 Hola, buenas tardes. Bienvenidas y bienvenidos y a ver si consigo decir todo lo que quiero en solo dos minutos. Soy Raúl Gomez, director de Transición Verde y en nombre de mi fundación, de Transición Verde y de la Green European Foundation. Pues doy las gracias por dedicar un rato de esta tarde a acompañarnos en esta sesión. Estoy convencido de que no os vais a arrepentir este evento desmontando el discurso del crecimiento, cuidado. Forma parte de un proyecto de la Green European Foundation, de la Fundación Verde Europea, con el que pretendemos contribuir a abrir en la sociedad los debates en torno al modelo socioeconómico imperante hoy en día y pensamos que para conseguir que este tipo de debates, que a veces pueden ser un poco técnicos, se abran paso entre la sociedad, pues consideramos que es importante que analicemos la propia narrativa al crecimiento, que aquí podríamos hablar también de determinada idea de progreso, determinada idea de desarrollo, etc. Analizar cómo se han convertido estos conceptos en hegemónicos y cómo podemos hacer para empezar a pensar más allá de ellos. Eso es lo que pretendemos con el proyecto. Fruto de este proyecto es también un informe del que luego os hablará Aurora y que hoy vamos a hacer público. De hecho, os pasaremos luego un enlace a través del chat del Zoom. Y aprovecho que he mencionado lo del chat del Zoom para comentaros que los micrófonos del público van a estar cerrados para evitar interferencias, pero podéis utilizar el chat para hacer comentarios, compartir enlaces, etc. Y si hubiera tiempo al final para realizar preguntas desde el público, pues también podréis hacerlas a través del chat. Como ya sabéis, la sesión tiene traducción simultánea, español e inglés, y podéis seleccionar el idioma en el icono del globo que tenéis ahí en la parte inferior de la pantalla. Por si alguien no lo ha hecho aún y está hablando en inglés, you can choose English or Spanish in the globe icon at the bottom of the screen. Y yo ya no quiero quitar más tiempo. Voy a cumplir con lo de hacerlo en dos minutos y voy a dar paso a Aurora, que va a ser ella quien modere la sesión. Aurora es consultora e investigadora social y cultural. She is a friend, has been for a very long time, and she has a very important role in the development of this project, as she will tell you in a few seconds. So once again, thank you on behalf of Transifian Verde and the Green European Foundation, and I give this photo to Aurora. Thank you very much. Good afternoon everyone. Thank you, Raúl. I am going to be doing a brief introduction of the study that we were asked to carry out. The objective was to analyze the discourse, the narrative of the growth discourse. The objective was to try and see what weaknesses it had in order to see what are the possibilities where actions can be put in place to put it in a situation of crisis and fight against it. Our secondary objective was to find out what was its structure, its protection, to see what are the points to articulate this discourse so that we could identify the strength and weaknesses and then to set the basis so that we could then build alternative discourse to combat this growth discourse. In order to carry out this analysis, in order to answer to these questions, we had two ways of working on the one hand. We were doing a semiological analysis of a series of texts that were chosen from articles and books that were significant because they set the basis, the theoretical basis for this growth discourse and sometimes they are actually quite belligerent and we also did a qualitative investigation that tried to dig deeper into how this growth discourse works in the social fabric. We had two workspaces on the one hand experts and on the other hand non-experts of different ages from different places in Spain and so on. During qualitative research, as you go along, as you obtain results, your methodological design might change, it might be modified and in this case we did so from the beginning. So as we made progress, as we analyzed the growth discourse we changed our methodology. As we were astonished by the strength it had, the power it had and how difficult it was to find any cracks in it, any alternatives, what we thought was to use qualitative research so these foreseen workspaces with experts and with non-experts so with experts and lay people, to contrast that perplexity and to see how we somehow could dismantle it, shake it or try to get closer to the objectives that we had set ourselves for this analysis. So what did we find? Well, first off what we found was that analyzing the growth narrative faced us quite harshly against the main characteristics of what we consider to be, semiologically, the discourse. So what did we find? We found that at this point the discourse of the growth narrative was configuring the reality, the way in which we understand and we perceive our own reality in the context where we were working. On the other hand, we found that this was a discourse that tries to naturalize the situation. What does that mean? Well, it means that each and every one of us will consider as natural the keys, the dimensions of this discourse. The way of understanding the world is through this discourse and then there is an anti-historic evolution because it not only explains what is happening but it also sets the explanations and the understanding of the future world. And on the other hand, a very important element, it intervenes as a paradigm. What does that mean? It means that it is a discourse that goes through many other discourses that build our understanding of reality, our understanding and our way of building reality, those that are directly linked with fields that we could understand that are close to growth such as the economic growth but also other discourse that are social, anthropological, of our day-to-day life or even our understanding of success in life or work, the construction of our professional careers and so on. On the other hand, we found a great strength that was built around the fact that it's rigid on the one hand but it's also flexible on the other. So it has the capacity of absorbing any criticism, any change, any questioning, anything that might arise, it makes them its own, it transforms them and it turns them into something that belongs to it, it metabolizes it, it rereads it in its own keys, in its own logics. And lastly, really, all of these keys that we're mentioning are invisible, they're not visible. And that is something that usually happens, everything that is part of our understanding of our daily lives, of what is given for granted, or taken for granted rather, is very difficult for it to be visible in our environment and all of these characteristics show the strength of this discourse, it's solid, it's adaptable, it configures our way of thinking, it takes all the reality that does not fit in its definition of the world, out of it, it goes through different discourses and narratives, even if they are in the periphery of what is being talked about, even if it doesn't look like it has to do with the economy. And then we have another element, which is the fact that the growth works as a subject. What does that mean? It means that it is something that is acting, that sets up all the elements of the world, its relationships, and how the key is for the promotion of the construction of our reality, of our culture work. And it also demands protection. In this context, going back is seen as a villain, something that needs to be fought. And in that sense, this also happens, not only among lay people, but also experts who participated in the work groups do believe that growth needs to be protected somehow. So it's as though, even if we had to redirect it, re-read it, we consider it as an element that cannot be abandoned, cannot be left aside, because it describes everything that we are and everything depends on it. And actually, some of the people who had a more open vision of the economy considered it as a way of protecting equity, a good distribution of wealth, a correction for inequalities in our society. So, somehow, even if we do see the danger in it, we consider that it has to be improved. It needs to be redesigned to redirect it to reeducate it with other values so that it is possible. And to that, we have the fact that in the discourse analysis, there aren't any discourses that are against the growth discourse. Actually, degrowth is built as the other side of that same, the other side of the same story. So, what did that do? I mean, I'm not saying that we were in shock, but we did face some perplexity because we wanted to find cracks, we wanted to find alternative discourses and then we finally found ourselves in the midst of a discourse that gives sense and meaning to the whole culture we're deep into. So, we see the reality, we build the reality, we experiment the