Macro N Cheese

It’s customary to think of growth as something to aspire to and celebrate. It’s one of those words with positive connotations, like progress. Growth represents our progress as a society. The MMT community has called this into question by exposing the underbelly of the most celebrated measure of economic growth, the GDP. The costs of clean-up after a man-made or natural disaster, like an oil spill or hurricane, represent an increase to the GDP. How twisted is that? Steve’s guest this week is Lorenz Keyszer, a master’s student of environmental systems and policy in Zurich. His paper, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22884-9 (1.5° C Degrowth Scenarios Suggests the Need for New Mitigation Pathways), co-authored with Manfred Lenzen, attempts to subvert the positive meanings associated with traditional concepts of growth. In the face of ongoing climate catastrophe, Lorenz sees the need to dig deeper and ask which things we really want to see increase and which things which we want to decrease. In other