on 25-Feb-2024 (Sun)

Write a “prequel” to A Christmas Carol . Describe how Scrooge developed as a character

Secular stagnation, escalating socio-ecological crises, and the urgent need to scale back resource use in affluent countries make reductions in economic output increasingly likely.

- What is "secular stagnation"

- How are "escalating socio-ecological crises" defined and quantified?

- What drives the urgent need to scale back resouce use in affluent countries, and why does this need only apply to affluent countries?

years around the Global Financial Crisis

- Which years specifically?

vulnerability of livelihoods in the UK

- How is vulnerability measured?

- How does vulnerability differ between countries, or beetween regions of the UK?

- How applicable are the conclusions of this paper outside the UK?

vulnerability is not inevitable but arises when livelihoods are dependent on wage labour whilst employment and adequate incomes for workers are insecure, or when adequate pensions are insecure

reductions in economic output (as expressed by GDP) are associated with hardship and wide-reaching negative impacts on human livelihoods, i.e. on people’s ability to meet their basic needs and in particular their ability to afford the cost of living

- Correlation or causation?

- Are other measures more closely associated with nagative impacts on livelihoods?

- How well established is this claim?

Most governments seem to regard the vulnerability of livelihoods to output reductions as inevitable, and conclude that any output reduction is a threat to livelihoods, and that the only way to secure livelihoods is to pursue economic growth.

- This would seem to correspond to statements I've heard politicians make over the decades, but can it be backed up?

First, to stop biodiversity loss and to equitably limit global warming to 1.5 ◦C without relying on highly contested assumptions about future technologies, affluent coun- tries need to reduce their production and consumption, on top of other environmental policies

- What future technologies are being referred to here and how are they contested?

- How do biodiversity loss and limiting global warming relate to each other?

- What alternatives are there to reducing production and consumption (e.g., efficiencies, shifting production and consumption rather than reducint them).

- How do you avoid simply shifting greenhouse gas emitting production from affluent countries to less wealthy nations?

secular stagnation

- What is secular stagnation?

practical limits to growth

- What kinds of practical limits on growth exist?

- How severe are these limits?

- How difficult is it to work around these limits?

- What is evidence for the existance of such limits?

escalating financial, ecological, resource, and public health crises are already and increasingly disrupting societies and plunging economies into deep recessions (e.g. the 1970s oil crises, the 2008/2009 financial crisis, the Covid-19 crisis)

- Can the "escalation" of such crises be quantified? How do they compare in magnitude and frequence with past crises (e.g., global 1930s recession, WWI, WWII, cold war)

As Bailey (2015, p. 800) puts it: “The end of growth may be economically unavoidable or environmentally necessary."

Four challenges:

- Need to limit environmental damage (biodiversity loss, global warming)

- Apparent limits on growth (secular stagnation, practical limits)

- Escalating crises

- Growth no longer improving well-being, sometimes decreasing it

Finally, the pursuit of economic growth in affluent countries is no longer improving human well-being, and is in fact in many ways socially detrimental

- What are examples of economic growth not contributing to well-being

- In what ways is growth detrimental (aside from the obvous like, e.g. polution from unregulated industry, poor treatment of employees)?

- Have the negative effects of grown been quantified?

- Are these negative effects (or lack of positive effects) associated with growth in general or with specific drivers of growth or industries in particular.

Given that output reductions are becoming increasingly likely in the short and long run, the vulnerability of livelihoods to output reductions poses a fundamental threat to human well-being

- Isn't this at least partially contradictory to the claim that growth is causing harm?

1. How are livelihoods related to economic output, and which variables mediate and moderate this relationship? 2. Under which conditions are livelihoods vulnerable to reductions in economic output? 3. Which factors create and sustain the conditions for the vulnerability of livelihoods to output reductions in contemporary capitalist economies? 4. What interventions could in principle overcome the vulnerability of livelihoods to output reductions?

During the Covid-19 crisis, this vulnerability [of livelihoods to reductions in economic output] likely also contributed to late implementation and premature termination of lockdowns in many countries.

social provisioning

- What is social provisioning?

