Life After GDP: Tim Jackson Returns to 1968 to Excavate a Post-Capitalist Future

00:00:30 Andrew Keen: Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States. Hello everybody, we are on the road today. We're in Guildford, in Surrey, just south of London, with an old friend of the show, Tim Jackson, prominent UK-based thinker on the environment, economist, and he's been on the show before, talking about June 1968. June, Tim, do you remember where you were on the fifth of June 1968?

00:01:30 Tim Jackson: Yeah, I remember where I was on the fourth of June 1968 because that was my birthday, and I think it was very late on that day in California, so it would have been very early the next day, on fifth of June, when RFK Senior was shot, just after he'd finished speaking at the end of a very successful California primary, which more or less guaranteed him the Democratic nomination, but he was shot leaving the hotel that evening, and died a couple of days later.

00:02:17 Andrew Keen: And you were an 11-year-old boy watching this on a black and white television in the UK.

00:02:23 Tim Jackson: I think I think I've got that right. I mean, sometimes I confuse it in my head because I was also old enough to remember the assassination of JFK five years earlier, and I sometimes confuse them in my mind, but basically my sense watching this on this black and white TV was, oh no, not again, and a kind of prayer that this time it would turn out differently than it did with JFK. And I remember, because at that point I had an aunt who had just decided basically she was going to emigrate to the US, and I'd seen her off, I think, from Southampton on a transatlantic liner going to this job that she was to be taking up in the US, and thinking, is this the country that my aunt is going to? It's two assassinations, two high-profile assassinations. Actually, it was more than that, because of Martin Luther King, obviously, and wondering at the kind of violence and political violence that inhabits the world, and as an 11-year-old, that was a kind of, you know, a sort of odd moment out of time as it happened, and I had no sense then, no understanding, no inkling that RFK would become important to me professionally some 20, 30 years later.

00:03:56 Andrew Keen: And I know you discovered, so to speak, RFK through a speech he made in Kansas, a couple of—three or four months before his assassination, in the spring of 1968, a speech that you discovered in a university basement.

00:04:14 Tim Jackson: Yeah, I didn't discover it myself, but I was drawn to this discovery, because the speech was, as you said, it was actually pretty much the first, maybe the second speech that he gave in his presidential campaign. The first one was at Kansas State University, and the second one was at the University of Kansas. As you might know, there's a huge sporting rivalry between KSU and the University of Kansas, and they've sort of been at each other's throats. And the first thing that Bobby Kennedy says when he gets to University of Kansas is, I've just come over from KSU, and they told me to send them their love. Yeah, no, they did. That's all they think about over there, is how much they love you. And, of course, the whole stadium where he was speaking erupts into—and this was at the—

00:05:06 Andrew Keen: Phog Allen Fieldhouse, in just outside Kansas City, on the campus.

00:05:12 Tim Jackson: And so he's there, you know, giving this—I mean, he's really finding his way into the campaign. When you look at the campaign speeches at that time, and the record of what he was doing, he'd only just decided he was going to stand, and he was standing against the incumbent president, he was standing as Democrat against Democrat, he was a kind of outsider in the race at that stage, and he was sort of feeling his way into it. He'd been persuaded into it largely because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, but there were other things that he wanted to talk about, and it was those, it was the other content of the speech that really blew my mind when I discovered that it existed, because he began to talk at a certain stage in the speech about the limitations of economic growth, of an economy built around economic growth, and I'd spent my professional life up to that point thinking about, talking about economic growth.

00:06:06 Andrew Keen: So, how old were you when you discovered this—

00:06:09 Tim Jackson: It was the GDP—

00:06:11 Andrew Keen: —speech?

