wellbeing

Beyond the Obvious: novel podcasts for enquirers

Our pilot podcast series, Beyond the Obvious, was co-organised by Feasta and the European Health Futures Forum.

The hosts, Seán O’Conláin and Caroline Whyte, explored a range of topics with guests from a wide variety of backgrounds. There are six monthly podcasts of 20-30 minutes, released between March 15th and September 17th 2019. (We took a break in August.) Please feel free to comment below.

Topics include:

• decarbonisation
• decreasing energy consumption
• measuring wellbeing
• reviving biodiversity, which is taken to include local culture and language
• drivers of health
• monetary reform

Our thanks to Laoise …

Money through the looking glass

Caroline Whyte argues that the only way to achieve degrowth without crashing the global economy is to change the way that money is issued. Yet, paradoxically, it would be advisable for central bankers to continue to publicly disagree with the Vollgeld and other debt-free-money campaigns’ suggested financial reforms - and for the campaigners to continue their campaigns regardless, not letting themselves be discouraged by the officials' stance.

Significant discrepancies between Irish peoples’ overall well-being and Irish GDP levels during the period 2000-2014, according to new study published by Feasta and FEST

A newly-developed National Well-being Index finds that well-being in Ireland flatlined and even diminished slightly during peak GDP years 2001-2004. The index takes housework, voluntary work, healthcare, education and environmental damage into account.

From Our Archives: The Problem with Economic Growth

This article, written by Richard Douthwaite in May 1997, outlines some of the basic ideas that led to the founding of Feasta. It's interesting to note how ahead of his time he was in his criticisms of growth as a measure of progress, many of which are now quite well known. Sadly, the widening inequality he describes and the many problems related to that have only worsened over time.