas. And it was, you know, for us, as working on it, it was just, it was extraordinary. And we kind of, you know, almost had not known until that point that that recording was unearthed, that actually someone running for president of the US had made the same point 40 years before, or it wasn't 40 years at that point, but it's now 47, 48, so. Of course, unfortunately, he was assassinated. So we never know what would have happened in case he was 50. I'm sorry, my maths, you know, obviously I'm not being, it's for those listening and paying attention. 1968 is not 48 years ago. It's 53. Actually it's 53 almost exactly when he made that speech 53 years ago. And then you went down the rabbit hole and, you know, you pulled the thread and you saw that his advisors were Galbraith. And then the advisor, you know, the PhD advisor or Herman Daly is Galbraith. If I understand correctly. And so there is not quite, but the, but he was, Galbraith was very, very influential. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Herman's PhD supervisor. No, no, you're right. So yeah, yeah, no, I was fascinated. I mean, it was like, why, where did this come from in 1968 when gross rates were four and 5% per year? How come this guy comes along says actually, you know, great, not all is made out to be folks. And so I was really fascinated by the ideas that I came from. And in some ways, thinking about it now, I think I was a bit arrogant about it because, you know, we have an arrogance that in us about our own modernity. We think we are the most modern, most progressive, most forward thinking part of society because we're at the cusp, we're at the forefront of it. So we must be the ones who are thinking best. But actually, and that's one of the things I suppose about the stories in the book, the more you look, the more you find that actually these ideas have a legacy. And that legacy is the legacy of incredibly thoughtful, intelligent, poetic people who've been there before us. And that's a part of what I wanted to do. And it's, you know, when I began to discover the sort of roots of that speech that Robert Kennedy made, it really reinforced that point for me that we are sort of engaged in a kind of ongoing conversation about the kind of society that we want. And yes, people have been there before us. They have talked about those things. There's enormous knowledge locked up in history books, which is bad because not many people like history books that much. But it's, you know, if you can bring that alive and tell those stories, then we can connect ourselves not just to a future that we want, but to a past that's already been supporting us even though we didn't know that we were being supported by these long dead people. Yeah, and even, I mean, it seemed like a crime investigation when you went down this path. And it's funny that, well, Herman Dahlio was writing his article at the same time, more or less of the speech, and these were not correlated, and it's, that's also a human tradition, yeah. It's almost like we're living inside a program, do you think? No, I'm not going that far, but, I mean, that's kind of, you know, that's Elon Musk territory, I guess, but. Soon, wait for it, yeah. Yeah, wait for it. But it's, but it is, you know, there were moments during that, during the writing of the book and during this exploration of ideas when I, when I, it felt so connected those ideas across time. And, you know, through accidental occurrences of the same thing at the same time like Herman Dahlio's paper and Bob Kennedy's speech. And I asked Herman himself, because I was fascinated, because I met him a couple of times and I know him reasonably well, because of the work that we've done. And so I asked him, you know, did you, did you know about the speech at the time? And he said, no, I have no idea. Which makes it even more extraordinary in a way. But there is a kind of sense, of course, in which, you know, ideas have their time in history and appear in different places. And so, you know, maybe something like that was going on. And then, of course, there were common sources. So the most obvious one was Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. And John Kennedy, he was Robert Kennedy's brother, was a huge supporter of Rachel Carson. So already in the DNA, actually, of the kind of Kennedy presidency, there was this care, this concern for the environment and a reflection on the kind of economy that we had and the kind of society we were becoming. And a lot of support for what I would now call, and you would probably now call, post-growth ideas. So that was, you know, it was a part of the kind of fascination of looking at these different people. Well, it also gives a legitimacy to, you know, these thoughts, you're not just a radical thinker that out of the blue, you know, pull the post growth out of your head. And that is it, it exists for a long time. There are philosophical values or economic values. There's a number of values that have existed. And we just need to reshape them, remake a puzzle out of old pieces, more or less, and make sense of our current contemporary challenges. Because the challenges are similar, you know, over the ages, we had environmental challenges. We had societal challenges. But we kind of keep on pushing, trying to change more or less what is happening with more or less success. But it's also, you know, a root. It's not new all of this. We were really, I think you also had the lockdown and the pandemic at the epicenter of your book as perhaps a trigger or perhaps a revival of some old instances. I don't know how. It was impossible really to write that book at that time without at least partly anchoring it in the pandemic. Partly because most of it was written in lockdown, but also because it is, of course, the most extraordinary thing to happen, not just to our economy, but to our society as a whole. You know, definitely in our lifetimes. My lifetimes, which is a little bit longer than yours. And indeed, you know, almost anyone alive