00:06:11 Tim Jackson: The speech, I think the speech was unearthed in the, I want to say, the mid 1990s, something like that, that was discovered in the basement. And at that point I was working on a kind of alternative measure of progress, a sort of adjusted measure of the GDP, and so I was fully versed with all of these arguments against the GDP, what's wrong with it? All these limitations, you know, it doesn't count the damage we do to the environment, it doesn't count the inequality in society, it counts a lot of things, like, you know, selling guns to our kids to persuade them to become violent that don't necessarily contribute to welfare, and so I knew all this stuff, and then this speech was unearthed, and there was Bobby saying it in that University of Kansas address, and it was a very odd thing, and I kind of—I was fascinated by it, you know, first of all, I was fascinated by the fact that a high-ranking politician, a presidential candidate, was prepared in the mid 1960s, end of 1960s, to stand up and question economic growth. That's quite a—that is a profound stance for a presidential candidate to take. So that I found absolutely fascinating, and I was also kind of fascinated to know how he got there, you know, what, why was he critiquing the GDP? What was the basis of that, and so many of the things that he was saying, you know, some 40 or so years—less, 35 years, 30 years—after, before I was even thinking about them, why was he thinking about them? What drove that inquiry in his mind, and what was the background to it?

00:08:00 Andrew Keen: Tim, was he amongst the first to question the very idea of economic growth, at least in a modern sense?

00:08:12 Tim Jackson: In a modern sense, I would say he was definitely amongst the first. There were critiques about kind of society, so when I looked into it a little bit more, you know, I found that he was well acquainted with the work of a guy called John Kenneth Galbraith, an economist who wrote about the affluent society and critiqued affluence in some way, and Arthur Schlesinger as well, also a critique of essentially the rise of private wealth against the rise of public squalor, a sense that the economic model was not doing the work it was supposed to do, and there's no doubt that, you know, that Bobby was influenced by that work, and he was also influenced by a sort of rising environmentalism. So, actually, JFK, his brother, had been a big public supporter of Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring, and Silent Spring was this landmark for environmentalism. It was this point in time in which a woman had very poetically expressed the damage that we were causing to the planet, and so, you know, I knew a little bit about JFK supporting that, and I found a little bit more out about Bobby's kind of environmentalism. He was very good friends with a guy called William Douglas, who was a Supreme Court justice in the JFK administration, and he and Bobby used to go hiking in the woods, and so the sense within his personal history of someone absolutely with a sense of social justice, with a sense of social injustice, and with a concern, a sort of deep-seated concern for the environment, that was all there in Bobby Kennedy before he got to that Kansas speech, but it was probably, I would say, the first time that it was articulated in that way, certainly by a high-ranking politician within the United States.

00:09:48 Andrew Keen: And of course, running for president.

00:09:50 Tim Jackson: Running for president.

00:09:50 Andrew Keen: Bobby Kennedy always seems to be hard to pinpoint on the traditional political spectrum, right and left. Does this give him his core identity, do you think, as the man who very, very early on questioned the very idea of economic growth?

00:10:46 Tim Jackson: Well, I mean, his legacy, I think, is probably broader than that. It does give a very specific tint to that legacy, this critiquing of the economic model itself. But what drove him, I think, was this kind of concern for social justice and the injustice that he saw around him. So that speech, for example, at Kansas, he spoke about the sort of road trips that he'd been on, going around the country, being with, talking to poor, undernourished people who had concerns about their jobs, who didn't have the income that they needed to support their families, who had health problems that they needn't have, because there was no proper health structure for the poorer people, so that sense of injustice, I think, motivated him, and as did the concern for the war in Vietnam, and I think in some ways that flowed from his concern for social justice, that you know we were throwing away young men to this war overseas that was being fought in some kind of proxy battle with another superpower, for what ends in terms of American people, and he was deeply concerned about that. His daughter Kerry Kennedy, one of his daughters, who I met actually shortly after this Kansas speech had been discovered, now runs the RFK Foundation, which is a human rights foundation, and it's human rights, I think, that you could characterize as the sort of center of where Bobby was when he was running for president, that idea that human rights matter, and they matter sometimes more than the political goals of economic growth, and I think that's where economic growth came into it for him, that he felt that economic growth, the kind of economy that we have, is undermining human rights, it's undermining social justice, it's leading us astray, and it's not even offering us the dignity of being human beings. He speaks about dignity quite a lot in that speech.

