A couple of times in this series on degrowth I've talked about billionaires - about how economic growth is actually fueling increases in rich people's yacht money , not the basic needs of ordinary people, and about how our social fragmentation and the control of our media by similarly rich people means we are largely unaware of this fact and frightened to challenge the status quo for fear of losing our precarious security. In this post I'd like to talk in a bit more detail about our billionaire problem. I consider myself wealthy. After over four decades of professional careers and now in our 60s, Lois and I are debt free, own the house we live in and have a healthy superannuation balance. We can look forward to a secure, comfortable retirement. We are better off than 80% of the world's population. Now, we have simple tastes, we don't need a vast amount of money to live on. I understand that some people have more expensive hobbies than we do - they want to ...
Back when I worked in Brisbane City Council I worked with a very clever man called Frank. Frank was the Manager of City Assets, responsible for overseeing management of Council's vast portfolio of land, buildings, infrastructure, equipment and so forth. I was responsible for housing and homelessness initiatives and Frank organised for Council to donate some fabulous parcels of land for the Brisbane Housing Company , a new affordable housing company we were kicking off alongside the State Government. He also handed over a small stock of spare houses to homelessness organisations to use for short-term housing until they were needed for their original purpose. I really appreciated his support, but the thing he did that impressed me most had nothing to do with me. It was about cars. For most of my time in Council, cars were a source of frustration. Each of Council's hundreds of small teams had its own allocated vehicles, with their numbers vary...