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“Post-growth doesn’t spell the end of the entrepreneurial spirit or of human creativity or personal development – quite the opposite.”
For example, reduced working hours would help to create more time for community and cooperative activities, as would a guaranteed basic income for all. With that foundation in place, people would be released from the treadmill of having to earn more money to finance their habits of over-consumption, and social security, pensions, and universal healthcare could be ensured. This would also make social security systems less dependent on continued economic
growth. These collaborative forms of economic activity rest on the development of new forms of entrepreneurialism and alternative monetary systems, like local or virtual currencies, which establish a second monetary system alongside fractionalreserve banking. We might call this new post-growth economy a ‘civil economy’, a productive economic system beyond the growth imperative that promotes every kind of
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GLOBAL FORUM
wealth in cities and communities – cultural and human as well as social and economic. Taken together, these steps would change the physical, economic, social and mental infrastructure that surrounds us in fundamental ways. They will create a new normality in which we use resources collaboratively, create and live out values beyond the monetary, foster closer social ties and community cohesion, and abandon the relentless call of perpetual economic growth.
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