More extraordinarily, scientists suggest that, if undisturbed, the Holocene’s benevolent conditions would be likely to continue for another 50,000 ye… - Kate Raworth

Homo sapiens, it turns out, is the most cooperative species on the planet, outperforming ants, hyenas, and even the naked mole-rat when it comes to living alongside those who are beyond our next of kin.

Rostow hinted at his uncertainty of what might lie over that horizon, briefly acknowledging ‘the question beyond, where history offers us only fragments: what to do when the increase in real income itself loses its charm?’4 But he did not follow his own questioning through, and for understandable reasons: it was 1960 — the year of John F. Kennedy’s election bid on a promise of 5 percent growth — and for Rostow, a soon-to-be presidential adviser, it was wise to focus on keeping that plane in the sky, not on pondering when and how it would ever land.

For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.