Thread by @jasonhickel

Here is an interesting #postgrowth thought experiment.

1. Portugal achieves much higher life expectancy than the United States, with $38,000 less GDP per capita. How? By distributing income more fairly, and investing in universal public healthcare and other key social goods.

2. That means that from the perspective of human welfare, $38,000 of America’s p/c income is effectively “wasted.” That's $13 trillion per year for the US economy as a whole. $13 trillion worth of ecological pressure, that adds nothing, in and of itself, to human welfare.

3. $13 trillion is enough to do three things:

a) raise everyone in the world above the $7.40/day poverty line.

b) fund universal public healthcare for the entire global South, at the standards of Costa Rica - one of the best in the world.

c) have $3 trillion left over.

4. In theory, this would raise life expectancy across the global South to as high as 80 years, thus *eliminating the health gap* between the North and the South, while at the same time improving US life expectancy (by 2.6 years, to Portugal's level).

5. If Portugal isn't your cup of tea; don't worry, you can use Spain as a reference instead. And if life expectancy isn't your favourite indicator, you can use education (see Estonia and Poland) or even happiness. Regardless of how you slice it, you get the same big numbers.

6. And that's just the US. We can do the same thing with Canada, Australia, much of northern Europe, and many other excess countries.

We don't need more aggregate global growth. We need a fairer distribution of income, and economies built around well-being rather than capital.