Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration-and Why It's Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration-and Why It's Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration-and Why It's Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration-and Why It's Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives

Hardcover

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Overview

The end of our high-growth world was underway well before COVID-19 arrived. In this powerful and timely argument, Danny Dorling demonstrates the benefits of a larger, ongoing societal slowdown

Drawing from an incredibly rich trove of global data, this groundbreaking book reveals that human progress has been slowing down since the early 1970s. Danny Dorling uses compelling visualizations to illustrate how fertility rates, growth in GDP per person, and even the frequency of new social movements have all steadily declined over the last few generations.
 
Perhaps most surprising of all is the fact that even as new technologies frequently reshape our everyday lives and are widely believed to be propelling our civilization into new and uncharted waters, the rate of technological progress is also rapidly dropping. Rather than lament this turn of events, Dorling embraces it as a moment of promise and a move toward stability, and he notes that many of the older great strides in progress that have defined recent history also brought with them widespread warfare, divided societies, and massive inequality.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780300243406
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication date: 05/19/2020
Pages: 400
Product dimensions: 6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Danny Dorling is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. His previous books include Inequality and the 1% and The Equality Effect.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Chapter 1 To Worry: Imaginatively 1

Chapter 2 The Slowing Down: Of Almost Everything 16

Chapter 3 Debt: A Decelerating Sign of the Slowdown 37

Chapter 4 Data: The Deluge of Less and Less That Is New 64

Chapter 5 Climate: industry, War, Carbon, and Chaos 89

Chapter 6 Temperature: The Catastrophic Exception 120

Chapter 7 Demographics: Hitting the Population Brakes 140

Chapter 8 Fertility: The Greatest Slowdown of All Time 180

Chapter 9 Economics: Stabilizing Standards of Living 230

Chapter 10 Geopolitics: In an Age of Slowdown 262

Chapter 11 Life: After the Great Acceleration 287

Chapter 12 People: Coalition and Catfish 314

Appendix: How to Read and Draw a Timeline 333

Notes 339

List of Figures and Tables 371

Index 375

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