Can we have prosperity without growth? With Tim Jackson
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Please apply. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Cirenti. Is prosperity possible without growth?

And in an age of environmental crises and rising inequality is our obsession with economic expansion doing more harm than good? On the podcast today, renowned economist Professor Tim Jackson challenges the very foundations of our economic thinking. In his groundbreaking book, Prosperity Without Growth, Jackson argued that relentless pursuit of GDP not only fails to deliver human well-being,

it actively damages both society and the planet. Now in his latest book, The Care Economy, Jackson issues a powerful warning: "Affixation on growth has come at the cost of the most vital parts of our lives: care, health, and human connection."

In a world that undervalues care work and prioritises profit over people, what would it take to build an economy centred on wellbeing instead of wealth? Jackson sat down with broadcaster Carl Miller to explore the future of prosperity and why reimagining our values might just be the most important economic decision we face. Let's join Carl now with more.

Hello everyone and a very warm welcome to This Intelligence Squared today with me, Carl Miller. I'm delighted to introduce our guest, Tim Jackson. So Tim is the Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and is the author of the incredibly influential book, Prosperity Without Growth, and is also the author now of a new book, The Care Economy. So Tim, very warm welcome.

It's great to be here, Carl. Thanks for the invitation. So why write The Care Economy? Well, I think for various reasons. One is it actually goes back to prosperity without growth and sort of something that was half articulated in prosperity without growth, but never fully fleshed out, which is the kind of economy that we might want in a world without growth to deliver prosperity without growth. And I did. I mean, at the time I talked about the sectors of care, craft and creativity as sort of set of

sectors which are kind of left behind in the conventional capitalist economy and almost second-class citizens. And I wanted to sort of flesh out both the arguments for that economy, but also some of the reasons why it doesn't happen in quite the way that we might think it ought to happen, given that care is so self-evidently the foundation for any kind of economy, for any kind of life. And I wanted to start from that point that care is a

foundational principle for economic, for organic life, but isn't a foundational principle for economic life. And I was teasing out some of the reasons for that, but also making that case that actually this economy matters. And you were telling me a minute ago, Tim, that you needed a kind of a motif of sorts, you know, a song or an image to kind of begin writing. What was the, what was the

the motif that you began to write Care Economy with in your head? It was a tricky book to write for all sorts of reasons. And one of the reasons was that, aside from that blindingly obvious fact that care matters to the economy and therefore it should be taken seriously, was why, when that is so blindingly obvious, doesn't it happen?

And I was from the early stages. I mean, I spent a long time before I got to that point of not knowing how to write the book. In fact, I wrote quite a lot of words as well and threw a lot of them away. But I suddenly had reached a point, I think, where the book itself was becoming a sort of problem to write.

And when I used to write radio plays, I used to always start with a piece of music. When I had trouble writing the play, I would just go away and listen to the music. And I felt like I needed something like that for this.

And then at that point in time, the publisher came along and said, actually, you know, you must have almost finished the book now. So we need to start thinking about the cover. And instead of admitting that I hadn't actually started to properly write the book yet, I went to her and started researching what the cover might be. And we came up with various images, various kinds of possibilities, some a little bit too obvious, some a little bit too medical, some a little bit abstract.

And then I came across this image of what is the Enzo circle, it's called. It's an ancient Zen Buddhist image that's

conventionally painted by exactly by an artist starting in one place on the paper and with one brush stroke just finishing the circle in in one go and and it's It just struck me as the right way to think about writing the book and the right image for the book and I still feel very attached to it as an image and

I mean, I normally talk about writing process at the end of an interview around the beginning, but it's so fascinating. Let's just dwell on it for a second, Tim. So why is that motif, whatever it is, so in this case, this image of the circle, why is that so important to you as a writer? Is it a kind of grounding kind of like or guiding element that you come back to when you're trying to think about what direction the book is going in and what you want it to say?

It is definitely something like that, but it's also more, it's not quite so linear as that, if you like. It's more that actually, and I used to very much do this with a piece of music, was that the piece of music takes me out of my logical, rational brain into a creative space. And it's that ability to move from that linear, rationalistic way of thinking into the creative space that becomes really important when you're writing music.

particularly when you're writing this kind of book, not every kind of book and not every kind of thing. And if you're writing a scientific argument from point A to point B, then that rational, logical thing is very important to you. And of course, there is scientific argument within the book. But there's also a sort of sense of a narrative that I was trying to capture about the subject matter that called on that more creative side of the brain. And something like that

as a piece of music or as an image, that's a kind of constant way of reframing your brain's desire, and particularly your left brain's desire to take over the project by allowing the creativity of the subject matter to come through. And so it's more process-based, really, than kind of deeply symbolic.

