3 The New Economics Foundation: Crisis as a Missed Opportunity
The New Economics Foundation (NEF) is a centre-left think tank which aims to offer innovative policy proposals with a focus on the environment, wellbeing, and alternatives to free-market economics. It was founded by the leaders of ‘The Other Economic Summit,’ which ran parallel to the 1984 London G7 meeting. NEF’s launch is historically associated with a growing conviction within some policy circles that social development should be understood more broadly than merely as measurable economic output (Friedmann 1992). Hence the need for a ‘new economics,’ which the book The Living Economy—edited by the first head of NEF in the year it was established—defines as “based on personal development and social justice, the satisfaction of the whole range of human needs, sustainable use of resources and conservation of the environment” (Ekins 1986: xiii). One could also mention the influence of an earlier book by the Club of Rome, Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), which predicted that, if
In this chapter, as in those to follow, citations in the format (MM/YYYY) refer to the corresponding think tank’s policy reports and blog posts, which are listed separately in the bibliography. Also, some of the data in this chapter and in Chapter 4 inform González Hernando (2018). © The Author(s) 2019 M. González Hernando, British Think Tanks After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20370-2_3
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