Avarice crushed Congolese dream

• Published date: 12 February 2022
• Publication title: Saturday Star

It is a modern epic that witnesses one of the greatest mobilisations of resources and people since WWII and exposes the lie of growth

It is, above all, a story about people and massive economic deception. It brings to life the individuals and ideas that have created a perfect storm for the present economic crisis. Set in the past, The Tyranny of Growth is a book about the present.

It provocatively recounts how and why the 2008 global financial meltdown and present COVID-19 pandemic have become the leading cause of governments’ and multilateral institutions’ global spectacular failure. Probing deep beneath the surface of the crisis, the book reveals uncomfortable truths about the classical economic growth doctrine.

It traces the costs of close to a century of growth to the fabrication of the growth doctrine in the US after WWII. The book reveals how the growth doctrine, the brainchild of a post WWII US, was used to co-opt African post-colonial institutions and elites to its cause during the developing Cold War and decolonisation wave of the 1950s and 60s. It brilliantly explains how a single number – GDP – came to have such bewildering appeal and power over our lives despite its ruinous consequences.

By deducting the negative environmental consequences of global GDP since the 1980s, treating them as a loss rather than a gain by producers, the book reveals startling cover-ups in the calculation of GDP.

Since the 1980s there has been no real economic growth throughout the world. The simple deduction of burgeoning environmental costs reduced economic growth to zero.

The book uncovers that the official model used to calculate GDP data was designed to fit the growth myth. Written by Malcolm Ray, one of the finest minds of our time, The Tyranny of Growth heroically strives to give the reader a new way of imagining the world and transcending the limits of the disaster that is all around us by offering new and brilliant ideas to achieve change.

The author of Free Fall and The Tyranny of Growth, Ray’s work is devoted to breaking down walls of silence – the comfortable catchphrases and policy tropes used by political and economic elites to win hearts and minds. A multi-award-winning journalist, his writing is unapologetic and irreverent and deals directly with themes of power hierarchies, race and gender discrimination, and class inequality. His protagonists are often but not exclusively the poor and discarded communities.

Ray began his career as an anti-apartheid...