Dirk Philipsen

Fences, Fortunes and Failures: The Legacy of Property

Dirk Philipsen is a political economist at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. He has spent more than thirty years developing courses and curricula on the environment, climate change, and sustainability. He plays a leading role in Duke University’s educational climate commitment, helping to shape the university’s efforts to integrate climate literacy and action across teaching and learning.

He also serves as Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, director of the Duke University Focus cluster on “Building a Better World,” Fellow at the Royal Society of Arts, and founding associate of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, where he serves as one of the organization’s ambassadors. Philipsen is internationally recognized for his research on the role of exponential economic growth in driving climate change, as well as for his broader work on sustainability, wellbeing economics, and the history of capitalism. His latest book, The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World, and What to Do About It (Princeton University Press, 2015/17), critiques GDP as a measure of progress and calls for alternatives that better reflect human and
ecological wellbeing.

His current projects focus primarily on the role of property in shaping economic systems, cultures, and ideologies that contribute to climate change, rising inequality, and widespread popular disenfranchisement. He also researches and publishes on poverty, the role of academia in a moment of planetary crisis, and the imperative to design modern economies freed from the destructive imperative of economic growth.