How the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative is Pioneering a Model for Equitable Housing
The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative is an impressive burgeoning commons legal institution that’s aimed at the decommodification of housing.
Economy featured
Money Through the Looking Glass
Many of the severest crises we’re facing at present – e.g. climate instability, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of vital resources, and the dangerous compromise of ecosystem health through the spread of waste plastic and other pollution – stem directly from economic expansion hitting against ’hard’ limits in the physical world.
Imagining a World with No Bullsh*t Jobs
Bullshit jobs are ones where the person doing them secretly believes that if the job (or even sometimes the entire industry) were to disappear, it would make no difference — or perhaps, as in the case of say telemarketers, lobbyists, or many corporate law firms, the world would be a better place.
How Did We Do That? The Possibility of Rapid Transition
How did we do that? The possibility of Rapid Transition, by Andrew Simms and Peter Newell, STEPS Centre & New Weather Institute, 2017 shows what we can learn about rapid change through examples from history and the present day.
Today We’ve Consumed More Resources than the Planet can Renew in a Year
August 1 was Earth Overshoot Day, the date when we have taken more from nature than it can renew in an entire year. Unsustainable extraction is occurring on a planetary scale: we are using natural resources 1.7 times faster in 2018 than the Earth’s ecosystems can regenerate this year.
The Curse of Thomas Malthus
Poor old Malthus. He has had a bad reputation ever since he predicted, towards the end of the 18th century, that over-population would lead to famine and then to social collapse.
Move Over, Bitcoin Bros: A Green Cryptocurrency is Here
To borrow a boxing analogy, if Bitcoin is an unceasing, ever-escalating zero-sum brawl, Bitcoin Green is a group of people with a common purpose standing in a circle and holding hands. Bitcoin Green participants are rewarded just for entering the ring — no fighting required.
State, Capital, and Ecology: A Report to the International Marxist-Humanist Organization
To be sure, ecological calamity will not permit an organized, equitable, and civilized global community. Marxist Humanists and others would like to add, “it doesn’t come from one, either.”
Climate Breakdown: Where is the Left?
For some on the left, environmental justice remains as important to their DNA as any other type of justice: their heart always has been, and still is, firmly in it. But more generally, some things still feel a bit… lacking.
Magic Economics
Economists do like to weigh in on normative issues of this kind nonetheless – and here is where, for me, they cease being potentially useful mechanics and start to become priests, magicians or quacks.
The Music of Time – or How We’ll not Change the Music unless we Change how We Sing
An enclosure is no less than right to amorality, freed from the ancient obligations of the common. It follows that our task is to evacuate enclosures and reclaim the common.
How the Ultra-Rich Can Help Fix the Affordable Housing Crisis
Municipalities should move quickly to enact high-end real estate transfer taxes, requirements for the disclosure of beneficial ownership, and regulations aimed at the disruptive impact absentee owner-investors are having on our cities.