reality and look for realities on that basis. And we try to research with experts the topic of redefining the word degrowth. We try to suggest how we could talk about bad growth, about other cosmovisions that would allow us to consider alternatives and different perspectives on a reality, but in the end, really, we always went back to the power of the growth narrative that would absorb everything and would redefine everything in the same terms that we were trying to use to find alternatives. It's true that in the experts panel, there was a topic that opened the door to something that we did think was important, which was a fact that there is a gap, there is a crack that talked about the growth discourses, certainty, but talking about degrowth faces us with uncertainty. It faces us with something that we cannot see. I'm saying this because it was also the place that lay people also got to when they went along this reflection with us. So their first reaction was, let's redefine it, let's look for other contents, let's look for negative nuances, other parameters, other values, but in the end, what happened was that we could not think outside of the dominant discourse. All of the narratives that were built to analyze and to criticize the dominant discourse would end up giving it tools. So they made it even more, they made it even stronger. I'm going to use one of the words that one of the participants used, which was that it was stuck in our heads, it was inside our heads. And we did think about a horizontal path, the possibility of reorienting all of our assistance towards the other, towards that which was beyond, that place that I was mentioning at the beginning, which is that uncertainty. So non-experts lay people consider it the abyss, that which could not be named. How can we fill that with meaning, with sense, and when faced to the abyss, what do we do? We find that when faced to the abyss, the growth discourse offers certainty, safety. Why? Well, because it has a perfect timeline. It talks about everything present, past, and future, and it gives meaning to everything and it has a space brand that is very well defined. It occupies the western world and it is the reference that we all have in our heads. It places us in front of a world, tasks and social concepts for people and collectives that is solid, that is predictable, that is understandable. It has a brand of objectivity and it is dynamic. It allows us to overcome threats and the values linked to growth are values that are linked to the whole of society, including our ethics. It becomes strong again when facing the abyss. In this world, what paths did we consider? We have a path which we have named as the the Naked King. So when there is a strength, there is always a hidden weakness. So there is a possible way to unveil through analysis those weaknesses that seem to be hidden. Just to name a few, it shows growth as historic. But it is it is built. It is linked to the values of a reality where growing is positive. But we have to ask questions. We have to unveil that argument has weaknesses. But really the key was given to us once again or at least not the key, but a space for us to play which we believe is very positive was given to us by the reflection that we did through all of this marimácnum of conclusions that we drew, that kept us perplexed was the fact that my team, the one I believe too, Abenaladvia and myself, we have been working for a very long time with different collectives, with people of different ages and there was a space that appeared which is the relationship of people with work. At the beginning, around 20 years ago we did seem to be given the possibility of having a discourse where the work would no longer be at the core of the construction of identities, life and construction of your place in the world and your social relationships. And since it was taken out of the center and the work was just a dimension of a life, a life that had other things to say or give. Lastly, we have been investigating quite a bit with men and women of different ages and we have seen that this discourse that is built from without, from the outside of that paradigm of progress and growth is being propagated and is now to be found in different profiles, different people. It used to be women, but now it's men and women. It used to be young women or women when they were thinking about a life work balance. Now it's men and women of all ages and it's not necessarily a work life balance but they're simply putting work outside of the center is just another dimension and it's a dimension that is purely instrumental. By having this globe we could call it of an emerging discourse that is of the margin of the dominant discourse we have found a space to understand the situation a space where we can talk and where we, I don't know if I'd say dismantle, but we can at least feel this abyss by saying that there are other ways of living other ways of understanding the world other ways of building the identity of being who we are different ways of doing it and that are not built from the logic of growth and progress. Ok, so it's not really about dismantling because this strategy is not trying to dismantle the dominant discourse it's simply about building about recovering a discourse that is an emerging discourse that is being built at the margin of the dominant discourse and that is why we are thinking about two action lines on the one hand communication which is unveiling things so lifting the mask and on the other hand it's a general strategy to favor through very concrete narratives how could that place be which in this growth narrative is considered as an abyss and uncertainty so we have to create discourses narrative that reinforces the idea that we can create an idea that is understandable outside of those keys and we actually discover that there are other discourses emerging discourses that are already there and that opens the door to think that this way of of building from the outside a sort of resistance to the dominant discourse is actually possible well thank you and I will now give the floor to José Manuel Naredo who is our next speaker he is a doctor in economic science and he is a statistician he is one of the most prestigious voices in ecological economy, he is the author and editor of many studies that consider the video with ownership but also industrial urban and agricultural distribution and everything linked with natural resources he has many books that have been published but he has many books such as the taxonomy of profit or the the tired criticism so theories for the change of civilization José Manuel I will give you the floor well thank you thank you so much for having invited me to this session to dismantle the discourse of development or rather growth and I'm very happy to have been present during Aurora's presentation because it actually fits with my worries my ideas that were in me as you will see during my presentation so I'm going to share my screen so that we may begin ok so I have prepared this intervention which is the invention of economic growth which is actually how this discourse appeared just to see that it didn't exist previously and to see how it appears and and how we can go beyond it so just to set the frame or the context the disorientated critical discourse by lawyers and idolatries is what I call the non-concept in this book La crítica rotada so ever since Plato and Aristotle we have thought that people could improve society and that social sciences would contribute to this but instead of that they generated new mythologies that legitimize the status quo amongst them actually the whole growth discourse which is what we're going to be talking about the inflation of unclear fetish terms prefixes such as post and neo that populate critical discourse denote the lack of real generally accepted concepts with which to create as we were saying during the previous intervention alternative frameworks to the hardcore of dominant ideology that remains shielded from criticism and continues to underpin the current corporate tyranny and escaping this impasse requires transcending the dominant ideology with its notion of economic system at its head obviously by relativizing it and seeing that it was no dominant in the past and it did not exist and it doesn't have to keep on being dominant in the future obviously and this relativization is what I did in my book economy and evolution history and perspective of the basic categories of economic think economic thinking where we see that that notion of system did not exist and how it arose how it evolved and what could be the perspective and from and beyond the dogmas we have the book that has been mentioned by Aurora during her intervention so the invention of economics and of growth economic growth because obviously if we don't dismantle the