And why was it such a difficult book to write? Because as you said, the kind of thesis is super clear, you know, kind of care is tremendously undervalued by the economy. It's arguably should be what the economy is trying to create. And yet it seems to be that we're, you know, tremendously unable as kind of economic beings to kind of capture and value care in the way that it should be. Yeah, it was difficult for a few reasons. The first, I think,

And sort of patiently obvious is that a lot of when I started, certainly when I started really delving into the writing, other people who'd written about care, it's blindingly obvious that most of that is done by women. And I felt a little bit like an imposter, wandering into what Nancy Foel was called the land of the invisible heart, or she simply calls it the invisible heart. But I began to think of it as a definitive land.

a place, a territory where I had sort of stumbled in with my white male economist boots and was wandering around using a concept which I had developed 15 years before, but suddenly realizing that it was someone else's concept, someone else's territory. So that was kind of interesting for me and something that stayed with me as a kind of uneasiness through the writing of the whole book, at least until I got to

Chapter 13, which we'll probably come on to. But the other thing was that just about the time that I sat down to start writing about it was, well, the end of 2021, beginning of 2022, and in February 24th, 2022,

Russia invaded Ukraine and suddenly we were in a, from being in what was a kind of post-pandemic world, we were suddenly pushed into a world that was ramping up the idea of aggression, of war, of domination, of violence in ways that we had pretended not to see for the last decade.

You know 30 years really since the fall of the the Soviet Union in 1990s early 1990s and so so we were suddenly it felt as though we were in a world where care Was not just the last thing on our mind in the most conventional sense that it's always ignored and always a second-class citizen but actually much worse than that we were rushing away from care and towards violence and

in a way that made talking about care almost irrelevant. And that was, at least until I kind of figured my way through that, that was quite problematic.

Well, we certainly will get on to chapter 13 in a second because it's a kind of very important kind of almost like kind of abrupt change, isn't it, in the direction of the book, Tim. Before we get there, let's talk about some of the kind of earlier concepts that you spend time laying out and kind of confronting and explaining in the book. And the first one I'd like you to kind of talk to us about is health because you spend some time in the early part of the book telling us what health is and, of course, importantly, what it also isn't. Yeah.

Yeah, and that also came from Prosperity Without Growth. When we started asking people what prosperity meant to them, almost top of the list always came out health. You know, your own health, your kids' health, your parents' health, your friends' health, the health of your community, the health of the planet, to some extent, for some people. And so that idea that prosperity is better conceived as health is

than as wealth has its roots in prosperity without growth and it was one of the things that i wanted to articulate when i when i came to it it's a really tricky thing because it isn't it's not a simple concept in a way

But there is something very simple about it, which is just this, that health, in most of our understanding or medical understanding of it, for quite a long time, health is primarily about the idea of balance. It's about being in the right place, about things having not too much, not too little, no deficiency, no excess, the right amount.

And of course, that is very opposite, very different from the concept of wealth, which is about accumulation. And it therefore was a way of sort of juxtaposing for me

that care is the antithesis of growth, or at least it's an antidote perhaps to growth because growth continually sees more and more. It's always about accumulation. It never sees a point of balance. And even if it saw that point of balance, it wouldn't know how to stop when it got there because it was so intent on just growing and accumulating. And care actually becomes at that point a way of regulating this almost insane obsession with having more and more and saying actually health is

is a very, very different thing. It is not achieved by just growing and growing and growing. It's achieved by growing at certain points and up to a certain point. But it's then achieved actually by paying a really accurate, constant attention to balance. And that goes missing in the economy. But health also is not simply the absence of pain, is it? It's something that's kind of in a way harder to achieve than that.

Yeah, or even the pursuit of pleasure, right? That's kind of you know One of the most fascinating things that when you think about in a pain is pain. There's a lovely quote that pain is an opinion And it's an opinion obviously that you should be listening to but it's an opinion of your body about its own state It's a message from the body to the brain basically about the state of your body and it's a really really, you know valuable one because it keeps us away from danger it alerts us to harms and

The difficulty is that the pain and our aversion to pain is a deeply monetizable commodity. And so you end up with things that look like health, but they're actually pushing you continually into what appear to be solutions to the problem of pain, which are driving a cycle of ever continuing pain and actually deepening pain in the body through a very precise homeostatic mechanism.

