How Insane is Global Trade?
The way trade works in the global economy can be insane – it wastes resources, worsens climate change, and undermines the livelihoods of millions of small-scale producers worldwide.
Economy featured
Participatory Budgeting: When Government Really is by the People
In terms of broader systems change, participatory budgeting, when adopted, marks a real change in the way that folks do business, a real change in the way that government operates. For me, and for many folks, this is a beginning of a larger participatory democratic wave…
Growthism: its Ecological, Economic and Ethical Limits
We believe that growth is the costless, win-win solution to all problems, or at least the necessary precondition for any solution. This is growthism.
Monetary Policy Takes Center Stage: MMT, QE or Public Banks?
As alarm bells sound over the advancing destruction of the environment, a variety of Green New Deal proposals have appeared in the US and Europe, along with some interesting academic debates about how to fund them.
Pulling the Plug on Fossil Fuel Production Subsidies
Ending subsidies to producers can play a key role in taking the fossil fuel economy off life support – or we can wait for the planet to take our civilization off life support.
Bruno Latour on Politics in the New Climatic Regime
By stepping outside of the conventional frames of discussion about climate change, Latour opens up a rich, grand structure for thinking about the future of politics in the Anthropocene. Now if only we can build out this new third attractor. Let us call it the Terrestrial Commons!
Global Inequality: Do We Really Live in a One-Hump World?
These geopolitical power imbalances sustain and reproduce a global class divide that has worsened since the end of colonialism. This injustice is conveniently elided by the one-hump graph, which offers a misleadingly rosy narrative about what has happened over the past half century.
The Green New Deal: A Strategy for a More Equal United States
The Green New Deal resolution outlines a vision of what we need to do to address the dual crises of climate change and runaway inequality. What policies and programs could help us realize that vision?
Punching Ronnie in the Mouth (Episode 2 of Crazy Town)
This episode of Crazy Town focuses on the limits to growth, including the growth imperatives built into our economic institutions, and explores how the economy could make a shift toward sustainability. Along the way, Asher, Rob, and Jason take some potshots at Ronnie and his cohort of math-challenged wishful thinkers.
Why Free Trade is Bad for You (or Most of You at Any Rate)
Free trade is in real trouble today. But the promoters of free trade brought this on themselves. However, it is not because they have been tepid in their defense of free trade, as the description of this debate has it. They have been guilty of far greater sins.
In an Era of Brutal Cuts, One Ordinary Place has the Imagination to Fight Back
And for those desperate to preserve a spark of hope in a political system that feels so hopeless, let me suggest this: watch Preston.
Ghosting the Planet
This week’s episode is co-hosted by Rhiana Gunn-Wright, one of the lead policy writers of the Green New Deal. She joins Mary & Maeve in the studio to discuss public opinion on climate change in the United States, where it’s crucial that citizens and politicians take a role in environmental action.
