22. Revisiting the Slowdown, and the end of the Great Acceleration
Danny Dorling’s book ‘Slowdown’ on how the engine driving the Great Acceleration is being dismantled; Japan, Greece, and the Nordics as ‘developing nations’; Fukuyama on the tea ceremony versus Japanification
Perhaps the most interesting paradigm in front of us is the least discussed yet, and a gently confronting idea that undercuts numerous established mental models. In his book Slowdown, the Oxford University economic geographer Danny Dorling claims that the age known as the ‘Great Acceleration’ — the age that many experts assume we are in the midst of — actually ended some decades ago. Instead, the emerging patterns of our age are characterised by a slowing down rather than acceleration, across almost every single measure that we think is moving in the opposite direction at great pace.
As I touched on in the previous batch of papers, Dorling makes a convincing case using a vast and diverse array of data, such as global population increases, GDP per capita, life expectancy, fertility rates, house…
