contractionism.org - Frank Rotering's Economics of Needs and Limits

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. - Kenneth Boulding (18 January 1910 – 18 March 1993), economist, educator, poet, religious mystic and devoted Quaker

Face to Face with Frank Rotering and the Contractionary Revolution
Ictv Victoria July 2011 - "We talk to author Frank Rotering about his book 'Needs and Limits; A New Economic System for Sustainable Well-Being'. We need a new economic system; corporate capitalism is a disaster. We need 'sustainable well-being', and 'needs and limits'; so this is the right time for these ideas."

Frank is critical of Green Reformists like Prof Tim Jackson. In Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (London: Earthscan, 2009), p90, Jackson bases his claim that we can morph present day capitalisim into a sustainable capitalism on the arguements of economist in William Baumol's Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity (2009). Franks writes, "I can find no support in Baumol's book for Jackson's assertion that capitalism can avoid growth. Jackson is in fact coy about this claim: "The main thesis of Baumol and his colleagues is that not all types of capitalism are equally good. Some of them lead to growth; others lead to 'stagnation'. Specifically, the 'good' ones lead to growth and the 'bad' ones lead to stagnation! This moral judgement is fascinating in its own right. It's also interesting in suggesting that a capitalist economy doesn't after all inevitably have to be growth-based." (Ibid., 89f) Thus Jackson's statement that capitalism is not growth-dependent is supported by an interesting suggestion made by standard economists. The reader can judge whether this is an adequate basis for a fundamental claim about today's economic reality."