Why Your Retirement Fund Might Be Destroying Your Future

About this episode

Matt Orsagh discusses the flaws in the financial system and the implications for retirement funds with Garr Punnett.

Matt Orsagh spent 17 years inside the CFA Institute, working at the intersection of corporate governance, ESG, and sustainability until he realized the system he was trying to fix from within was fundamentally designed to produce the outcomes he was fighting against. In this conversation, Matt and Garr dig into why GDP is a terrible measure of success, why degrowth isn't a political position but a response to physics, how planetary boundaries are already collapsing, and what a post-growth financial system might actually look like. The conversation gets personal, philosophical, and surprisingly hopeful. Books Referenced The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity — David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021). Matt referenced this as a "huge doorstop of a book" written by an anthropologist and archaeologist. It examines how diverse civilizations throughout history organized themselves in ways that challenge the capitalism-vs-socialism binary. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.The Limits to Growth — Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III (1972). Commissioned by the Club of Rome, this MIT study modeled the consequences of exponential…

People in this episode

Hosts: Garr Punnett, Sabira Lakhani

Guest: Matt Orsagh

Topics covered

• retirement funds
• corporate governance
• sustainability
• degrowth
• financial systems
• planetary boundaries

Keywords

• retirement
• GDP
• degrowth
• sustainability
• financial system
• planetary boundaries
• corporate governance

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: CFA Institute, Club of Rome, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Books & works: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, The Limits to Growth

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