notion of economic system then the economic growth will not be overthrown so you might say well invention of economy that has always existed hasn't it ever since Aristotle hasn't it yes since Aristotle he talked about managing the household and so on but as an independent discipline for moral or power ethics it did not exist as such so I have worked in the first dictionary of the Spanish language of cobalrubias from 1616 first royal academy of Spanish language dictionary in 1634 so in those dictionaries and the English dictionaries Bailey from 1742 Samuel Johnson's dictionary in 1755 with various that has been published at various times we never talk about economy as a discipline I mean it did not exist so how is it possible that this has come to be well it was created in the 18th century by some French authors called Physiocratical authors and they were the first ones to formulate this idea of an economic system and how well because experimental science started to be to be practiced they did experiences with the continuum in their rural areas and they saw that there was a great growth with seeds or with different seeds there was a generation a creation so that is why they use the word production because in all of these dictionaries the word production is linked to that creation isn't it so there was this creation and they needed to increase the production of wealth that is what the boss of this school would say of these authors would say they needed to increase the production of this of this wealth without damaging the the soil the earth so so it was about doing that which was good for everyone so they separated this discipline was separated from moral or power because previously for instance everything that was such as contracts and agreements were such as prices and commerce and so on was a manual but now they were emancipated it was an independent discipline with that very clear objective and he would say that if that physical product this physical creation was stated in monetary terms it would also create a profit a monetary profit but he also warns that producing to him is not reselling with a profit because you can do it in many different things in many different ways and merchants would do it but that was not producing so that happened in a century that went from publishing the Newton's principles to the elementary treatment and so that was here for chemistry and we had at the time the mechanical philosophy was in vogue and alchemy was also very much present and they thought that what would grow what was created was linked to mother earth so to agriculture, to fisheries to the forestry but also to mining I mean mines were included also in Keynes in his economic ideas because they thought that minerals were perfected in the earth's bosom and at that time of Linium where he started using the term economy of nature and actually Linium would direct a thesis of the growth of the liveable earth so they thought that even the continents would increase their limits so it was about increasing those physical limits for their use so we see that economy was an independent discipline in the 18th century as the marriage between mechanical philosophy and alchemy and it was based on the metaphor of production and the goal of growth in line with the old organises worldview so for instance the origin of wealth and we thought from Aristotle to Copernicus they all had a similar sentence of the earth conceived by the sun and is impregnated by it and gives birth every year so it was the earth that would generate wealth it was mother earth that would generate but then William Petty Petty I'm sorry an author from the from a previous area from a physicist would talk about father labour an active ingredient to to actually impregnate mother earth so it wouldn't be the celestial powers it wasn't impregnated by the sun but by labour by the father labour that would generate wealth we could see so the invention of labour would allow also to justify private property absolute private property and why do I say the invention of labour because the word labour did not exist in Greek or in Latin so that is another term that also arose as another ingredient of this economic system definition and Adam Smith in his book the wealth of nations he said that the annual labour of every nation is the fund which supplies with all those things that are necessary and useful for life and you think wow so labour monopolizes a creation of wealth so then you'd say oh then there has been a very important brainwashing because obviously what then photosynthesis or iron exchange are they are they protagonists because they're fundamental for life relationship with labour so we continue that path and then we have neoclassical authors who say well no but actually it's capital because it can substitute the earth and labour and it's thus the limit the ultimate limiting factor so wealth is in the end measured by money because capital is measured by money and it can replace the earth and labour so wealth is measured with money and the economic reasoning is limited to everything that's monetary so there we find ourselves in a situation where this old cosmology this old way of understanding the world on top of which we had created the notion of production and so on would simply fall at the end of the 18th century beginning of the 19th century we have the la voisie lografe and we see that minerals would not grow or perfect themselves at the bosom of the earth and the earth and the continents could not dilate the limits so what happened then well we see what I call the epistemological break so the economy consolidates itself in isolation in the late 19th century and beginning of the 20th century the economy establishes itself as an independent discipline by cutting the umbilical cord that would link its economic system to the physical world in order to circumscribe it to the isolated universe of exchange values by falling into the usual monetary reductionism so obviously producing ended up being simply to sell with a profit what kane did not want he who had invented the notion of economic system because GDP is just a value when selling a series of values and services minus the value that they cost so it's just selling with a profit and then we establish national accounting and then we find ourselves with the social construction of reality which is the look mom's book so we see the process that he shows is the formulation of a world which is what they did what those offers did that we now call physiocrats of the 18th century in France they generated this idea of a world with a carousel of production consumption objectivizing the world making it a thing something that is socially produced and that is then transferred to the to the monetary world and the isolated monetary world and a general acceptance of that as something objective so national accounts we calculate GDP and we consider it something that is absolutely objective and universal and not as we generate invention of the human mind so together with that production definition with that that hunger to increase it so the covering function of the standard economy the conceptual apparatus that guides our approaches and perceptions and behaviors is largely metaphorical the absolute metaphoric production and the mythology of work and growth conceal the processes of extraction and acquisition and the damage caused and there is an environment which is not studied which is physical, social and financial due to this study and why do I say that it is absolute world because obviously by by transferring it to selling with a profit then it goes to to being a metaphor avoid of any content as the 18th century authors thought about this physical creation and production had a very specific content so you would plant a seed and you would have you would have a flower with many seeds and now the production is just a box where you include any any concept such as selling with a profit and it is completely broken because it now gives a judgment on many different things without any rational basis it seems that selling with a profit is always good but it is always positive so the ideas of production and the market would also eliminate moral and the power from the economic scenario that that subordinates politicians and now obviously politicians are simply rogues so to finish this part I would say that the usual idea of the economic system based on the metaphor of production quantified by GDP is by no means universal and secondly that if we transcend the metaphor of production and we look and talk about and we talk about in another way about this goal of growth, well it completely collapses because the only way of measuring it is the GDP it's the only thing that can measure it so let's look and talk about things differently and we're going to see that environment that has not been