00:12:38 Andrew Keen: You wrote that, going back to this 11-year-old boy staring at the black and white television on the fifth of June 1968, that the man who lay dying in front of me would provide clear foundations for your professional life. And I'm not suggesting that Kennedy's death, or even that speech, shaped your professional life, but how has, in a broader sense, Tim, Kennedy's challenge to the idea of economic growth, how has that shaped your professional life? And in terms of a writer, you wrote this wonderful book—Life After Capitalism—

00:13:23 Tim Jackson: Postgrowth—Life After Capitalism was the subtitle. Yeah, yeah. And I spoke about that, I wrote about that quite a lot in the book, and I began, I think I began to put it together for myself the first time.

00:13:35 Andrew Keen: The introduction to the book refers back to the case, also to the speech in Kansas.

00:13:42 Tim Jackson: It does, and it was a process for me of kind of putting it together, and, I mean, how could that 11-year-old boy connect to the adult who'd been working on economic growth, and what connection did that have to that moment, that's the assassination of Kennedy, into Kennedy's work, and in some sense, I suppose, you know, there's a chain of logic that connects us.

00:14:11 Tim Jackson: Writing that book was a process of making the connections for me, and if you think about it, I mean, Kennedy gave that speech in 1968; four years later, Dennis Meadows and Dana Meadows published The Limits to Growth, 1972, which really—and that, together with Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, catapulted the idea that the economy was destroying the environment into the public imagination, and then I became someone, a part of that public imagination. My concern, that, you know, the economy that we had was destroying the only planet we've got, became the foundation for my professional life at a very specific moment in time. And although I didn't start by thinking about economic growth as such, I came to the conclusion that it was this growth-based model of the economy that was driving both the ecological destruction and, to some extent, the social injustice, and not even doing justice to our own needs as human beings, and I came to that conclusion through my work after 15, 20 years of working, and then all of a sudden I find this speech from Bobby Kennedy that says all of those things almost, you know, in pretty much the same order, and that was the sort of sense of kind of not just shock and surprise, but actually, yeah, kind of a sense of hope that I wasn't just a kind of marginal voice crying in the wilderness, which actually most of environmentalism was at that point in the mid 1990s. This was a serious train of thought that had not just occurred to me or my mates or the people I work with or the environmental lobbies that I was working for, but actually to a presidential candidate for the biggest economy in the world. If he can say it, why can't we take that more seriously?

00:16:42 Andrew Keen: Do you think there was an element of anti-capitalism in those remarks? They were still somewhat spontaneous, they weren't very programmatic, but do you think in his own way he was challenging the foundations of capitalism itself?

00:16:58 Tim Jackson: Well, he obviously was, because economic growth and capitalism go together. I think there's a famous quote that, you know, it's like a horse and carriage, you can barely separate out capitalism from the endless pursuit of growth, or growth from the pursuit of capitalism, although that's not strictly true, because communism also managed to pursue growth quite strongly at that time, but whether that was a conscious critique of capitalism, I don't know whether he would have articulated it in that way. I don't know. He didn't specifically articulate it in that way. He articulated, for the understanding of ordinary people, that this model doesn't take appropriate account of the ecological conditions of our lives, it doesn't deliver us towards social justice, and it doesn't respect who we are as human beings, it has nothing of the kind of poetry, the wisdom of the moment in it, and it's therefore distracting us from what development should be, is distracting us somehow from what our lives should be, what it means to be human, and he was definitely saying that.

00:18:12 Andrew Keen: He said in the speech, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Some people might be listening to that and thinking, well, that's all very well for Bobby Kennedy to say. It was the son of one of the richest men in America, who never really had to work, he led a life of remarkable privilege, even if, albeit, it was marked also by horrible tragedy. Is that a fair criticism, that it was all too easy for a wealthy guy like Bobby Kennedy to tell everyone that material accumulation was a form of, I don't know, false consciousness, or wasn't going to make them happy?

