Serge Latouche: “Sustainable development is a slogan”

Today’s protagonist chooses to conduct the interview at Les Délices du Fournil (The Delights of the Oven), a small, fast-food joint serving sandwiches, croissants, and coffee in the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter. With the latest hit music videos playing in the background, and while sipping from his glass of red wine, Latouche, an expert in economic philosophy and proponent of the theory of degrowth, recounts how his life experience with communities outside the realm of developmentalism, first in Laos and then in Africa, led him to lose faith in economics. These stories he recounts in *The Society of Frugal Abundance *, one of his latest books translated into Spanish. For Latouche, a Parisian academic with gray hair and a friendly smile, the growth society is based on the unlimited accumulation of wealth, destroys nature, and generates social inequalities.