SLOWDOWN News   

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YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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ABC National Radio
The end of the great acceleration: Progress, growth, invention, innovation - the trajectory and the speed of change, appears to go in just one direction and that’s up and up and up and faster and faster. But step back a moment and study the data and the long term trend, according to Danny Dorling, is something quite different. He argues that we are at the end of the great acceleration – change is still all around us but the pace and speed has started to slow.
— ABC National Radio, Sydney (28 Jan 2021,)
Tolita musings I was just thinking logo
Slowdown's premise is as simple as its name: contrary to popular belief, humanity is not inexorably heading towards more growth. According to almost every indicator; from Fertility to Global Demographics, from Data to Debt – life is (often imperceptibly) decelerating.
—Tolita's Musings(9 May 2020)
The National Scottish newspaper logo
This is excellent, usefully counter-intuitive stuff. I especially like Dorling’s prediction that, under slowdown, social and cultural innovation will come to the fore. The lockdown has only revealed the slowdown that we are already on. This is the intriguing argument from the geographer Danny Dorling. His new book’s full title is Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration – and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives. With a forest of graphs, Dorling tries to show us that our major trends point to stagnation, not more explosive growth.
—Pat Kane, The National (9 May 2020)
 
The Oxford geographer on whether we can escape the hectic pace of our lives—and how the pandemic is re-shaping our imagination. As the world slows down, many of us are thinking—what comes next? Oxford geographer Danny Dorling joins the Prospect Interview to discuss what a decelerated world might look like.
—Prospect Magazine (5 May 2020)
 
Danny Dorling and Zoe Williams - Slowdown podcast: In his intriguing and counterintuitive new book Slowdown (Yale), Danny Dorling argues that, contrary to what most of us believe, human life is actually slowing down, in diverse areas from birth rate to GDP to technological innovation. And, what’s more, in an arresting graphic style combining text and data with illustrations by Kirsten McClure, he shows how slowing down can be good for the planet, for the economy and for our lives in general. Professor Dorling talks here to the Guardian’s Zoe Williams in a specially recorded episode to replace the cancelled event.
London Review of Books (22 April 2020)
 
Three graphs that show a global slowdown in Covid death: Almost as soon as the COVID-19 pandemic began, graphs and many other visualisations charting the rise of the virus started to multiply. These graphs show something more heartening.
—The Conversation (7 April 2020)
 
Radio 4 logo
Prof Dorling joins host Amol Rajan and fellow guest Nick Timothy, former Downing Street adviser, to talk about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has seen the need for massive state intervention, on conservative ideals and policy.
—BBC Radio 4, Start the Week (30 March 2020)

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Radio 3 logo
Does Growth Matter? Anne McElvoy discusses economic futures with demographer Danny Dorling and economists Richard Davies and Petr Barton. —BBC Radio 3, Free Thinking (17 March 2020)
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A spellbinding book that will almost certainly make you reconsider what you thought was happening in and to the world, and then think again about where we might be heading."
—Juliette Powell, author of 33 Million People in the Room
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Slowdown is a new standard for visually understanding human history and social change. Using beautifully illustrated graphs, Danny Dorling provides a broad perspective on long-term social changes, the limits of growth, and widening inequalities, and emphasizes the importance of adapting to this slowdown."
—Tomoki Nakaya, author of The Atlas of Health Inequalities in Japan"
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Blinded by a cult of progress, many of us can't see the slowdown that Dorling makes clear. A true public intellectual, he shows that, if we survive, life will be slower--and possibly better."
—Paul Chatterton, author of Unlocking Sustainable Cities: A Manifesto for Real Change
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This challenging and provocative book casts a wide net as it finds evidence everywhere of slowing growth. Most notably in population and life expectancy, but also in economic living standards, the halcyon era of rapid growth lies in the past.”
—Robert J. Gordon, author of The Rise and Fall of American Growth
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Ever since Malthus, stories about the future have been stories of rapid growth. That’s what makes Danny Dorling’s Slowdown such a revelation. It challenges our vision of the future and our fundamental assumptions about the nature of change.”
—Alex Soojung Kim Pang, author of Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less—Here’s How
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In this counterintuitive and eye-opening book, Dorling explodes the prevalent myth of acceleration and shows a beneficial slowdown is already happening—and needs to happen.”
—Vanessa Baird, New Internationalist
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Is the world spinning out of control? I thought so until I read Slowdown. Dorling's human vision of a slower, more stable future gave me new hope."
—William Powers, author of Hamlet's Blackberry 
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Dorling’s optimism is infectious as he brilliantly explores the huge challenges of a slowing pace of growth while the world transitions to a new ‘normal’ of stable and then shrinking populations.”
—Vicky Pryce, author of Women vs Capitalism