The False Economy of Big Food. And the case for a new food economy | Report
New analysis commissioned by the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) has found that the costs of Britain’s unhealthy food system amount to £268 billion every year – almost equivalent to the total annual UK healthcare spend. The report by Professor Tim Jackson provides the first comprehensive estimate of the food-related cost of chronic disease, caused by the current food system.
The Problematic Role of Materialistic Values in the Pursuit of Sustainable Well-Being | Journal paper
Strong materialistic values help to maintain consumer capitalism, but they can have negative consequences for individual well-being, for social equity and for environmental sustainability. In this paper, we add to the existing literature on the adverse consequences of materialistic values by highlighting their negative association with engagement in attitudes and actions that support the achievement of sustainable well-being.
Self-transcendent experiences and sustainable prosperity | Journal Paper
The achievement of sustainable prosperity requires the enhancement of human wellbeing alongside increased care for the environment. In this working paper, Patrick Elf, Amy Isham and Tim Jackson explore the emerging potential of Self-Transcendent Experiences (STEs) to deliver beneficial effects on human wellbeing and sustainable attitudes and behaviours.
The Art Of Power
CUSP Director Tim Jackson reflects on the life of and work of the late Thich Nhat Hanh and its relevance for contemporary debates about the meaning of prosperity and power. (This blog first appeared ...
Energy and Productivity—A Review of the Literature | Paper
The UK is experiencing a period of low productivity growth. Although exacerbated by the financial crisis of 2008, the underlying trend is longer and more persistent. This report aims to expand conventional understandings of productivity by exploring the literatures which relate productivity to the availability, production and use of energy in the economy.
Wellbeing and Productivity: A Review of the Literature | Paper
This report reviews the relationships between the different aspects of wellbeing, productivity, and productivity growth. It is the culmination of a desk-based evidence review, survey, and a mapping workshop held with experts from backgrounds including psychology, sociology, economics, and design. The focus is on wellbeing and labour productivity.
“I believed I understood the land” | Tim Jackson reading poem by Adam Horovitz
In July 2019, the RSA Food, Farming & Countryside Commission with CUSP director Tim Jackson as Commissioner and Chair of the Research Advisory Group have published their final report, calling for radical 10-year plan to transition to sustainable food system with more government support for healthy produce. The event opened with Tim's reading of a poem by Adam Horovitz, from the collection 'The Soil Never Sleeps'.
Living the Good Life on Instagram —An exploration of lay understandings of what it means to live well | Paper
While the consumerist approach to what living well can mean permeates traditional media, the extent to which it appears in people’s own depictions of the good life is unclear. Using multimodal discourse analysis, this article uses a sample of posts tagged #goodlife and variants collected on Instagram to explore which understandings of the good life can be found on the platform, and what their wider implications in the consumer society are.
The Mindful Consumer—A Big Ideas think piece
This paper forms part of the exploration of the topic of consumption and wellbeing, in which earlier consultation and deliberation identified a key question of how societies might reduce or replace the role of consumption and consumerism in supporting human identity. Here, Alison Armstrong and Tim Jackson bring their cutting-edge research and deep experience in sustainable consumption to bear on the topic.
