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Accidental Gods

Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse with economist Gaya Herrington

Jul 5, 2023
01:16:22

What does it take to avoid global collapse?  Is there still time?  And if so, what are the societal, social, cultural and goal-oriented changes that we need to make to get there? 

This week's guest is one of the new generation of super-thinkers who have the capacity, individually and collectively, to bring into being that better future our hearts know is possible. 

Gaya Herrington received her first master’s degree in Econometrics from the Liberal University of Amsterdam and her second master’s in Sustainability from Harvard University. In between she worked for KPMG, for the Dutch Government as a regulator and then back to KPMG in the US, where she now lives. She is a member of the Transformational Economics Commission of the Club of Rome, a recurring guest lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and works at Schneider Electric as Vice-President of ESG Research.

She wrote her thesis for her second Masters on the seminal Limits To Growth work that first came out in 1972. The paper she wrote as a result of this went viral - and she expanded it into a book called Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse. She has made this freely available by download and I have put a link in the show notes - because this is absolutely essential reading for anyone on this path. The take home message though, as you'll hear, is that if we all work together, there is still time. Which should be a fairly familiar idea to those of you who have listened to other guests. But this time, we'll really unpick the data and concepts behind it in the company of someone who has worked hard at the coal face of the old system and has seen how to change it. 

Gaya's book https://mdpi-res.com/bookfiles/mono/6206/Five_Insights_for_Avoiding_Global_Collapse.pdf?v1682069789
Gaya's paper at KPMG https://advisory.kpmg.us/articles/2021/limits-to-growth.html
Manfred Max-Neef https://gaiafoundation.org/the-barefoot-economist-manfred-max-neef/
Club of Rome: Earth for All https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/earth4all-book/

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