Fair growth

Equal Opportunities, Effective Reforms and Prosperity for Wider Society as a Cure for Political Rigidity

The Czech Republic perpetuates a lot of expensive injustices. Poor children have little chance of getting a quality education. Low-wage workers are being crushed by the tax system. Parents, foreigners and the over-indebted are being pushed out of the labour market by legislation. Public systems do not motivate health prevention or economic initiative. None of this can be called blind spots anymore - yet nothing is happening and hundreds of thousands of people and entire regions still fall short of shared prosperity. Because of this, the Czech Republic has been stagnating for a long time and losing social cohesion. The geopolitical situation, the ageing population and the climate crisis pose much more serious challenges.

Sociologist Daniel Prokop shows that we need equitable growth. The Czech Republic will only grow if it includes all its citizens fairly in its prosperity. At the same time, it must overcome the self-rule that governs public systems today. Some people get lost in them, the rest exploit their loopholes and weaknesses, and politics just maintains social rigidity. Fair Growth shows the depth of the problems here, while detailing data-driven reforms to taxes, the welfare system, education, local government and preventive health care that would move the Czech Republic toward prosperity for all.

From the bestselling author of Blind Spots.

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Righteous Growth expands on the book Blind Spots in many ways. It is perhaps more enlightening, certainly more comprehensive - and often more courageous in describing the structural roots of our problems. I chose the title Fair Growth deliberately. The book doesn't want to hide behind metaphors and wallow in the negation of what all doesn't work. It offers or discusses specific solutions to each problem described. Therefore, different readers in different parts may not agree with it. And that's good. Because we need productive argument. One of the main mistakes of the Czech public debate of the last decades is that we are so tired of constant personal disputes and permanent campaigning and slander that nobody wants to engage in really stimulating conflicts about the shape of key reforms. Political and social clashes spill over into impotent troughs of culture wars from which marginal political parties extract enough potential to threaten liberal democracy. On key issues such as education reform, we have again manipulated ourselves into an apparent consensus by being afraid to name things precisely and to go into a substantive dispute - but this falls apart when it comes to real reforms, because the supposed consensus does not give a realistic assignment on how to change things.
— excerpt from the book