And this is therefore an illusion when it comes to thinking about health, that health is the absence of pain. To some extent, pain is...

is a mechanism, a part of the dynamic of health, bringing us back into balance. It's also, and this is, you know, kind of related, is that one of the things that happens when we address pain, and it's one of the revelations of the neuroscience of the last 10 years, is the pain and pleasure happen in the same part of the brain. And so the absence of pain is actually quite closely related to the presence of pleasure. And pleasure is the thing that we're supposed to be in our

modern vision of what it means to be alive and to flourish in society, the thing that we're chasing, chasing after pleasure. And it becomes very easy to slip into things which are about

start from being the avoidance of pain and end up being the pursuit of pleasure in very, very addictive ways. And so I was kind of very early on trying to establish that this was not really the same thing as health and that neither the pursuit of pleasure nor the absence of pain could really be construed in terms of a workable vision of health.

I mean, we've been talking a lot about concepts up to now, but the place is a very important aspect in the book, isn't it? Isn't it, Tim? Yeah. I mean, you begin many chapters with these beautiful, poetic descriptions of sunrises or sunsets or clouds or rain in Paris. And one of the places you take us is Tredegar, Nye Bevan's constituency. Why do you work this kind of visceral description of place so kind of

self-co... well, kind of deliberately, I suppose, like into the book in the way that you do? Again, for me, it was a rescue remedy. It was a... it was in part a way... I think partly because it's very difficult to talk from the abstract and I was encountering that difficulty of talking from the abstract. And in part because my own strategy in pursuit of that, of overcoming that difficulty was actually to take myself into various places. And... and

It was almost accidental that I ended up grounding the narrative in place. But it was also part of my writing process because place became important during the writing of the book. And when I first started writing about place,

within the drafting of the book, I was unsure whether I would keep it. I didn't know if I would keep that writing at all at various points. I thought I'd just chuck it away like quite a lot of the other work that I'd done, I'd just chucked away. But it actually became both a way of allowing myself to write, but also grounding the concept in place. And as you say, Tredegar, very much a part of the narrative of the book, but also a quality of place that allowed me somehow to reflect on those abstract concepts and

And that abstract history in a very precise way. And in Tredegar, you introduce health economics or this kind of constant collective pursuit that we've been having for a healthy population. Tell us a bit about that and how that as a kind of moving target has changed so importantly, kind of since the founding of the NHS up to where we are now.

Yeah, it is fascinating. It was a fascinating kind of history and it's fascinating this kind of, you know, miner's son who himself went down the mine, Nye Bevan, at the age of 14, at a time when child labour was absolutely de rigueur, you know, that you just needed all these kids to be stuffed out of school and into the mines as fast as possible so we could dig the black stuff up and use it to fire our furnaces and build tanks at that point, actually, mostly, and other sort of

institutional structures of capitalism. And so, you know, this kid and I, Bevan has grown up in a town where people are basically chattels of a rampant capitalism and the cheap labor that's needed to make it work at that point in time. And out of this kind of almost what could be a horror situation,

of early industrialization comes this idea that, and to some extent it might be a cynical idea that you have to protect labor because it's valuable to capitalism, but nonetheless, it also protects human beings. This idea that there's a value in keeping people healthy, keeping the workforce healthy. And the medical aid society in Tredegar, which was founded

where essentially Nye Bevan, one of the places where Nye Bevan got the kind of impetus for the National Health Service from was an early social experiment to try and create something like that, that welfare...

universal health care free at the point of need for anyone who needed it. And this-- and it did go beyond the miners themselves. It went-- it also included their families. And in the end, there was a point at which the Trudyga Medical Aid Society was supporting everyone through a point where there was mass unemployment and deepening ill health. And so it became a sort of symbol for Nye Bevan and for the early architects of the National Health Service.

of a kind of different way of thinking about health and different way of thinking about well-being in society.

