{"id":2765,"date":"2014-12-10T20:25:55","date_gmt":"2014-12-11T01:25:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=2765"},"modified":"2014-12-10T20:25:55","modified_gmt":"2014-12-11T01:25:55","slug":"reframing-progress-post-growth-institute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=2765","title":{"rendered":"Reframing Progress | Post Growth Institute"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reframing Progress | Post Growth Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026Progress is one of the most powerful notions in the modern world<\/strong>\u201d writes John Dryzek in
The Politics of the Earth<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m inclined to agree with him. Progress acts as a kind of meta-narrative, an incredibly potent and pervasive trope that is woven through stories ancient and contemporary, and forms a core part of our culture. The idea of progress is essentially about things getting better, about the future being better than the past and the present. This hopeful idea, tied up with assumptions about\u00a0how<\/em>\u00a0it will happen, forms our shared story of progress \u2013 our progress story. It\u2019s natural that humans should be attracted to a notion like this, as it gives people hope, satisfaction, a sense of achievement and empowerment. What isn\u2019t so natural is the way the idea of progress has become so wedded to the idea of economic growth, fuelled by rampant consumerism.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As\u00a0this earlier post<\/a>\u00a0discusses, growing dissatisfaction with GDP as an entirely misleading and insufficient measure of progress has led to a recent explosion of new indicators, such as theHappy Planet Index<\/a>, the\u00a0Genuine Progress Indicator<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Gross National Happiness<\/a>, to name just a few. The groups and individuals behind these ideas are getting the conversation started on what we value, what we consider to be progress, and how best to measure it. This is incredibly important work. But it\u2019s not just official indicators that determine what the progress story is all about. The media forms a very influential gateway between the official statistics and measurements and most ordinary people \u2013 meaning it\u2019s the media representation that is directly encountered. I think that the work being done on developing new indicators would be greatly supplemented and reinforced by an effort to reframe and redirect the progress story in terms of the language we use to talk about it and the way it\u2019s represented in the media.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reframing Progress | Post Growth Institute. \u201c\u2026Progress is one of the most powerful notions in the modern world\u201d writes John Dryzek inThe Politics of the Earth. I\u2019m inclined to agree with him. Progress acts as a kind of meta-narrative, an incredibly potent and pervasive trope that is woven through stories ancient and contemporary, and forms […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[341,353,1452,1826,1825],"class_list":["post-2765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-future","tag-gdp","tag-happiness","tag-past","tag-progress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2765"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2766,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2765\/revisions\/2766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}