00:18:55 Tim Jackson: Yeah, I mean, it's a fair criticism in a way, and it's not one that I haven't thought about myself. I mean, I even think about it in relation to myself, because, you know, relatively speaking, I'm not not poor, I'm not particularly rich, but I definitely have privileges that some other people don't have, and I have access to an education, which itself a privilege that other people can't have. So, it's fine for me to talk about it, it's fine for Bobby to talk about it. What does he know about it? You know, the way that I kind of approach that now, I think, is that if you are in that position of privilege, what do you do with that privilege? Do you go out and kind of protect it, and ultimately argue and defend it on the basis that, because you've had it, well, obviously everyone can have it. So, all we need is more growth, and more riches, and more affluence, and then everyone can have my privilege, and everything will be fine, or do you look at the model itself in a self-critical way, in a critical way, and say this is not good enough? Do you use that privilege as a voice for social justice, or do you try to sweep those things under the carpet? And I think what gives credit to Bobby Kennedy is that he did not sweep them under the carpet, he did not hide behind privilege, and of course you can say, well, not everyone has the luxury of being able to say that, but if you have that luxury and you have the position and the power that he had, saying it becomes a very, very powerful thing.

00:20:29 Andrew Keen: He said it, of course, in the mid 60s. Since then, there's been an enormous advance in some ways in technology, consumerism of one kind or another, also a great deal more inequality. We'll talk about that, Tim, in a few minutes. But who's to say when too much is too much? Could you be making that argument in the 50s, in the 1920s, in the 1850s? Might future generations looking back, even at our time in the 2020s, think to themselves, well, those people had it easy, or those people had it tough?

00:21:09 Tim Jackson: Yeah, I mean, well, they can look back and they can see that some people had it very tough, still have it very tough, and some people have, you know, a material affluence that possibly in 50 years' time we can look back on and say, "Wow, really, they threw that stuff away, they had all these things and they threw it away, and they didn't use it, and they didn't reuse it, and they made it so inefficiently, they burned so much energy that destroyed the climate—did they really do that just to have these material things?" So you can look at the world as we look at it at the moment, you can see both, you can see material poverty, extreme material poverty, and you can see extreme affluence, you know, we're standing here, sitting here a day or two after the world's very first trillionaire has triumphantly arrived on the scene [as spoken — no individual had been publicly recognized as the world's first trillionaire as of mid-2026; flag for Andrew's review], and this is an obscene amount of money for one person to have, while there are still 2 billion people without access to water and clean electricity in various parts of the world, and, you know, the same would have been true if you look back, you would have seen some extreme wealth, middle of the 1850s, absolutely, you would have seen the kind of monarchs and principalities of Middle Europe who were parading luxury while the people around them starved, so in every era, you've got this sort of sense of extreme materialism, and you've also got extreme poverty. Is there a kind of point at which that turned? I mean, for me, I suppose there is, and it's a long, long history. Every economic history that you look at, you have to look at what happened before it. Every political history has its own pre-history, and the political and economic history of the obsession with growth, the gross domestic product, goes something like this. In the middle of the 18th century and towards the beginning of the 19th century, we discovered fossil fuels that allowed us to be immensely productive in producing material things, and all of a sudden we had it in our capacity that there shouldn't be any material poverty whatsoever. We had a huge industrialization, middle of the 19th century, and on the back of that industrialization, the building of an economic model that was predicated around expansion, and then something kind of bad happened, partly from the political history of Europe in the First World War, which destroyed a lot of that potential, and then on the back of that we moved into a place where actually we could produce things more efficiently than we could consume them, so we had what was called a crisis of overproduction, too much being produced, and that meant that the jobs that were beginning to produce all of those wonderful goods went bust, people lost their livelihoods, the financial situation ended in the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s, and to some extent, we were only rescued from that by the Second World War, and I use the word rescue in a very cavalier sense there, and so up to that point of the Second World War onwards, we're in a world where, you know, this economic model driven by fossil fuel and striving towards this endless expansion had already gone through a roller coaster, including two world wars, and there was then a sense of sitting down in the post-world-war era saying, how do we stabilize this? How do we build our economy? How do we think about the place where we never have to go back to the Great Depression, we never have to look at that level of overproduction, because—and this was, I think, the big mistake—because we're going to persuade people that having more stuff is what really matters, and it was the birth of a kind of post-war consumerism that was supposed to rescue us from the roller coaster of the previous economic history, but it also, and this really was what Bobby Kennedy was talking about, it didn't have the right view of human beings, it saw us simply as material and materialistic beings, it saw all our needs as being material needs, and in fact, it lost sight of our kind of social needs, our relationship needs, our spiritual needs. It lost sight of what it means to be a full human being. And the trouble was that in our desperate attempt not to go back to the roller coaster, we'd built an economic system with economic institutions and economic accounting systems like the GDP to ensure that we just went up and up and up, that growth was what mattered, economic growth was the foundation for our security, and we missed those two big factors. First of all, that's not all we are, we're not just consumers, maybe sometimes being happier means you produce less, and the second factor, if you produce less, that will do less damage to the environment. The more you produce, the more impact you have on the planet, and those two big wrong turns, I think, the failure to acknowledge the ecological impact, the failure to acknowledge the psychological model, are both what we're looking at now in extremis, and they are both essentially what Bobby Kennedy was talking about in Kansas.

