Growth, economic growth and sustainable economic growth generally requires making investments. And any investment requires you to forego some form of consumption today in the promise of more consumption in the future. A lot of prosperity is about how we lock ourselves into stability. It's that ability to say, I'm going to stop myself from tempting myself today. That's the real challenge with prosperity. Stopping yourself from taking the easy out. This is a structural problem. Is this an inevitable problem in the area of prosperity? Yeah.
What can the global response to climate change tell us about the health of modern democratic states?
• Ben Ansell is professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford and author of “Why Politics Fail”
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