IAS Talking Points Seminar

Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable

Prof Julie Livingston, NYU

Respondent: Prof Henrietta Moore, Director of the Institute of Global Prosperity

This talk, like the book from which it is drawn, calls into question the imperative of economic growth, tracing the unintended consequences of escalating consumption. Using a series of linked cases of successful economic growth in Botswana as a model (water, roads, and cattle), it shows how insatiable growth, predicated on consumption, will inevitably overwhelm, a process I term self-devouring growth.

Julie Livingston is Professor of Cultural and Social and Analysis and of History at NYU. She is author of Improvising Medicine: an African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke) and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana. In 2013 she was recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

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