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Start giftingThe Infinite Desire for Growth
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Learn moreThe Infinite Desire for Growth spotlights the obsession with wanting more, and the global tensions that have arisen as a result. Amid finite resources, increasing populations, environmental degradation, and political unrest, the quest for new social and individual goals has never been so critical.
Leading economist Daniel Cohen provides a whirlwind tour of the history of economic growth, from the early days of civilization to modern times, underscoring what is so unsettling today. The new digital economy is establishing a "zero-cost" production model, inexpensive software is taking over basic tasks, and years of exploiting the natural world have begun to backfire with deadly consequences. Working hard no longer guarantees social inclusion or income. Drawing on economics, anthropology, and psychology, and thinkers ranging from Rousseau to Keynes and Easterlin, Cohen examines how a future less dependent on material gain might be considered and, how, in a culture of competition, individual desires might be better attuned to the greater needs of society.
At a time when wanting what we haven't got has become an obsession, The Infinite Desire for Growth explores the ways we might reinvent, for the twenty-first century, the old ideal of social progress.
Daniel Cohen is director of the Economics Department at the École Normale Superieure in Paris and a founding member of the Paris School of Economics. A former adviser to the World Bank, Cohen was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 2001. His many books include Globalization and Its Enemies and The Prosperity of Vice.
Liam Gerrard is an award-winning voice artist with over ten years of experience working in every field of the voice industry, as well as a highly acclaimed stage and screen actor. His animation Walter Tull-Britain's First Black Officer was nominated for a BAFTA in 2016, and he has been nominated for an Audie Award in 2017. He has narrated over thirty audiobooks in a wide range of genres and styles. He comes from a large Irish family, although he was raised in Yorkshire before moving to the Middle East, where he went to school. He studied at Lancaster University and then as a classically trained actor at Mountview; he is currently the youngest actor to play the lead role of Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest in London's West End. He has worked for the most renowned theater companies, including the Royal Exchange Theatre (two Manchester theater award nominations), Edinburgh Lyceum Theatre (five Critics Choice nominations), Soho Theatre (MTN nomination), and most regional theaters throughout the U.K., including Alan Aykbourn's SJT, New Vic, Oldham Coliseum, Nottingham Playhouse, and Theatre by the Lake. His wide-ranging experience has also seen him perform Opera in Rigoletto. He is an associate lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University in Broadcast Voice and is also a communication skills specialist and trainer. In addition, he is an examiner for the Royal College of Psychiatry, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal Scottish College of Surgery. In his spare time Liam is also a musician who plays the violin, drums, piano, and percussion. He also enjoys spending time with Peg, his Springer Spaniel, out on the Peak District whenever he can get away from the studio!
Jane Marie Todd has translated more than eighty books and hundreds of shorter texts for trade and university presses and art museums. She was awarded the French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation 2010 Translation Prize for Nonfiction for her translation of Dominique Charpin's Reading and Writing in Babylon.