has not really been able to kind of remember anything quite so extraordinary. And our kids, you know, they're gonna be living through and hopefully prospering after one of the most extraordinary events in the certainly in the last century. So there was no sense in which I could kind of write the book without thinking about the pandemic, even though I started writing before, it sort of inevitably seeped into the way that I was thinking about the book. And also because it's had some really extraordinary lessons for the way that we think about the economy. You know, it's really has turned so many things on its head. First of all, most obviously I suppose that, you know, when push comes to shove, it's not wealth that matters so much as health. And that's a change in viewpoint. You know, it's a real switch in viewpoint. And it happened a year ago. We stopped prioritizing wealth and we began to prioritize health. And governments did what they had to do and they did it more or less overnight. And they did it without any restrictions and they paid for it through mechanisms that they denied had ever existed. And so we kind of in a way, in a way it was giving us lessons about the post-growth economy in a way that no book ever could. And that was so inevitably, you know, I think there were lots of very key influences there. And then there was also this other thing which about the pandemic I think which is that it's taught us something at least about ourselves as human beings. And, you know, not just about the things that matter but also about the things we struggle with. The lockdown in some sense is a kind of, you know, huge metaphor for our own mortality and the temporality of our lives. And that there are certain kinds of limits on us. And the way that we respond to those limits is really almost like our existential task. You know, it isn't an accidental thing that comes just because we have a pandemic and because we have to suddenly deal with an unexpected situation. There is a sense in which, and this was kind of, I mean, this is obviously my learning out of the pandemic. It's not everybody's, but it was certainly, it sort of reflected back at me in a sense that, you know, ultimately our battle against limits is an existential one. And we have a choice in that. We either sort of try to bounce our way out of it and bound free, you know, in one bound he was free and pushing at the frontiers of, I don't know, anything from overseas holidays to Mars if you are of a certain kind of understanding about the frontier of human ingenuity. And yet there are still limits to that and there are limits to how many people can participate in that. We might get, if we're lucky, a few people to build a colony on Mars, but that's not about the lives and livelihoods and health of eight billion people on planet Earth and it's not about the quality of our environment. And so if we retreat from that frontier mentality and draw our sights back towards Earth, towards ourselves, towards the inner part of the human psyche, what do we find there? And it's one of the most extraordinary things is that we've lost sight of that journey, that inner journey, it seems to me. You know, we've been so focused on that outer journey. We've been so focused on that innovation. We've been so focused on the outer frontier that we've neglected parts of what it is to be human. And in a way, I think it's the same process that we've neglected our own history. If you're continually innovating, if you're continually searching for the new, you're not looking back anymore. You're not looking at the understandings of our grandparents and therefore we're losing the wisdom of the history itself brings to inform our lives. And there's sort of two sides of the same coin in a way, those things, that continual innovation loses sight of history and continually bursting for the frontier loses sight of the inner game, if you like, one of the books that I cite in there in pursuit of a kind of equality which in psychology is called flow. The ability to really focus on something and concentrate on something and be carried away from it. And I was first introduced to that interestingly through playing tennis. There's a wonderful book called The Inner Game of Tennis. And it says a very obvious, very straightforward thing to someone, anyone who plays any kind of sport that most of it is happening inside your head. Your sporting ability is partly, but very partly about the physical and about what you can physically achieve. And most of it is happening inside your head. And that's where the battles are being fought. That's where you fall apart when everything goes wrong. And that's when it goes right. You really can achieve these kind of states of mind which go outside of the ordinary. So in a way, it's almost this bizarre in a way that by coming back from the frontier and focusing in what's inside us, we actually burst out way further than the imagination of that frontier that we had in the first place. This is not physically going to Mars. And hands up to the people who have landed Perseverance Rover on the surface of the red planet. It's a stick achievement, but there are other achievements that are more accessible to all of us. And it was a part of what I wanted to do is to lay before people the possibility of that inner journey. It doesn't cost anything. It isn't material intensive. It doesn't give you instant gratification, but it's a part of our, almost a part of the soul of society. And it connects us to other people in ways that are competitive materialistic, hedonistic lifestyle. Well, it depends if you're teleporting to Davos, as you've mentioned. I have to say, that's got to be a blast, isn't it? That's got to be a real... But we're not going to do it because it's so bad. Not all of us. Not all of us, that's true. There's not room for 8 billion people on clusters. But I find it funny that I wanted to address this flow state because I think it's the point that I connected most with your book. I'm really