Tim Jackson on The Care Economy

'It's more money for someone somewhere, but it's not more prosperity.'

In our June xChange Paul Skinner interviewed 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 discussed 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 dissected how the UK health burden has changed since the inception of the NHS and how our growth-based economy feeds chronic disease.

He said, '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'.

The book provides 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 left 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?'

And Tim also encouraged us to join the March Against Fake Food on July 6th in London for anyone passionate about tackling the ultra-processed foods crisis.

You can watch the full replay below or listen to it on our podcast here.