I sometimes find myself feeling improbably sorry for politicians. For all their obligatory bluster and bombast, they often sound lost, out of their depth, mystified as to why nothing seems to work anymore, facing into multiple, overlapping, persistent crises—the 21st century’s so-called ‘polycrisis.’ So is there, perhaps, a single cause for all of this?

In 1919, William Yeats wrote his famous poem, ‘The Second Coming,’ with these resonant lines:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, it seemed to Yeats that the norms and relative certainties of Western civilization (“the center,” in his poem) had been brutally, irreparably ripped apart by the atrocities of the war.

So are we now, more than 100 years on, engulfed in another such existential moment? As things fall apart all around us, with anarchy loosed upon our world, is our ‘center’ now imploding in front of our eyes?

For the last 75 years, in countries both rich and poor, in democracies and autocracies alike, there has been one constant imperative: generate as much economic growth as possible. All else has come to depend on achieving year-on-year increases in economic growth: addressing poverty, ensuring social mobility, maintaining high levels of employment, improving public services, and even our national security.

However, for at least the last 15 years since the global financial crisis in 2008, it's become more and more apparent that the growth machine has run out of fuel. Yet this rather obvious conclusion remains entirely taboo. Every other explanation under the sun (declining productivity, ‘the end of globalization,’ the onset of stagflation, and so on) is endlessly dissected to explain what's gone wrong. But the thought of the growth machine itself spluttering to a halt is, well, apparently unthinkable.

God knows why. The costs of generating that growth have been exceeding its benefits for a long time, measured both in physical ‘externalities’ (more CO₂ and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, more plastic in our oceans, more poisons in our bodies, more forests cut down, and soils depleted, etc.) and in socio-economic externalities, in terms of worsening poverty, in the ‘pandemic’ of chronic disease (including cardiovascular disease, obesity, and dementia), in an insupportable burden on public health, and so on.

How telling that health researchers have recently assessed the cost to the global economy of depression, anxiety, and other mental health problems at around $1 trillion a year, more or less, as it happens, the same economic burden as that entailed in dealing with type 2 diabetes.

This kind of cost/benefit analysis, at the macro scale, is at least well understood. Far less familiar, from the point of view of the growth machine grinding to a halt, are the economic implications of continuing to extract the raw materials we need to keep topping up the tank: more energy required to extract every barrel of oil or cubic meter of gas—with the ‘energy-in/energy-out’ relationship worsening all the time; more waste generated for every ton of mined materials, as the higher-grade ores and deposits are depleted; more pumping effort required to draw up precious (and diminishing) groundwater supplies; more inputs (fertilizers and chemicals) to produce the same tonnage of critical agricultural commodities. Few economists have ever gotten their heads around the laws of thermodynamics!

All of which means that today's politicians have to go to ever-crazier lengths to keep the global economy's clapped-out growth machine on the road. But any debate about whether this is still the best way to make progress is ruthlessly closed down, and advocates of alternative approaches are still dismissed as ‘blockers’ or ‘eco-zealots.’ Keir Starmer’s government has just introduced a new bill into Parliament (the Planning and Infrastructure Bill), which is without a doubt the most environmentally irresponsible measure any UK government has brought forward over the last 50 years, despite Labour's manifesto pledges “to restore and protect our natural world.” Not a day goes by without his increasingly desperate refrain of “growth, growth, growth” being ritualistically trotted out.

According to the High Priesthood of Economic Growth, the most blasphemous of all dissenters are the ‘deranged disciples of degrowth’—which is rapidly becoming the most persuasive of alternative economic proposals. Degrowth has been defined by economist Jason Hickel as “a planned reduction of energy and resource use, designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being.”

In my opinion, that just sounds like common sense! But there are many critics of conventional economic growth who still remain very uncomfortable about the degrowth movement, in no small part because of the word itself. It just sounds ‘retro,’ or, worse yet, regressive—as in ignoring the critical importance of dealing with chronic poverty or seemingly putting the brake on people's legitimate material and financial aspirations. Degrowth doesn't do that—but that's never going to cut it in the fierce heat of debate.

Which may explain why Professor Tim Jackson (author of the 2009 bestseller ‘Prosperity Without Growth’) has chosen to go down a very different path with his new book, ‘The Care Economy.’

The basic case he makes is that we all have a big choice to make over the next few years: health or wealth? “Human prosperity, properly considered, is primarily about health rather than wealth. The economy should therefore concern itself first and foremost with care, in all its forms, rather than with relentless growth as it does at the moment.”

He lays bare the ways in which modern medicine (with its total dependence on Big Pharma and increasingly sophisticated ways of “curing our diseased minds and bodies”) ruthlessly crushed any alternative ideas about health—as defined by the World Health Organization as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

There are telling parallels here between the medical establishment systematically suppressing more holistic, integrated models of healthcare, and orthodox, obsessively pro-growth economists systematically suppressing the ideas of people like Tim Jackson and Jason Hickel. In truth, much of the Western world is already living in what looks more and more like a post-growth world, but we're just not allowed to think about the consequences of that.

For me, it all comes down to the dominance of a certain way of looking at things, with experts in different fields forensically focused on smaller and smaller aspects of a much bigger picture: economists focused on Gross Domestic Product, per capita income, and measures of productivity, without for a moment looking at the wider world in which the outcomes of all these things are playing out; GPs and surgeons looking at different health problems and symptoms as if they were unrelated, and seeking to treat them in that disconnected way. Reductionist thinking is pushed as far as it will go.

Tim Jackson takes us back to the 19th century to show how ‘germ theory’ (it's germs that make us sick, so let's identify them, isolate them, and eliminate them through drugs) triumphed over ‘terrain theory’ (where it's the bigger picture that really matters: diet, lifestyle, the environment we live in, exposure to toxins, state of mind, and so on). 150 years on, that ‘cure vs care’ dichotomy is still playing out, with care invariably relegated to a secondary role.

So interwoven is this model of curative, pharma-led medicine with today's dominant economic orthodoxies that Jackson goes so far as to suggest that the real deep-down pathogen we're going to have to deal with is capitalism itself. That it’s our pursuit of at-all-cost economic growth and corporate profits that is fundamentally undermining our health and well-being, and that this is:

Inflicted on us by a pharmaceutical industry selling toxic ingredients to treat isolated symptoms. By medical practices that pay no attention to the care of the whole person or to the wisdom of the body. By a scientific dogma that has exiled both common sense and ancient wisdom in favor of its own hubris. And by a model of health that has itself been captured by the interests of industry and capital.

I loved ‘The Care Economy.’ It's not exactly an orthodox book, taking the reader down all sorts of rabbit holes along the way! But they invariably add to the overall aim of the book, which is to invite us to move beyond our more and more desperate dependence on a clapped-out growth machine.

’The Care Economy’ by Professor Tim Jackson is published in the USA at the end of May by Polity, an imprint of Wiley.