It was a spiritual community of people united in an effort to contribute to the prosperity of the Fatherland and the enlightenment of the people living in it.

In fact, an African philosopher wrote to me, when Prosperity Without Growth was published, pointing out the similarities between this view of prosperity and the traditional African concept of ubuntu.

You need in the long run for stability, for economic growth, for jobs, as well as for financial stability, global economic institutions that make sure that growth to be sustained has to be shared, and are built on the principle that the prosperity of this world is indivisible.

And it's also clear that we will never achieve that unless we're capable of redefining a meaningful sense of prosperity in the richer nations, a prosperity that is more meaningful and less materialistic than the growth based model.

If the process of social modernization that produces this disorder is not matched by a process of political and institutional modernization a process which produces political institutions capable of managing the stress of modernization the result may be violence.