studied firstly the physical environment so the production of the metaphor of production underpinned by GDP and we see that when we consider biosphere and resources which is what these 18th century authors would think about and so on had a creationist vision of the world and they thought that God would not have created something that was worthless so even a soil worm or any insect would have a purpose in that chain in that life chain but that is now reduced with a more isolated perspective things that are either useful or not useful and then appropriated and now we talk about the absolute ownership of the soil that can be bought they can be valued so the fact that they acquire value is what we call production so appropriated objects are valued and that can be measured by GDP and that is how we have consolidated GDP and it justifies the objective of growth the growth of that monetary result which is GDP so this is the way in which economy has now become enemies because obviously the environment and ecology thinks about all of the elements of the biosphere and the resources and it's obvious that we can increase that little that little square of the GDP of the valued objects by deteriorating all of the other objects that are around it that are not in that accounting so we do not measure that deterioration so what can we do well my proposal is what I call the echo integrative approach which is to have a broader approach an interdisciplinary approach so that we can give visibility to the fact that things existed previously as resources before they had been valued and then unfortunately they still exist when by definition they lose their value with consumption and they still exist as waste so all of this has to happen within a territory obviously and we see then that the economic objects are not necessarily born out of nothing in the economic system just because they have value and then the value disappears but rather physically there are some flows there is a metabolism and there are things that need to be studied particularly with all of their flows in a territory and with a timeline that shows what is and isn't irreversible so with this approach of a systems economy we can see what the biosphere system is that allowed for life to take place on earth we see that this phenomenon of photosynthesis has as first raw material water carbon, hydrogen and oxygen then there is photosynthesis so prairie, vegetation cows that digested milk, calves then their waste so poo and that the solar engine is the one that takes the water back through the atmosphere and the hydrological cycle to the cloud so that it can re-initiate the process and it is the decomposing bodies that will take all of that waste and turn it into fertile soil by the humidification process so where are the waste and resources in this scheme they are not there because everything is being used in a succession of cycles and how can that happen because of diversity because nobody can be fed by its own waste so that is why we have a very diverse chain that allows for millions of bacteria to live inside the stomach of the cow that will allow to digest grass so it is not digestible by human species by their human species but we have this whole chain and the symbiosis has allowed for life to be richer but the industrial civilization has turned to the extraction of resources the creation and use of products and then the generation of waste no matter how good industrial recycling is because perfect recycling is impossible so we have lost this battle beforehand so the earth is a closed system with regards to materials so unsustainability is something that will happen beforehand and we know that the human species is varying a huge weight on the planet and that is the great problem we find ourselves in the end in a situation where there is an increase of minerals extraction because with the rules of the game where we value things simply because of what their cost of extraction is and not the cost of replenishment well then we will just be extractivist civilizations and since the year 2000 you can see that extractivism has exponentially grown due to new technologies mainly and with the energy renewal because we have programmed obsolescence that never had been present in the world so for decarbonization for instance and that is this is about fossil fuels they have not gone down worldwide we still see that they go up and what has grown most since the year 2000 is coal coal has been doubled has been multiplied by 2 so we have entered a perverse spiral because the rules of the game are the ones that move this along so these rules of the economic game push the earth into a dead state which we call Taneitia so the horizon would be a planet that would not have mineral resources because we are extracting all these rare materials from the earth without thinking about the cost to replenish them and we should think about what the cost to replenish the earth would be because we need to try and promote recovery and recycling so without fossil fuel with degraded atmosphere overheated due to climate change and now we have talked a bit about the environment the physical environment but let's talk now about the financial environment which is what we don't usually talk about so the metaphor of production overlooks as well the fact that the process of financialization shifted the creation of value which we thought that was simply of goods and services but then it wasn't actually it was just the manufacture and sale of assets through property allowing the financial system to give more power to the powerful so we ignore the fact that development is not about production but rather about power and position because the belief of the economic system is that a developed country is a very productive very productive country that will pave a lot and that can lend money to the rest hides actually the reality the fact that a developed country exercises its power as an extractor of capital, resources and population from the rest of the world and this economic approach is completely destroyed by the paradox that the richest country in the world, the USA is the most indebted country for instance we can take this graph from the International Monetary Fund we see if we have the financial assets minus debt we see that they have been they owe to the rest of the world so 18 18 thousand billion dollars because they are issuing debt such as for instance the dollar itself or the nominated charity dollars or by using other titles and that is being bought by international markets international financial markets and that is really the situation so so this developed country is transcending the metaphor of production so first of all because the trade outlook is that they have a favorable terms of trade because that country is now getting the best part of all the monetary values so that is why if it's in your favor that's because others have it against them it's about relationships if you attract capitals from the world over by issuing debt by issuing non-requirable debt or by quantifying the value of their debt that's because others see that their capital leaks and the physical landscape well after the industrial revolution Europe and Japan have a deficit in resources and have a waste surplus because they use the rest of the world as a place for resources and to throw their waste so there are some nuances here because there are some rich countries Norway or for instance Australia that since they have lots of natural resources they are also net exporters but they manage it themselves they are not being pillaged by transnational companies that would take the most valuable part of the value generated now the demographic outlook well it attracts population from the rest of the world because others can't retain there so if some are at the top it's because others are at the bottom so in order to see what is going on it is much more useful to see these perspective of predator and prey that we use in ecology so it's not really about production and austerity and so on which is what they used to to tell us what we needed to think was true such as what Adam Smith said and for a very long time this perspective of predator and prey for instance in Extremadura how they were using resources at a very low price but then the financial system would use the wealth from Extremadura so that they could use it in the urban centers such as Madrid and Barcelona and then there was another book that I promoted in the 50th anniversary of the symposium in the US in 1965 and I applied it quite at the planetary level so you can access these books in my website elrencondenaredo.org so the unstudied monetary environment that is a great paradox so the science of profit does not classify or rank the forms of profit it takes them all as a something positive and defends their growth by adding them to