happy to hear you say that because there are some people who think, what is this guy on? Actually, some people who know me quite well found that flow stuff quite difficult to take. So I'm happy, Ariste, but go on. Well, I'm an avid surfer. Exactly, so you know. I experienced this, going to the mountains as much as possible. I experienced this. Also how difficult it is to learn something when you're in your late 20s, 30s, to discover from scratch and to battle your own youth behind you in order to... And I find the happiness... Your youth is not behind you. Ariste, believe me. There's nobody else listening. Your youth is not behind you. Mine is. I have friends that learned skiing and surfing and all that. I know what you're saying. You're not going to do that again. And I feel I've learned so much through it and it's except... Well, perhaps it's the moments I'm the most happy when I'm with family and when I'm in the ocean and feel alone. It's the only times where you can disconnect with the vanity and writing a paper or whatever. That's the interesting thing to me. It's not... I introduced it and it emerged in my life in relation to a very specific thing which was tennis. But actually when you go looking for it, you find it in all sorts of places. And as you say, family and social environments is one of the places where people do experience flow. Actually some of the work we've done in CUSP has kind of identified some of those areas where you can achieve that flow. Some of it is physical exercise. Some of it is craft and being absorbed in a task. Some of it is social and in the presence of other people. Some of it is meditative, contemplative. And so I guess in a way there's something in there for everybody. Yeah, certainly. And that's kind of... I mean, in a way, isn't that what we're looking for? We're looking for not a good life. One size fits all. Do this, do that, do the other. But actually something that is free to everybody, available to everybody that can create opportunities for everyone. And I think that's why that concept is in there. And it's investment to yourself as you mentioned it in this which takes a lot of time. So if I had to synthesize your book, you kind of do it yourself in that chapter. You say that more is not always a virtue. Struggle is not only basis for... the only basis for existence. Competition is not the only response to struggle. And then you say that productivity doesn't exhaust the return to work. Investment is not a meaningless accumulation of financial wealth. This denial is not the only response to our mortality. And so are these the precepts of post-growth or if you had to give some pointers towards the... I think they're the foundations of post-capitalism in a way. They kind of... All of those things really were saying were kinds of things that... If you like, they opposed the dogma that capitalism imposes on us. That work is a form of slavery, that productivity is all that it's about. Investment is a kind of casino where we gamble and the winner takes all... The structure of late capitalism has imposed a set of dysfunctionalities on human society. And in that phrase, in that passage that you just read, I'm just kind of pointing that up really, that the journey of the book shows actually what a poor conception of work, for example, lives inside capitalism. And that there is actually one and it's the one that I draw from Hannah Arendt in the book and her philosophy. There is one which actually is very much about the enrichment of the human soul and the security of our sense of self and our participation in society. And we've given these goods up to the service of a capitalism that just sees rapacious growth as its output and efficiency as its only core driver. And so I guess by the time you're reading that at the end of the book, I guess that's what I'm hoping people will understand but understand not in a kind of intellectual here's my argument way but in a sense of all of all of that history of ideas and the ways in which that's been explored in our very own cultural history. We're not trying to necessarily reinvent the whole world. We're actually drawing the threads of a different kind of narrative that already exists and has been laid down with extraordinary elegance by some of the most intelligent people. And that you know I think as you mentioned at the beginning is to me is a kind of it gives me this sense enormous sense of support the moments in thinking about grace and challenging grace and when prosperity publish where you kind of think I'm putting my head up above the parapet here and I'm just about to be shot and that's not the case that that legacy of thought exists in our own culture and in other cultures actually the grounds not just for thinking about writing about post-gross society and not just believing in it either but actually sensing it feeling it and and living it. Well it feels very poetic of course so we're really looking forward to this post-gross society this podcast is mainly focused on cities so I was wondering if you can find or how do you envision a post-growth city given that cities are really the hub of consumption so and the place of accumulation the place of you know the surplus all of the surplus is cities exist through surplus so have you ever thought of what would a city a village would it be a city would it be a village what would be this post-growth territory or how would it look like do you have any idea I think it can exist in different places am I allowed to say that I don't really know the answer to that question I see I mean I kind of have some inkling of it and I think in a way there's there's a lot of creativity at the moment about visual visually imagining those places and if you go to some of the some of the people who have begun to do that and this sort of richness of imagery of the way that nature and city merged together the way that people and function work the way that work and life are put together the energy dependencies of the city that I think