In our June 17th xChange Paul Skinner, founder of MarketingKind, will interview Tim Jackson, ecological economist, author and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), to explore the ideas from his latest book The Care Economy.
Care leads a curious dual life. In our hearts it’s honoured as an irreducible good. But in the market it’s treated as a second class citizen – barely recognised in the relentless rush for productivity and wealth.
What would it mean to take health seriously as a societal goal? What would it take to adopt care as an organising principle in the economy? These are some of the questions we’ll explore together.
Tim has been at the forefront of international debates on sustainability for three decades and has worked closely with the UK Government, the United Nations, the European Commission, numerous NGOs, private companies and foundations to bring economic and social science research into sustainability.
During five years at the Stockholm Environment Institute in the early 1990s, he pioneered the concept of preventative environmental management—a core principle of the circular economy—outlined in his 1996 book Material Concerns: Pollution Profit and Quality of life.
From 2004 to 2011 he was Economics Commissioner for the UK Sustainable Development Commission where his work culminated in the publication of his controversial and ground-breaking book Prosperity without Growth (2009/2017) which has subsequently been translated into twenty foreign languages. It was named as a Financial Times ‘book of the year’ in 2010 and UnHerd’s economics book of the decade in 2019.
In 2016, Tim was awarded the Hillary Laureate for exceptional international leadership in sustainability.
His book Post Growth—life after capitalism (Polity Press, 2021) won the 2022 Eric Zencey Prize for Economics. His latest book The Care Economy is to be published in February 2025.
This will be our second xChange with Tim and you can watch the first one, which explored the alternatives to and for capitalism alongside Sir Tim Smit and Daniela Barone Soares here.