What if Jeff Bezos funded Degrowth.info?

There’s lots of talk recently about the wealth of Jeff Bezos. There are maps comparing his wealth to entire countries, a “You are Jeff Bezos” game where you can spend his money on different things - like paying their fair-share of taxes, and a graphic that puts his wealth in perspective. A recurring point is that most people simply cannot fathom the amount of money he has. The number is $150 billion. My favorite attempt to bring the number into human terms is Quartz’s article, “The average US worker would need 10 times the length of all human history to earn as much as Jeff Bezos”. This beautifully captures the point that someone does not simply earn or work for such an amount of money, but rather captures it. We, at degrowth.info, thought a similar calculation would be interesting. We wanted to know how many humble (but hopefully useful) projects like ours Jeff Bezos’ wealth could pay for. In case you haven’t heard already, degrowth.info is improving its site to better support the degrowth community and improve the usability of the platform – this will cost 7,500€.

So, how many awesome projects like degrowth.info could ol’ Bezos fund? 18,215,179 !

Over 18 million, another massive number. Our site is one of a few that provides numerous resources, tools, and acts as an outlet for the degrowth community. In the same way that our little project touches so many people, imagine how many people would be impacted if 18 million similar movements could be funded without having to grovel for donations. Unfortunately we cannot (yet) expropriate Jeff Bezos’ wealth, so until then we have to continue to ask you, the degrowth community (and its friend and families), to support our webportal via our crowdfunding page. So, for now, please be our Bezos :) And also, you can read more about this topic on our website, check out this nice article about degrowth and wealth/income caps. Plus see the great efforts across Europe, but especially in France, to push back against Amazon on Black Friday. You can get involved with your local Attac network to organize against Amazon and it’s socially as well ecologically unsustainable practices. One last time – please help this website continue its work for the degrowth community! In solidarity, The degrowth webportal team