the GDP so here in an indiscriminate way we are adding all of these situations where we are reselling with profit whether it is extractive activities because it is just production of oil and so on but it is just extraction it is not production well but everything is sold under the veil of production as well because there are ways of profit that grow and grow and grow that are excluded from the GDP they are ignored so that is why I wrote the book taxonomy of profit to try and clarify these aspects because in natural sciences we always start from a taxonomy of what it is that we are going to study but here with the metaphor of production we simply create a whole box of values and we consider them all as good and we want them to grow so well we are going to dig deeper into this we Aristotle made the difference between economy that deals with logistics and dealing with a home and then chromatistics which deals with profit those were two different categories he did not really like merchants he thought that profit well was not to do with with managing the household and how could profit be socially justified well we have already seen it with the metaphor of production this absolute metaphor of production and the objective of economic growth ignored and justified the different ways of profit by putting them all together in the GDP or by excluding them so they are overlapped we see an overlap of the gap that would separate economy from chromatistics and here we have united them all with the metaphor of production and we quantify it with GDP so the function of production is a source of added value of profit and we add that to the notion of market so the whole profit is considered as useful but then there are a series of processes that leave this economic system notion much more dated because there is a mercantilization a disintermediation a privatization a financialization so what happens well they are protagonists I mean the financial world is protagonists more than ever and then the metaphor of production ends up masking and when we see that there is a decoupling between GDP and the monetary mass and the financial assets and the derivatives we see that there is a greater growth of the financial market than the GDP itself and this graph that we see that comes from the taxonomy of profit and here I have a ratio between the monetary mass and the GDP between financial assets and GDP and we see that in 1980 worldwide there were all below GDP because the ratio was below but then they started growing much more and in the end the financial assets were four times bigger than GDP and the derivatives were ten times greater than the GDP and we are talking worldwide because in rich countries the difference between GDP y financial assets is even greater in Spain for instance it's not just multiplied by four it's multiplied by eight the value of financial assets I'm talking about here so we find ourselves in a situation where revenue coming from this financial assets would grow and would have a greater weight as time goes by so we see that the tax statistics reveal that growing profitability they cannot just talk about GDP they have to show things that exist and here we have a percentage of revenue that has been declared by the selling of property in the US so here we see that it is growing so it occupies a greater percentage in the revenue in the average of individuals and then in Spain we have the great weight of the last real estate bubble that that accounted for 12% of the income of individuals in Spain selling and buying homes for a profit so it's not goods and services but just houses and although the bubble burst at the beginning of the 90s it was at around 1% and now it's at around 5% as an average but the key is that the richest the richest layers would have more assets have a greater weight and we see here the weight of these assets by profit and they even reached 85% of their income with the bubble in Spain at the highest the highest layer which is the one that we saw previously so this explains the miracle of how well GDP would not grow with a crisis and a pandemic and so on well with Oxfam and so on they say well yes but the main the biggest fortunes have doubled well yes they have and we see all of this profit that has nothing to do with GDP and has nothing to do with a macro economic framework which is what cannot be usually seen so we're going to finish with a very worrisome scenario profit without a consideration or with virtual corrupt consideration invades and parasitizes profit without consideration of the GDP in theory because we would have to study it in depth so this is how it's going to happen and as this gap grows between owners and beneficiaries of the networks and those who are not owners of those networks I mean it's good that this is it actually good that the purchasing power of some entities and individuals keeps on growing exponentially it doesn't seem so because actually the creation of money has is no longer under the control of the state because previously I mean the penal code would have sanction those who falsified money it was actually even capital punishment for those who falsified currencies but now it's not just the banks who create money any company, any company can create money what I call financial money by issuing titles for instance Telefonica in Spain just makes a capital increase and with those shares that they issue they can they can purchase Telefonica de Perú with shares or they will pay their their managers and their shareholders so they're creating financial money that has the same functions that normal money so controlling that growth would demand to change the institutional framework would have to change the international monetary system, the ownership system financial havens so that we can change the way in which we can create money so that we can benefit from the trade we cannot trade a patrimonial goods because that's what big corporations are doing because they're purchasing the world they're purchasing the whole world all of the real estate territory and so on and to finish I would simply change the paradigm where are we well, we find that part of the premises of this paradigm are still present they are still in force there is much modernity and relativism but we're still in the same anthropocentrism we're all focusing progress, there is technology, there are some analytical approaches that are too too isolated and then natural sciences are separated and social sciences are at the service of the economy because they are all on the supported by the natural condition although in anthropology we have already dismantled that situation fortunately so standard policies and politics with general will and so on so the economy the standard economy which is what we have been seeing with its own production metaphor at the head of it to increase that production and the idea of the market competitiveness and so on so against this well, some people are worried by the regression we don't really believe in progress we think about the regression that is taking place and we should we should have a different approach with natural sciences social sciences that are integrating that is why I think that we need an eco integrating perspective, we need to not have analysis in silos we should integrate knowledge we should integrate the humans with nature instead of going against nature so we have to go beyond the separation between the human species and the nature if we talk about the environment we can't maintain that divorce, that separation but the human species are part of the biosphere and there needs to be a symbiosis we need to remember that symbiosis is what allowed for an improvement of life on earth if the human species is battling nature then that's the end of it we should be merged and in symbiosis so that there is a win-win situation and we cannot separate the individuals from society, that is also something that needs to be corrected so integrative sciences economy, ecology, agroecology are helping in that sense so we have to talk about agricultural ecosystems industrial ecosystems urban ecosystems and so on so in that sense we would have the paradigm the emerging eco-integrating paradigm that goes in that line and for that subject at hand my message is quite clear we transcend the metaphor of production and broaden the ecological reflection both in the physical and in the monetary financial world then the goal of growth crumbles in and of itself so we should unite economy and ecology with a cross-disciplinary vision and we would go from considering GDP our idol to an economy of systems so that is what I wanted to share with you and I have finished my intervention thank you very much thank you José Manuel with this analysis you have shown that it is possible to dismantle this the situation we can take the crown off of the king so