About this Event
This webinar is part of a series called From Crisis to Care: Reimagining Economics for our Common Home. The climate crisis and global pandemic have made it starkly clear that current mainstream economic ideas are not working. To chart a new future, we need to unlearn and transcend the accepted ideas that economic growth and gross domestic product (GDP) are what we should build our societies upon. Through those workshops we invite you to join us in this process of unlearning by exploring:
- Why a focus on GDP and economic growth often does not lead to genuine improvements in well-being,
- How we can refocus economic goals in terms of care for our common home, including the use of alternative indicators to measure health, happiness, and quality of life,
- How we can create an economy that seeks to lessen income inequality, overcome systemic racism, and achieve ecological justice,
- How these emerging alternatives can close the gap and ensure greater economic equality between the global South and North,
- How to turn these ideas into solutions for a just recovery, effective climate action, and an economy of care.
In this first webinar called Beyond GDP: Reimagining Economics for our Common Home,
Marilyn Waring, a New Zealand feminist, former politician, author, academic, and activist for human rights and environmental issues will explore why GDP is a problematic measure and how the quest to increase it often drives ecological destruction, impoverishment, oppression, and social marginalization. Key questions to be considered include:
- What is the relationship between economic growth as measured by GDP and ecological destruction, including the climate crisis?
- How does GDP undervalue the work of women, racialized communities, and those involved in subsistence economies?
- What is the relationship between economic growth, colonization, and issues of Indigenous rights and sovereignty?
- Why is moving beyond a fixation on growth of GDP an essential part of a movement for a just and sustainable transition or recovery?
- What might be some alternative ways (indicators) to measure improvements in health, well-being, social justice, and sustainability?
Organizers of the event:
Alternative Economics Working Group is part of the Ontario JPIC Lay Network and consist of four organizations:
- The Jesuit Forum for Social Faith and Justice
- Ministry for Social Justice, Peace, and Creation Care with the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto
- JPIC office of the Sisters of Providence
- JPIC office of the Congregation of Notre Dame (Visitation Province).