Welcome to the LRB podcast. I'm James Butler, a contributing editor at the paper,

and I'm very pleased to be talking again to Jeff Mann, who is a professor at Simon Fraser

University in British Columbia. Jeff and I spoke a few months ago on this

podcast about the economic models used to tackle climate change, and he has a piece in the latest

issue of the LRB about economic growth, green growth, and degrowth, which we're going to talk about

today. Hello, Jeff. Hello, James. Nice to see you again. So your piece is primarily around

this range of books on kind of degrowth and climate change, but I thought we might start

kind of a little further back. And so, you know, obviously, and you actually start a little

further back in the piece as well. So the pursuit of growth is sort of so central to

political and economic decision making that, you know, it's sometimes hard to imagine it could be

otherwise, right? They appear to be the same thing, right? Political decision making is the pursuit

of growth, right? But that hasn't always necessarily been the case. So could you tell us a bit about

like when and how

that happened? Absolutely. I can give it a shot. It is not in any way a question that I think the

answer is understood to be settled. If that makes any sense, there's still a great deal of

controversy is probably overstating it. There's still a great deal of controversy is probably overstating it. There's still a great

deal of debate amongst the historians of economic growth and the historians of thinking about

economic growth as to when it emerges. And so you hear a whole range of stories. I mean, there is a

sort of, in my opinion, something of a lunatic fringe that says that, you know, there's no history

of this.

This is human nature. But if we set aside that question right now, I mean, the vast majority of

histories begin kind of with the beginning of capitalism itself as a sort of mode of organizing

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