And it was enormously influential at the time. There was a doctor there in Tredegar also, one of the early people who'd worked in the Medical Aid Society, a guy called A.J. Cronin. And he wrote a book called The Citadel, published in the 1930s. And it, too, was enormously influential in propagating this idea that something different was possible from the series of kind of privatized quacks and...

fake healers who had been peddling their wares to those who could afford to buy them. And the poorest in society had no recourse to health care whatsoever. And it was deliberately seen as a kind of way of saying, this is not the foundation for a civilized society. A civilized society has to do better than this for the health of its population. And it can only do this through what then became the National Health Service.

When you look at the National Health Service with sort of non-rose-tinted spectacles, you can see that some of the seeds of what subsequently happened were already existent there. For example, the British Medical Association famously stood out against it to the very last minute, and they only really accepted it when it happened.

by, through a concession that Nye Bevan made that private doctors would be allowed to still earn private incomes as well as their salaries from being a doctor. And so there were various aspects of what we have now begun to see as a sort of two-tier health system that were all actually also baked into that idea of the NHS right from the beginning and turned out to be problematic.

And another aspect was that the burden of disease began to change. And this is massively important for the concept of the book, that the burden of disease shifted from infectious disease issues and accidents at work, which of course is what the Trudeau Medical Aid Society had been addressing,

towards what is called non-communicable diseases, chronic disease, sometimes called, and perhaps not entirely correctly, lifestyle disease, but diseases that arise from the interaction between us as human beings, as organic beings, and the kind of lifestyle that we have around us, in particular diet, nutrition, exercise, and a variety of environmental toxins that we're exposed to. And

One of the things that's made the life of the NHS so difficult and is so problematic for health as a whole is this massive shift in burden that 74% of global deaths are now associated with chronic disease and an even higher proportion of our health budgets are associated with the treatment of chronic disease and sometimes not very successful treatment of the symptoms of the chronic disease rather than addressing the underlying causes. So as I unravel this history,

kind of almost for myself in the book because I knew some of it, but I wasn't entirely conversant with it. I began to see actually that

It's fine to think about the concept of welfare as a universal access to, at the point of need for everything related to health, but actually that not just has the vision, the vision has to some extent survived, but the context in which that vision is trying to propagate itself has changed massively and made it much more difficult to achieve that vision. You talk about stress a lot as well, don't you, Tim, and how

we're kind of quite poorly evolved as human beings for the kind of environments and contexts that we're actually now living in. That's absolutely critical. So, you know, the process that the body uses to bring itself back into balance can be hijacked. It goes back, there's a book called The Wisdom of the Body and essentially by a guy called Walter Callan back in the 1930s. And beyond that, actually to Claude Bernard, the sort of father of physiology,

And he draws on this idea that the body is constantly trying to achieve this sense of balance. And it's called homeostasis in the medical terminology of physiology, this bringing back into balance of various things of, you know, blood sugar, heart rate, blood...

acidity, actually even dopamine as it turns out, all kinds of things are just constantly being brought out into balance to achieve the constancy in Bernard's terms, the constancy of the internal environment in the face of changing external conditions.

Now, you might ask why evolution allowed for such a clunky thing to be happening. We constantly have to adapt. Why aren't we instantly adapted? And the point of that is that being out of balance is sometimes functional for the human body. Stress is one of those factors.

acute stress when something external to the environment stresses us. You know, we're being attacked by a wild animal or being attacked by another tribe or we're in acute hunger. Actually, a lot of the mechanisms of being out of balance are functional because they

lead us to the pursuit of health through the pursuit of either to defend ourselves or to flee or to go out and search for the things that we need in the environment this was all functional in our Ancestral environment and so being out of balance is also stressful even though being in balance is where the body has to aim to get back to now why is that different now because we we evolved in

In a in an era when those kinds of stresses were relatively rare relatively infrequent even being attacked was relatively infrequent But we evolved with a mechanism that allowed us to respond whenever we felt that we might be under attack and so a constantly competitive environment for example constantly encourages us towards being out of balance to create the

the mechanism of fight or flight, this constant, constant stress that's used actually to sell stuff, to excite us, to absorb us in social media, to bring us actually constantly out of balance. And of course, it's also monetized. That ability to hijack a specific part of our neuropsychology has been monetized within capitalism in ways that are constantly bringing us out of balance. And that is a situation to which we are prone

Not at all Evolutionary adapted we are evolutionarily adapted to being in acute stress and bringing ourselves and the body bringing us back into balance But we're not adapted to a situation where we're constantly being Pulled out of balance and then having ourselves exposed constantly to a monetized environment Which is which whose aim is to pull us out of balance? We are in the sense an evolutionary organism

at the mercy of a social system that we have ourselves evolved at a certain point in time, but that social system is now adversely affecting our health. The impact of that, to come back to the previous question, the impact of that is absolutely devastating. It's the rise and rise and rise of chronic health disease that are now killing more people and creating unpayable health bills.

