Moving from Growth to Welfare — a Conceptual Framework

The overall aim of this book is to focus on the problem of how to increase or at least maintain welfare (the benefits) while reducing ecological clam-age and risks and alienating labour (the costs). We believe that the case for reducing ecological impact of economic activity is proven (see Chapter 2) so that the issue is how to reduce economic activity and what would be the consequences of so doing. We have shown in Chapter 3 that much of current employment has little measurable impact on welfare other than on the person’s income which, with current employment and income policies, is nearly always higher when one has a job.1 In Chapter 4, we showed that for a number of reasons, the consumption which is derived from income is a very poor measure of welfare.