Welcome to the Steady Stater! A podcast produced by the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
I'm Brian Czech. In this inaugural episode, I will be introducing myself, the details of the show, and some of the topics I will be discussing in future episodes.
The Steady Stater is the only podcast dedicated to advancing the Steady State Economy, which is an economic philosophy seeking save our planet by curbing overconsumption, overpopulation, and halting GDP growth.
Now more than ever is the time to speak up, so that's exactly what we're doing. We hope you enjoy listening and support our cause by signing the position on our website calling for a Steady State Economy: https://steadystate.org/act/sign-the-position/
Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next week!
Richard Tibbetts:
From the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, this is the Steady Stater, a podcast dedicated to discussing limits to growth in the steady state economy.
Brian Czech:
Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Brian Czech, and I established the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy back in 2003, to help raise awareness about limits to growth, the fundamental conflict between economic growth and other really important goals, such as environmental protection, and long term jobs and national security and international stability. And our acronym is CASSE and so you will hear us talk about what CASSE is up to. But really, the podcast is going to be about what's in the news lately, that happens to be very relevant to limits to growth and the problems that are being caused by the push for perpetual GDP growth. Of course, it's a very unique time to be launching such a podcast given that we're in the midst of this COVID caused recession, but it's also an extremely important time to have such discussions, to be talking about the alternatives, rather than trying to go back to business as usual. Because in the 21st century, you know, economic growth is actually one of the biggest challenges, one of the biggest problems that we face. It's what's behind the things that we see as existential threats like climate change, biodiversity loss, the unraveling of ecosystems across the planet, the struggle for resources in places all around the world, some that come to mind, of course, being the Middle East, and in the Caspian Sea basin and the South China Sea. It's what's behind the tearing up of the environmental regulations that the United States and many other countries worked so hard to develop during the latter decades of the 20th century. Now, these regulations are being torn up just so we can free the way for more and more GDP. So over the coming weeks and months, we'll be talking about the the news items that are related to these topics. And now and then we'll dabble in some relatively technical material pertaining to ecological economics, and the steady state economy as the macroeconomic highlight. We'll talk a little bit about the degrowth movement, the movement to actually decrease the size of the economy, moving back down toward a sustainable size of economy. That would be the steady state economy. And then we'll talk about many of the actual policies that we have in mind to pursue the steady state economy. For example, the Full SEAs Act, which is a major legislative initiative that we're developing at CASSE to become the central macroeconomic policy of the United States for the 21st century. We will have guests now and then and we encourage your feedback, so feel free to send us your comments and questions at www.steady state.org. And before we close, I just like to note that this is the only podcast in the universe of podcasts that's dedicated explicitly to advancing the steady state economy as the sustainable alternative to growth. We will post a new show every Monday at 8am EST. So thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.