'It's more money for someone somewhere, but it's not more prosperity.'
In this episode we interview Tim Jackson, author of Prosperity without Growth and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) to explore the ideas in his latest book The Care Economy.
We discuss how the current growth-based economy is often a false economy and how we can instead work towards a Care Economy where "health" is the outcome and "care" is our guiding principle.
Tim powerfully dissects how the UK health burden has changed since the inception of the NHS and how our growth-based economy feeds chronic disease.
Tim says that, 'The food-related costs of chronic disease in the UK are now around £268 billion per year, which is substantially higher than the NHS budget'.
For anyone passionate about tackling the ultra-processed foods crisis Tim mentions the Fight Fake Food March on London 6th.
The book shares a new philosophy for the economy where health is the ultimate prosperity.
Tim believes that creating a Care Economy would mean changing education, regulation and financial systems, but he is not depressed by the road ahead.
He leaves us with a note of respair (recovery from despair) saying, 'The narrative form can hold vision for us. It can hold the vision for how things should be working even when they are fundamentally not doing that. And that vision provides a lens for how we could be doing things better. We can ask ourselves how we can do things differently. What would this look like if it had "health" as its goal and "care" as its organising operational principle?'
This episode is hosted by Paul Skinner, founder of The MarketingKind community, Director of The Agency of the Future and author of The Purpose Upgrade and Collaborative Advantage.