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Well, this moment when we're discussing balance is probably a good time to also return to this idea of care and its relationship with balance. Because, I mean, we've spoken about care up to now, of course, but I think it's worth making it, trying to make it as explicit as possible, Tim, how care kind of functions as a concept throughout the book. Because it's an expansive idea, isn't it?

in your mind isn't it and you know it's it's not just something that human beings necessarily do i mean there's there's one point in the book where you tim wonders whether the moon cares for us so it's also something that kind of like is it seems to be much more ubiquitous as a as as a possibility throughout the world that we live in so what is care in fact like where is it and where is it not

Yeah. I mean, the moon caring for us actually was one of those moments, a little bit like the Enzo circle, which rescued me from a kind of puzzle that I just was really, was bothering me. I mean, the problem with the word light care, and it is a problem, is that we use it ubiquitously, as you say.

And it's almost universally associated with an unassailable moral good. You know, to say you don't care about something is to denigrate yourself as a human being. It's almost to put yourself outside the human race. And there are very good reasons for that. But there is a point at which when a word becomes unassailably morally good, that it becomes analytically useless.

And that bothered me too, that I was kind of actually reading a lot of stuff and thinking about a lot of stuff and even writing a lot of stuff where I'm thinking this doesn't make any sense. And that question, which sort of thrust itself upon me, I would say, in a way uninvited as I was kind of sitting in the middle of the night on a Pembrokeshire beach watching the moon rise over the ocean. Does the moon care?

Had at that point I guess been thinking about I've been thinking about the idea of balance quite a lot and actually one of the metaphors for balance in the book is the oceans one of the places where where I do Root it in place is is around the sea the ocean emotion Of course the tide brings that the moon brings the tide back into balance is constant state of shifting of the waves the tidal motion that is the process of balance and it's there and

It works, it operates because of the moon. And so there were two aspects of the moon that kind of struck me when I began to try to answer this question, does the moon care? One is about the constancy of attention and care is,

is above everything else around the need for attention. It's the need for attention to the point of balance. And the other is that it's about the physical and not just physical, but physiological and psychological bringing back into balance. In the Moon's case, it's very, very physical. The Moon brings the level of the water back into balance constantly through the whole day. Constant attention to the point of balance, constant attention to the point of balance.

And it began to seem to me as though, and I might have this totally wrong, I have to accept even after having written the book, but what that did in a sense was begin to allow me to think about care as that process of bringing things back into balance, bringing things back into balance. And it allows you also to distinguish between things which call themselves care

Like care for our military security that prosecutes itself by continually building up an arms race, which eventually is only going to lead to violence, as not care, because it's going in completely opposite direction of balance. It's not exercising the principle of balance. It has no attention to the point of health. And that makes it not care.

And that allowed me in a way to sort of think my way through the characteristics of care as an organizing principle. And when you think about it as an organizing principle, you know, it's not just the moon. That might be a kind of primary level of care and the motion of the planets around the sun, which could be construed in the same way.

But also that wisdom of the body the internal balancing mechanisms. It's a sort of secondary level of care That's constantly there the body is constantly at attention to the level of balance and bringing it back into balance It's caring for us in that very literal way the whole time and then what we would normally talk about will think about in terms of a process of care you

You know, the care industry or the health care sector or nurses, doctors, teachers, social workers, they are, of course, caring to the extent that they are bringing the body back into balance, bringing us into balance, bringing society into balance that can be constituted as care.

But when it departs from that, and this, you know, in some senses, it is a hard political point I'm making, and obviously one that's subject to scrutiny. But when it departs from that sense of bringing things back into balance, then it's legitimately not care, or at least it's not obviously and legitimately care.

And to round off the argument then, the idea that economic activity being primarily organised around growth is the kind of, is the allegation you make, is the fundamental reason why the economic structures that we have created so profoundly lock out the idea of care from our priorities.

