Tim Jackson

In short, avoiding the scourge of unemployment may have less to do with chasing after growth and more to do with building an economy of care, craft and culture. And in doing so, restoring the value of decent work to its rightful place at the heart of society.

Productivity - the amount of output delivered per hour of work in the economy - is often viewed as the engine of progress in modern capitalist economies. Output is everything. Time is money. The quest for increased productivity occupies reams of academic literature and haunts the waking hours of C.E.O.s and finance ministers.

Firms produce goods for households - that's us - and provide us with incomes, and that's even better, because we can spend those incomes on more goods and services. That's called the circular flow of the economy.

Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. But question it we must.

The most staggering linguistic turnabout for me is the one that equates green economy with 'sustained economic growth.'