you know those visual images actually to me are incredibly powerful and they answer your question a lot better I think than I could do in practice you know in practice we know if you like to the sort of instruction manual of prosperity without growth and say we have to know what the limits are we have to fix the economics we have to change the social logic all of those things are broken this is what you do with enterprises what you do with investment blah blah blah and I think all of those things are true in relation to rebuilding cities but I think in a way to me a lot of the really interesting work there's two bits of interesting work one is the people on the ground you are actually doing it at city level and then there's the visionaries if you like the people who are imagining that giving us stories visual stories and cues about the kinds of places that we might be living in and that's I think those are tasks which actually other people do much better than I do what I hope I've given to that in a way is that that re-envisaging of the cities of the future is supported by a rich history of ideas which actually is enormously liberating even though it starts from the idea that we might be living within certain limits so two last questions before I leave you now that you gave birth to this book 2021, what's your next I have a very specific task actually which I'm working on with some research I have to go and talk to them kind of right now which is it seems to me that if we're right that one of the messages from the lockdown is that health is more important than wealth then we have to make an economy of care work and it's been difficult because of the structures of capitalism and most of the economics of care is not working properly so that's a quite specific project and it involves it goes back in a way sadly it tears me back into the mathematician and the philosopher and the policy maker and so on but it's a task actually that is absolutely essential and when you think about the people who basically saved our lives over the course of the pandemic many of them were working in the health sector and yet they had been living under deprived conditions, precarious lifestyles productivity targets that made their work more and more difficult and all of that is driven by the structure of the economies that we have and so there is a kind of urgent task it seems to me which is to find an economics and an economic structure of care and that allows us to create not necessarily at this point just a post-growth society but a post-pandemic society in which the people who matter most are never again neglected in the way that they were in the time running up to the pandemic. I do enjoy graphs so don't be shy with graphs and it's good you know Herman Daly has a wonderful thing which he calls misplaced concreteness and it's just fantastic I love it you know when you're sitting in front of a spreadsheet or a computer model the time goes by you're in flow and you never really have to worry too much about reality as long as you can produce some pretty graphs at the end of it. Just the last question so you already mentioned a great variety of books of authors of the films as well is there anything that either one book or one article one video that you would like to recommend that embodies post-growth? I'm not sure really. I mean you know it's really interesting to look at that video of Robert Kennedy you know the beginning of that video where he talks about the limitations of the GVP. Is that available now somewhere? Yeah there's a link in the references of the book and I did do that actually there were kind of the points where I just felt you know actually the notes are as important as the book for those who really want the detail because there's lots of notes and there's lots of links and actually almost as I think about the way that I wrote the book it was by reference to a lot of visual material so stuff that you can go that is well archived and that you can go hopefully the links from the notes in the book but if you go there and there's a couple of moments so that moment with Bobby Kennedy was one and then there's this moment which I actually tried to write about in the book because it's just an extraordinary moment to me of three days after Martin Luther King was shot Nina Simone gives a wonderful concert and in the middle of this concert it was just a sort of tribute to King and in the middle of it she just stops and she just this total mad lib comment on where things are on society and life on immortality and it's you know to me particularly as I was kind of looking at that in the middle of what emerged last summer of the kind of Black Lives Matter movement in particular and realising that the history of these ideas, the history of these struggles is not one thing at one time but a continuous story that we are all engaged in and each of those visual moments for me was part of what anchored me to that idea that we're sort of living in a chain of being and the chain of ideas within that chain of being and we're not individuals and we are and we're not you know on one hand we can play wonderful tennis or surf in extraordinary ways but at the same time a part of our well-being an enormous part of our well-being comes from our connection to other people and so I chose I think I chose I chose lots of those videos to almost act as a kind of inspiration for me as I was writing and hopefully there'll also be a kind of resource for other people as well. Thanks so much for all your time Tim it was wonderful. It's been a pleasure, thanks. I hope we're going to meet for some tennis or some surf in the future. Are you going to teach me to surf really? Sure. I've always wanted to but I've never actually stood up vertically on a surfboard. You don't need to to have fun. Thanks everyone as well to listen until the end. If you like this episode please make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues and I'm looking forward for your new report Tim. Thanks a lot.