Systematically. I mean, the problem is, and it's not quite as simple as saying they always systematically do, but the assumption that growth is the prior, that growth always happens and always should be what we're doing, locks that out systematically. And there's a very functional way it does that in capitalism through the pursuit of labor productivity, for example, which I talk about later in the book. But it's also worth saying here that

that there's a point at which that growth-based model of progress is not entirely wrong-headed because where there is deficiency, where there's clearly not enough, then some form of growth remains essential.

Actually that again goes right back to prosperity without grace the very first data I looked at was the relationship between income per capita and life expectancy and what you see when you look at that relationship is very very clear that For countries that have virtually nothing sub-saharan Africa where you're living in, you know with virtually nothing an increase in income represents an income increase in living capabilities and that doubles a life expectancy in a very very short space of time and

And life expectancy is clearly a good indicator of health. So there's a nonlinear relationship between growth and health. But at some point, some forms of growth are essential. And we know that, of course, you know, from our own kids, our own kids, we want them to grow up.

I don't know whether you have kids, but there's a point at which when you're a young parent, for example, that you're very quickly exposed to the idea of this little red book, which has the weight curves and whether you fall within the medium or the 10 percentile or the 10 percentile below the ideal weight for your baby, because that growth curve is a good measure of health in an infant. But it stops being a good measure after a certain point. And that's the point that the growth paradigm misses.

You write, Tim, metaphorically, of course, your children are not your children as you reflect on the kind of, I suppose, like the writing process and how books can start to move away from one's original intention. And that happens in this book, doesn't it? Because you kind of,

a light on a kind of a series of ideas that you say are kind of demonized by quackery but are very important to kind of recover so to tell us about this kind of hairpin turn if we can describe it as that that you you take the book down yeah um i mean it's actually happened again a

for reasons which might seem kind of arbitrary in a way, and obviously a sample of one person is never a very good representation of the population as a whole, except that in this case, it turned out I was. So at a certain point in the book, a certain point in the writing, I was diagnosed as pre-diabetic. I had high blood sugar. And it really surprised me. I was like the kind of guy who prides himself on being diabetic.

fit and healthy and gonna live forever. And suddenly I get this blood reading back on the back of a routine exploration of some pain I was getting my foot and it turned out that I had high blood sugar. And it shouldn't really have surprised me that much if I'd known the science of it, I would have known that two thirds of people of my age have high blood sugar. A third of kids have high blood sugar. Getting on for a third of people in the US have high blood sugar.

And 90% of people in the US have some form of metabolic dysfunction, of which high blood sugar is one indicator. And that means that almost everybody is living metabolically out of balance. And it goes back to this whole point about chronic disease. But where it led me in the book was to a kind of a conflict. The way of treating chronic disease largely and the way that I was offered as a treatment of chronic disease is pharmaceutical.

And for something like diabetes, for example, you know, there are pharmaceutical interventions which lower your blood sugar. For something like cardiovascular disease, the statins, which are supposed to lower your blood pressure, there are various pharmaceutical interventions.

And I began to look into them partly because it was suddenly a personal interest, a personal relevance, you might say. And I was very resistant to the idea that I was going to be given statins or I was going to be given semaglutides or for high blood sugar. And so I started to look into the sort of simply what are the alternative options. The alternative options are actually to address the root causes of some of those things. The root cause of something like diabetes is primarily diet, right?

And we live in an almost obesogenic, addictogenic environment in relation to our diets in which we are pump primed, refined sugars, refined carbohydrates, saturated fats in quantities which are simply, the body is simply unable to assimilate and to retain its own balance. And instead of

Instead of, it keeps on trying for us. I mean, you have to give it huge respect as a carer for what it's trying to do. Keep trying to bring us back into balance. But that balance is constantly shifting and the new set points, the new still point, the new points of

balance keeps moving upwards when you are in an environment which is constantly bombarding you with the same external conditions against which the body is trying to defend itself. And that was what was happening to me. I was becoming slowly. And actually over the course of the book, I became

officially diagnosed as diabetic and I struggled enormously to do anything about that through the obvious alternative to the medications which was to change my diet for the simple reason that wherever I looked I

Dietary change almost seemed like an act of rebellion. I think it is an act of rebellion, to be honest, because you go into a supermarket as a pre-diabetic or a diabetic or even someone with slightly raised blood sugar and you look around you and say, what can I eat here? And you realize that there's very, very little that you can eat.