after Manuel Naredo we will give the floor to Julia Steinberger she is a professor on climate change at the University of Lausanne since 2020 she has been the main researcher in the institute of social ecology and she researches the connections between resources and societies she has published over 16 international articles that have been reviewed by her peers she is the main author of the sixth evaluation of the IPCC and she was one of the speakers at the conference called Beyond Growth that took place in 2023 at the European Parliament thank you so much Julia please open your microphone and the floor is yours thank you so much so thanks Aurora and thanks José Manuel for your comments so I'm going to do a couple of things I'm going to basically give you a presentation that's part of what I showed at the European Parliament last year as part of the Beyond Growth conference then I hope that we can have a discussion about how that conference went and what we can learn from it how we can pursue of its work ok so one of the things I've been doing I'm an ecological economist but one of the things I've been doing has also been part of the IPCC and I think that we just always have to remember where we are right now we are headed for cataclysm already last year 2023 we almost reached 1.5 degrees I heard that lots of parts of Spain are already experiencing great heat and also water shortages and so we're already seeing very bad impacts and what we have to remember is the reason I like this plot and I show it a lot is because you see the temperature difference in the industrial era so zero degrees was before people started burning a lot of coal in you know in England and then France and Germany and other places and so what you see is that we used to live in this very small temperature range called the Holocene and that's the temperature range that the planet has been in for roughly 10,000, 12,000 years and we're really shooting out of it and we're able to develop agriculture and to grow as a human population is because we had this very stable temperature range that was you know less than a degree from top to bottom and we are shooting out of it very very fast and putting our stability of the basis of our economic systems in grave danger and either we act now to retain some stability or we are facing a very very dangerous future indeed what does that future look like I'm just going to share some slides about what the the sort of planetary extremes this wiggle being shown on this plot of the earth shows basically the I'm not a meteorological specialist I'm trying to explain it but it shows the jet stream destabilizing so you have a very stable originally very stable weather pattern and it destabilizes creates these waves and then the waves stick around and where the L is around Athens for instance you can see there's a lot that's a low pressure system that's just sitting there and dumping a lot of water at one time and what that looks like is this so this is flooding that happened in Greece last September the geography of Greece is forever changed there are now lakes where there were no lakes this was the most rich agricultural area of Greece and it is permanently damaged at least on a time scale of tens of years hundreds of years so this and this just happened in a couple of days of dumping a lot a lot of water due to this weather pattern in Greece they were lucky because there were good rescue systems evacuation systems very few people lost their lives directly because of this in Libya just on the other side of the Mediterranean the same weather pattern dumped a lot of water destroyed a dam and destroyed the city of Derna resulting in tens of thousands of people dying overnight just being swept out to sea and so I think that this really important for us to realize that we are in this current state of instability and very very dangerous at a very very dangerous time for our societies and for all of us this is just a few weeks later what Acapulco and Mexico look like now it's after this is after a hurricane and what's happening here is that the hurricanes landing on that side of Mexico are actually very rare and this one was clearly strengthened by climate change so it really shows the real this is the future that is waiting for us is even worse than this and we have to take it very seriously just in terms of what the IPCC can also tell us about this it tells us not only about average temperature increases average temperature trajectories but it also tells us about extreme events and it tells us about the frequency and geographic distribution of extreme events and so here you see that we know that we're going to have more heat waves more deadly heat waves we know that we're going to have more flooding as well as more droughts and in particular Europe is actually touched by all categories of extreme events in terms of the expectation not all areas of the world are touched by all of these extreme events but Europe is the geographic distribution of them is not equal and I'm not going to go into the details of what working group 2 tells us on impacts and risks but basically the prosperity for all is impossible without radical and rapid climate action so we are heading into such a zone of high risk and one of the big messages from the latest IPCC report is that we have been underestimating the risk because things temperature range is that people used to think we're safe even climate scientists used to think we're kind of okay 1.5 to 2 degrees was considered a moderate amount of warming the risk level we now realize is already very high at those levels of warming so we are advancing very fast into a future that's much more dangerous than we anticipated and we're clearly not doing enough now this brings us to the question of growth so growth has been accompanying the planetary crisis because growth means growth in resource use means growth in emissions and I'm just going to summarize green growth so the green growth argument is that we can keep growing the economy and reduce our resource use Jose Manuel made it very clear why that won't happen from those very foundations but we can also see it from the data there are a few countries that are decoupling their emissions from while growing economically even from a consumption perspective so even including international trade but as if Humphogl and Jason Hickel show in a recent paper I think it came out either last year or this spring or just earlier this year so they show that green growth is not happening the few countries that are decoupling are not doing it anywhere near fast enough now for emissions we have to hope and we have to not just hope we can demonstrate that decoupling is possible in the sense that economic activities, social activities can be done at low or zero emissions if we get rid of fossil fuels and we ramp up other kinds of production and other kinds of demand but the point here is that economic growth makes reducing emissions harder and that's something that we have to take quite seriously as a result of this kind of data it turns out that many climate scientists now believe that economic growth is in fact not compatible with climate action this is a study by king et al which was published in nature sustainability last year and what you can see is that you have basically sort of almost half the climate scientists that they interviewed saying that they don't believe they don't know if it's going to be green growth or degrowth about a quarter of them say green growth and about a bit more than a quarter of them say degrowth but the point is that there is no scientific consensus that growth is actually going to work quite the contrary so we really have shakes big cracks in the foundations of where we think things should go climate scientists are much more skeptical about growth whereas policy makers and economists mainstream economists are really sort of pushing ahead with this idea that growth is the cause of all our problems and the solution to all our problems at the same time so what should we do well I'm just going to quote from Mifium Fogel and Jason Hickles paper which is that to achieve Paris compliant emission reductions high income countries will need to pursue post growth demand reduction strategies reorienting the economy towards suficiency equity and human well being while also accelerating technological change and efficiency improvements and I think that this is really nice because it's a very good summary of what we should be doing so we need to orient our economies towards post growth and we need to think about how we reduce demand we need to think about how we orient the economies towards suficiency equity and human well being so this is basically the challenge that faces us immediately right now and so this is what I want to talk about in the rest of the presentation so this is the start