Painting Fakes

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 ...