[...] We define a person’s livelihood as their means to meet their basic needs (i.e. as the basis for their well-being), and introduce a novel concept: the adequacy of a person’s livelihood, defined as their ability to meet their basic needs.

Our study [is] the first to assess the growth dependence of livelihoods, and one of the first to explicitly analyse livelihoods in a post-growth context.

no study assesses proposed interventions against an adequacy benchmark for livelihoods

- How would one go about doing such a study?

Advocacy of specific interventions is rarely grounded in a systematic analysis of what conditions and factors underpin this dependence (Research Questions 2 and 3), and how these proposals would overcome it

previous analyses are often limited to the case of a low-growth or zero-growth economy, whereas the case of a contracting economy has received much less attention

social traps

- What are social traps?

Why We Can’t Build Better Cities (ft.Not Just Bikes)

‘Cold in amarillo’ by Luke Levenson https://open.spotify.com/track/0dX3z3...

Esther Addley, “‘This is political expediency’: how the Tories turned on 15-minute cities,” in The Guardian

Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Bernadette Atuahene, “Predatory Cities,” in California Law Review

Bernadette Atuahene, “The Scandal of the Predatory City,” in The Washington Post

David Banks, The City Authentic

Adam Barnett, Michaele Herrmann, and Christopher Deane, “Revealed: the Science Denial Network Behind Oxford’s ‘Climate Lockdown’ Backlash,” in DeSmog

BBC News, ‘How 15 Minutes Cities Became a Lockdown Conspiracy’

Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

Alice Capelle, “The Anti 15 Minute City Conspiracy is Ridiculous”

Alice Capelle, “The manosphere meets the climate movement”

Lisa Chamberlain, “The Surprising Stickiness of the “15 Minute City”,” in World Economic Forum

Steven Conn, The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is (And Isn’t)

Samuel R. Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Gareth Fearn et al., “Planning For the Public: Why Labour Should Support A Public Planning System”

Hannah Fry, “A ‘failure to launch’: Why young people are having less sex,” in Los Angeles Times

Edward Glaeser, “The 15-minute city is a dead end - cities must be places of opportunity for everyone”

David Harvey, “The Art of Rent”

David Harvey, “The Political Economy of Public Spaces”

David Harvey, “The Right to the City”

Tiffany Hsu, “He Wanted to Unclog Cities. Now He’s ‘Public Enemy No. 1.’,” in The New York Times

Frank Laundry, “The USA Will Never Build Walkable Cities”

David Lawler, “A World of Boomtowns,” in Axios

Eisha Maharasingham-Shah and Pierre Vaux, “‘Climate Lockdown’ and the Culture Wars: How COVID-19 Sparked A New Narrative Against Climate Action,” in Institute for Strategic Dialogue

Michael Naas, “Comme si, comme ca” in Derrida From Now On

NotJustBikes, Designing Urban Places that Don’t Suck (A Sense of Place)

NotJustBikes, How Suburban Development Makes American Cities Poorer

NotJustBikes, Suburbia is Subsidized: Here’s the Math

NotJustBikes, Suburbia is Subsidized: Here’s the Math

NotJustBikes, The Great Places Erased by Suburbia (the Third Place)

Oh the Urbanity! “15-Minute City Conspiracies Have It Backwards”

Feargus O’Sullivan, “Where the ‘15-Minute City’ Falls Short,” in Bloomberg

Feargus O’Sullivan and Daniel Zuidijk, “The 15 Minute City Freakout is A Case Study in Conspiracy Paranoia,” in Bloomberg

QAnon Anonymous, “Attending the 15 Minute Cities Oxford Protest with Annie Kelly”

Elliot Sang, “Nowhere To Go: the Loss of the Third Place”

Chris Stanford, “The 15-Minute City: Where Urban Planning Meets Conspiracy Theories,” in The New York Times

Darin Tenev, “La Déconstruction en enfant: the Concept of Phantasm in the Work of Derrida”

Trashfuture, “Cell Block IPA”

Trashfuture, Honk if You’re Honu ft. Dr Gareth Fearn

Joy White, Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City

Kim Willsher, “Paris Mayor Unveils ‘15-minute city’ plan in re-election campaign,” in The Guardian