And although it's possible for any individual to take that on as a challenge and say, I'm going to go elsewhere for my food. I'm going to start eating real food, whole food. I'm going to start making this work. You're doing it against the flow of this enormous tide of not just commercial interest, but absolute omnipresence, let's say. This kind of ubiquitousness is the word I'm looking for, of an unhealthy diet.

And in the later bit of work that I did for the Food Farming Countryside Commission, it's not in the book, but it was, I took it on because I was fascinated to know, you know, in economic terms, what that meant. And I did a piece of research which sort of topped up the cost of the unhealthy diet. And it's enormous. It's £268 billion per year in the UK, which is higher than all health spending. We are constantly, we're constantly...

creating a false economy around food and health. And we're doing it through essentially a mismatch between who we are as organic beings and a social system that's constantly monetizing our own neuropsychology to push us constantly out of health.

To what extent does that kind of open up, I suppose, both a burden but also an opportunity for individuals, Tim? Because when you, you know, you spent 15 years now talking about degrowth and or at least kind of post-growth economics.

Sorry, I know there's a difference. And I think people listening to that might struggle to know what they can do to usher forth the fundamental change in the economic priorities of the country. And to do that, you've had to speak to ministers and very powerful people that have the potential to start to turn levers in different ways. But when we talk about diet, of course,

Of course, the context we live in might make that more or less difficult, but that is something which we all have some control over. And does that mean that in a way, like, we can recover more agency ourselves over care or over health? In principle, yes, but in practice, it's incredibly difficult. I mean, this is really... It was my discovery, in a sense, was that, yes, you can recover that agency,

But under certain conditions, it's incredibly hard to recover that agency. And it's incredible. There are two conditions that make it incredibly hard to recover agency. One is our own neuropsychology. It's not just that we're being fed something that we hate. It's being we've fed something that our body loves. We're being fed something that our reward system is designed to crave. But we're doing it in an environment, you know, which we're not adapted for. We're doing it in an environment

where actually Scarcity has turned into a certain kind of abundance and abundance has been has monetized down your psychology to make sure that we constantly Wanting it so you actually have to overcome more than just you know a rational decision to be a little bit healthier You actually have to overcome your own neuropsychology you have to detox and detoxing from something like sugar is is pretty much the same process of detox from almost anything else, you know, this is kind of first

two weeks of withdrawal where you are absolutely craving the whole time and feeling like crap. And you think, why is this worth it when I know that there's a candy bar around every corner that could offset the pain that I'm now in? And of course, pain is very relative and it's very different in different kinds of addiction, but the process is just as powerful. And so what's right is that it's possible to go through that process. What's wrong is it's feasible now

to suppose that you can shift the health of the population by encouraging all them to go through that process, particularly when some of them cannot even afford to eat crap food that they're being delivered hand over fist from all kinds of places within a food system that's broken. So it is both an inspiration, but it's also a very salutary message to the organization of society, to policy, to economics, to the construction of our food industry,

to the way that agriculture works, to the way that the supermarket chains work. It's a huge incentive. It's a huge incentive to explore how to change that system because the system is pushing public health in the direction that an individual, even a well-motivated individual with sufficient resources to do it, struggles to overcome because of the nature of the addictive process into which we're all locked.

Now, I don't want to end the interview on too gloomy an note, but how do you feel about the kind of changed environment that the book is coming out into now?

Tim, because I mean, it kind of seems to me that at least some very important aspects of the kind of political terrain seem to be shifting against the kind of arguments you're making rather than for them. Climate action seems to be less galvanized. The election of Donald Trump has obviously bone a hole in the world's ability to respond to anthropogenic climate change. Do you see the book coming out in a context where there are more headwinds than there were when you were writing it? Yeah.

I mean, I could see those headwinds arriving. I think that was some of the difficulties I was describing right at the beginning. In a context in which we're rushing kind of away from diplomacy and towards rearmament, that's already a context in which care seems far less important than it did when we were applauding NHS workers on our doorsteps during the end of the pandemic.

And it was a rapid, rapid turn. And it's got worse. The environment, you know, now where we're talking about 800... Let me just talk about this, because this EU thing is just amazing. 800 billion euros for the rearmament of Europe.

Over the next few years. And, and of course, that's not absolute, absolutely a financial commitment. It's an aspiration to some extent, but it's basically a sort of sense of this is how important it is for us to ramp up our business.