of the presentation I gave at the European parliament so basically the way I see the world the way I think it's useful to understand it is that we have this idea of provisioning systems I don't care very much for the economy as a category or society as a category what I think is really important to understand is how we transform resource use to well being so how do we satisfy human needs how do we realize capabilities on autonomy and the thing sitting in the middle for me I think is social provisioning or provisioning systems these are social, political, technical and economic systems they have all of these elements combined in them and they can be studied together and they are the object of study of heterodoxy economics so heterodoxy economics is the study of social provision is one way to see it and if we understand these provisioning systems and think about how we can transform them then we can also maybe reduce our resource use while also satisfying well being and realizing human needs so that's the hope so I will go try to be quite simple three facts and three ways forward so the facts are inequality, possibility and dependency and the ways forward are suficiency investment and democracy so let's try that so the first fact is inequality this is something that we studied a lot in the project I led called living well within limits and this is just one example of the results that we found when we studied inequality here we're studying the inequality and energy of household consumption in the UK so in in the United Kingdom and what you see at the top of the graph is that you have the richest decile the richest 10% of the population and at the bottom of the graph you have the lowest decile the lowest 10% of the population the poorest people and you can see on the horizontal extent of the bars is the energy footprint in gigajoules per capita and I should also say that this is a paper led by Marta Bautruczewicz it's the last paper of her PhD which was quite wonderful and what you can see that's really interesting is you see a very large inequality in energy footprint this is clear but you see that it's not all the categories of consumption are equally unequal in terms of their distribution so you see that housing is a lot more equal and this is always true it's not always as true as in the United Kingdom but it is always true and the United Kingdom is strange for various reasons but what you see which is also something that we see around the world is that transportation categories are the most unequal there's this real split between housing and transportation energy use so flights and car use are where inequality happens and transportation all over the world is very unequally distributed both between countries and within countries so rich people fly more longer distances more frequently and they also buy bigger cars that they drive for longer distance on more frequent trips so transportation is just a little and that's where you see income inequality show up in the UK the inequality is so big that the 10% richest people use as much energy in flying as the poorest 20% do total what does that mean in terms of ways forward well we need to move away from this inequality and one way to describe this is sufficiency and Aurora was discussing alternative narratives sufficiency does have some level of promise sufficiency was described by Dr. Yamina Saheb of the within the IPCC report as a set of measures and daily practices that avoid demand for energy materials land and water while delivering human well being for all within planetary boundaries and sufficiency I think is one of the ways to describe it is freedom it's talking about an economy that gives us the freedom to live good lives without depending on a lot of resource use and what does it look like well one of the ways it looks like is the housing cooperative that is reasonably close to me this is the eco quartier desvergés and I took this picture I don't think it does it justice it's a beautiful place you have no idea there are no cars the children go from the school to their house without crossing any roads there's stores there there's a lot of communal life it's just amazing and people live in these buildings that they have designed themselves they have climbing gyms inside the buildings they have guest rooms they have whatever they want it's just a fun, lovely place to live and this is sort of an example of what sufficiency can look like okay moving on to the second fact this is possibility I'm not going to go into the details of this study I recommend the paper by Joel Milward Hopkins and Global Environmental Change I'll just tell you what the paper says which is that decent living standards for everybody this is well beyond poverty following the definition of professor Narra Simarrao of Yale University so decent living standards for all would be possible in 2050 at 40% of current energy use despite population growth and this is a scenario that we developed or that Joel Milward Hopkins developed it's based on efficient but realizable technologies equitable shared infrastructures the need satisfaction is defined based on tomography climate and geography so you have some diversity in there but the basic point is we can do this at much lower resource use than we currently have and so that but we have to change things very very much how much do we have to change them that's shown in the next slide so the next way forward which is investment and this is a study by Yormo Kikstra and environmental research letters and he basically calculated how much we would need to invest where and in which sectors to achieve universal decent living standards and this is the investment here is measured in biophysical units energy and exiguals and what you can see is that the global investment would be on the order of 290 exiguals so this is huge this is almost a year or half of a year of current energy use it's large it's a large amount of energy but it's not more than we're using in a year and we'd be doing this investment presumably over several years so basically it's entirely doable and most of this would have to be invested in the shell or half of it would roughly have to be invested in the shelter domain so in the domain that is the most equitably distributed and benefits the most people really where they live then the next bit would be in mobility and then you have socialization which is things like communication, health and nutrition now if you look at the plot of what annual energy use looks after investment you see that the shelter part becomes super small right? and that means that if we invest a lot into a better building stock more efficient building stock we need much less energy for heating and cooling than we currently do so it's really a question of are we willing to make the investment are we willing to orient our economies to serve people where they live with or what they need or are we going to use it for overconsumption as we currently are and so the other thing that you can see is that mobility now becomes the lion's share of energy use that's because of physics when you move things around you have to use energy so there's no no big solution there okay the third fact is dependency I talked about provisioning systems at the beginning so provisioning systems could enable us to live good lives at good low resource use it is entirely technically possible but are very often engineered designed to create resource dependency and that's what our economy is our current economy you want to call it capitalism you can call it whatever you want it is centered around industries that need to create overconsumption to survive these industries are overproductive and they need overconsumption to keep themselves going and then they make sure that our economies and our governments make the conditions for overconsumption happen for them so that's one of the things we found in this article by Giulio Maggioli in 2020 on the political economy of car dependence that the dependency on resource intensive consumption is itself an industrial product what these industries are creating is they are creating the conditions of dependency on their products and they are doing that through lobbying through acquiring subsidies and basically a whole bunch of different ways that they capture the state that they take over our governments for their own purposes and that's what creates our current situation of resource dependency and then the question becomes how do we get away from that because state capture of the automotive industry, of the road industry of the fossil fuel industry is very powerful how do we get away from them and that this is not going to be very intellectual compared to the previous discussion but I made a cartoon version of the neoclassical economy so how mainstream sees the economy as a horizontal market and you basically