Consequences

This chapter examines briefly the history of the growth paradigm and the dilemmas that it poses. Debt is a technique and pattern that is being applied in developed countries as well, and may be as odious as the debt foisted upon the developing world. The chapter also examines why maintaining the necessary rate of growth becomes more difficult, and why it necessitates yet more debt and the continuing acceleration of environmental degradation and differential power accumulation. It suggests the difficulties of changing the environmental, political, and social trajectories within the existing political economy by briefly examining the question of who controls the future of food and energy. The chapter reconsiders Thomas Piketty's work by examining the acceleration of differential power or inequality in light of the author's analysis of debt as a technology of power.

Debt · Development economics · Economic system · Economics · Environmental degradation · Macroeconomics · Neoclassical economics · Physics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Work (physics) · Ecology · Economic Theory and Policy · Engineering · Law · Sustainable Development and Environmental Policy