Response to what we now see as an increasingly violent unstable situation and of course the violence and the unstableness of the situation is very much a function of Course of our own rhetoric. It's not independent of what we say at any one point in time and so and and that is That is a direct conflict with the idea of care the idea of care in international relations seems to be very much about diplomacy diplomacy stopped being enacted and

way back, even before I was writing the book, it was stopped being enacted in relation to Russia. In the last four years when Biden was president, there were no

There was no direct back channel between Biden and Putin, which could have constituted what one might call an act of care in relation to that relationship between two superpowers. And all of the rhetoric really that came out was wrapped up towards conflict and ultimately to violence and the need to rearm ourselves. That $800 billion gap,

euros in Europe for rearmament which the US and the Trump administration interestingly has pushed Europe into to some extent by absconding its responsibility for for the defense of Europe is by comparison Over the build back better bill that followed the pandemic there was a provision called the recovery and resilience facility in the US in the EU which

promised some money towards health. And of those health initiatives, around 43 billion have somehow so far been paid out. And then there was also an EU for health initiative, which was 5.8 billion. So less than a 20th of what we're prepared to spend on rearmament have we even actually spent over a few years on rearmament.

supporting health, supporting care, recovery, resilience, something that could be called care. And it just is, it foresees a time in which, as I see it, and it was one of the things, the points that I came to in the book as I began to confront this idea that, you know, I was talking about care in an increasingly violent world,

I read a book called Care and Capitalism by Kathleen Lynch, and it sort of was another of those points. I have these sort of momentary points during the writing which really rescued me, and this was one of them. And there's a point in Care and Capitalism where Kathleen says, you can't really hope to understand care anymore.

unless you look at and understand its nemesis, which is violence. And it became for me a running theme through the book of actually that it's not, you can't just talk about care in this nice touchy-feely way. You have to think about it as an organizing principle with particular dynamic properties, but you also have to think about what happens when those properties go missing, and in particular how that can lead us towards violence.

And that, I feel, is what makes the care economy not irrelevant in the new politics, but more relevant than I could possibly have foreseen when I started to write about it. Because these principles matter. They matter to our health. They matter to the health not just of our bodies, but also of our societies. They matter to geopolitical stability. And we are constantly overriding them at our peril and looking at that peril directly now as we speak.

Well, if we step away from geopolitics, where it's all a bit grim, Tim, for the final question, let's focus on the reader.

So of all the people that are going to be reading The Care Economy, what would you like them to kind of take away from the book? Is it a kind of change philosophy or particular behaviours or, you know, being kind of having new tools to kind of find this balance that everyone so desperately needs themselves? What is it that you're hoping that the book will kind of impart? Yeah, I think it is very much that, this idea that our own balance matters.

is something over which we have legitimately have power of control and in fact have power of control and should be seeking to support in whatever way we can. And in a way, you know, it's a very empowering message precisely because we've been encouraged to give over things like our health to a professionalized medicine that found it easier to sell pharmaceuticals than to look at the conditions of health.

And I'm not blaming some of the medics who've operated in that system because they definitely come into it with the very best of intentions into improving humanity, improving public health, taking away suffering. All of those things are good. But if they're doing that within a system which is actually encouraging them, motivating them, incentivizing them into what are essentially pharmaceutical responses to the treatment of symptoms rather than to the recovery of health,

then that system itself is in need of restructure. But at the individual level, what that allows you is actually a huge degree of autonomy, a huge degree of responsibility for your own health.

but also the ability to work through the principles of care to think about health in a broader sense, not just your physiological body, but your psychological well-being, the way that you live in your community, the way that your society operates. And I would like them to come away, actually, with a sense that taking that responsibility seriously is itself important.

an act of rebellion against a system which is systematically undermining health. And to take that rebellion, you know, out into the world with them as well, to sort of say, "Yes, we've been persuaded under false pretenses that this is the way the progress lies. This is the way that-- where health exists. This is what care means."

And to see for themselves, actually, that when you look at things from first principles and when you approach them with the sense of personal responsibility, you can do otherwise. Another world is possible. It's a little bit, in that sense, a sort of call to arms of a different kind than the violent one which we're faced with today.

Well, it is on that act of rebellion, that call to arms, Tim, that we'll have to end. But thank you so much. This has been a really fascinating discussion. So I've been talking to Tim Jackson, everyone. And the book, again, is called The Care Economy. Thank you so much, as ever, for joining us. I'm Carl Miller, and you've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks, Carl.

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