00:26:38 Andrew Keen: So, finally, Tim, let's fast-forward to 2026. How can, or how could, Kennedy's ideas reinvigorate progressives? Are Bernie Sanders, for example, and AOC, and Mamdani in New York, are they the real inheritors of that speech in Kansas? Is their definition of what socialism is—and they embrace the S word—Kennedy himself was a product of the Cold War. I don't think he ever embraced the idea of socialism in any way. Is there a link between Bernie Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, and some of the more progressive political figures in the UK, in Europe, and the ideas that Bobby Kennedy put forward in Kansas in the spring of 1968?

00:27:40 Tim Jackson: Yeah, undoubtedly, you know, as you say, he wouldn't necessarily have pinned his badge on socialism. He was a Democrat, he believed in democratic principles, and those democratic principles at that time certainly went way back to the ideas of the demos and Greek civilization. He was, you know, kind of—he would quote Greek poets in his speeches, and actually he quoted one in that speech. He said, you know, I don't want to say, as they said of Rome, that they created a desert and called it peace, and you know, you could take that quote right out of that speech and apply it to today, to today's US. You know, what is it to be in government? What is it to be in the US? What is it to be a citizen of the affluent West, and only to have that on the back of creating a flattened Gaza or a distant war, or the creation of violence and destruction in order to preserve the failing hegemonic power of empire? I don't want that. That's what Bobby was saying, and he was saying, look, we have these values, we have values that we applaud around social justice. We have a planet that we live on that is fragile. These are the things that matter to us. And Bernie Sanders was saying the same things. He said them for years. And in this country, we've had people who've said them too. AOC has picked up that mantle from Bernie Sanders, from the people who said it before, and the long legacy of political history, in which lone voices have said exactly the same things, even as the framework, even as the institutions, even as the system itself seems to be trying to undermine them, and I think that, in a wider sense, is Bobby's legacy. He wasn't the first to say some of those things, but he was repeating that message through the platform that he had at a point in time, which could have influenced the course of history in radically different ways, and he failed to do that, not through any fault of his own. He failed on that Saturday, the fourth—I can't remember, I think it was a Thursday, the fourth of June, when he was shot just after that Democratic primary [as spoken — RFK was shot in the early hours of June 5, 1968, shortly after the June 4 California primary; flag for Andrew's review]. He failed for reasons as yet unknown, in fact, we have to say, and yet he also didn't fail. He succeeded because he amplified that voice, he amplified that message, he used his position of privilege, and he used his influence in the world, and his example in the world, to speak for those values which matter, which have always mattered to humanity, which matter now more than ever, and those who came after him, like Bernie Sanders and AOC, and people like myself, in a very, very small way, and many, many others, as Kerry Kennedy has been talking about in her book, Ripples of Hope, they created the groundwork for a humane, a more humane view of what it means to be a society, what it means to be a human being, and what it means to live on a fragile and finite planet, and it was a moment of amplifying that message that has had profound repercussions.

00:31:39 Andrew Keen: Well, Tim Jackson, it's always a real honor and a pleasure to have you on the show. Your book, Postgrowth: Life After Capitalism, is very much inspired by Bobby Kennedy's ideas. Thank you so much.

00:31:51 Tim Jackson: It's been a pleasure, Andrew. Thank you.

00:31:54 Andrew Keen: Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We're on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the platforms, and I'd be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thank you again. Bye.