have a bunch of small ants all the producers are small all the consumers are small and the producers are pouring different kinds of beer into the sea of the market the market is the flat surface of the sea is fine and consumers are happily drinking the beer of their choice because they get to choose what they want to do and nobody has enough power in this picture to create prices or to push anybody else around everybody is doing what they want and the market equilibrates everything between them this is a cartoon version of the real economy which is basically a bunch of very strongly interconnected technology clusters basically vertically integrated supply chains where you have lots of profits being created at the top so the economy is funneling profits upwards and it is funneling dependence on resources towards the bottom and so here what's represented is the transportation system where you basically have oil, roads, cars and real estate turns out to be a big part of it the state is represented as a scaffolding upholding the whole thing together just keeping it up and the market itself is just a funnel it's just basically making consumers consume a certain way and that's what our real economy looks like and the question becomes how do we break apart from that kind of structure which is very very resilient and very self reproducing and so this is where the way forward that I would propose and that we're studying in the real project is economic is democracy but not just any kind of democracy economic democracy and well as well so in order to break our dependency on state capture so in order to break our dependency on resource use and break state capture we need to expand the scope of democracy to our economies we need to take power back inside our economies and this means active citizenship through expanded decision making roles of workers, community members households, different levels of governance and the picture here is the French citizen assembly on climate democracy it turns out is something that we can see working so this is another paper by Yifium Fogel in 2021 who identify the socioeconomic factors which enable well-being or need satisfaction at lower levels of energy use and the positive factors are public service availability including healthcare, income equality and democracy as well as networked infrastructure access like electricity and sanitation negative factors are extractivism so if an economy is very dependent on mining or fossil fuel extraction that's very bad but we already knew that in economics the other thing that's quite bad is economic growth above a moderate income it turns out is unhelpful here so we see that we kind of need degrowth we see that we need democracy we need equality, we need very very good public services and infrastructures these are the things that we need to move forward that would really help us achieve well-being at lower levels of resource use this is something that we're studying now in our next project which is called real a post growth deal which was funded by the European Research Council I'm lucky to be one of the PIs with Yorgo Calas and Jason Hickel and I would recommend that you look more at the beyond growth conference there were lots and lots of presentations there I couldn't possibly do all of it justice I'm still catching up on it myself but I think that this was really this conference that happened almost a year ago really sort of punched through the wall of what alternatives are possible and viable it had some amazing people speaking the sessions on finance were amazing on the work on all different kinds of things including perspectives from the global south it was absolutely tremendous so I really recommend that people go and have a look and if people want to keep reading I have some I'm also willing obviously to share the presentation but these are some books some of most of which are out but some of which are not so poverty, the poverty of growth I think in a month or so so he's the special repertor on poverty and human rights at the United Nations and then there are even further perspectives on alternative societies and alternative ways of thinking that I recommend as well and I think I will leave it there thank you so much thank you so much Julia thank you José Manuel as well we are almost out of time I just wanted to maybe ask you a final conclusion, some final thoughts in just a minute if possible well I I think that Julia's intervention was actually very good but first of all we have to remember that management of energy resources is not an independent variable it depends on the system, the economic system and how it works so that is why my intervention shows that if we do not dismantle that normal notion of economic system and if we do not dismantle the production metaphor in all of those categories then it is very difficult to go beyond this hunger to increase production because in that sense from the point of view of metaphors we see that if you do not get out of what they call the framework then it's very difficult for you to change anything because you're trapped and in that sense my idea would be to get out of that framework so that we can then defend a whole series of practical things such as the ones that Julia has been presenting which I believe are all fine but the thing is that we need a basis which is going beyond that framework so if you're in the framework you say well degrowth and it has its own name degrowth the degrowth of production is called depression so nobody wants depression because everyone suffers as it stands from that other perspective as soon as you get out of the framework there is no way of talking about growth or degrowth it is multi-dimensional it's not just one variable there are different perspectives and we can obviously think about all the different scenarios the worst scenarios but we cannot calculate anything as we would want in the ordinary perspective with monetary reductionism because there is only one unit and for it to grow I mean in order to say that it grows there is just that unit and that's what grows and it's quantifiable so if you transcend it it disappears that idea disappears because you can even use an important variable such as life expectancy but in and of itself life expectancy we would have to see in what conditions the quality of life because even life expectancy would not be the only thing would it so so you enter a more diverse world so ok thank you José Manuel thank you very much for those ideas before we close yes I'm sorry but maybe the example in Spain we have had that real estate bubble that lasted 10 years and it shattered the whole country we were building more housing in Spain than in France and Germany put together and they have twice as many citizens and territory so it was completely absurd but we have to change the real estate model that promotes housing as an investment and not as a good for it's use so you cannot change the real estate model you cannot change that so you cannot talk about degrowth if you haven't changed the framework that produces the situation ok Julia the floor is yours thank you so much for closing that thanks so much I'm sorry if we didn't have time for this discussion with the rest of the audience I think that a good point in measuring things especially from a biophysical perspective and that a lot of social indicators including life expectancy actually do measure very reasonable things but I completely agree with Jose Manuel that we need to change our economic systems I think that this is quite important to do through the perspective on provisioning systems that's my particular lens it means different things for different industries and we have to think about how that practices and think about different organizations for different forms of provision so I think that would just be my what I add and please if anybody is still listening just go and look at all the other presentations from the post growth the beyond growth conference in Brussels it was astounding and I don't think that you care so much about whether or not degrowth is a good word or those kinds of things when you see them it really makes it clear that a new way of thinking is coming of age so it's quite a positive thing thank you so much Julia and thank you so much Jose Manuel and I would like to thank all of the people who have been connected thank you so much for listening and on behalf of the GEF and Transición Verde thank you I've been told to say that they're going to upload the recording of the session to the youtube channel and they're going to create a website where there will be a summary with a link to the video and with the presentations from the speakers and with the links that they have been sharing in the chat so we will finish this session here today thank you all very much and we'll see you next time bye bye hello