Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Growth is often a pale substitute for value, which often takes a back seat to flackery, smoke, and mirrors. The brightest business minds of tomorrow will shrug off the constraints of the shareholder-primacy model and embrace new modes of finance and governance.
At the heart of everything this is what a strong social movement needs: people coming together to form meaningful and lasting friendships with a shared passion for system change and a willingness to push for that change.
The main lesson is that debt cancellation is a crucial component of a global energy transition, and substantial reconstruction funds must also accompany it. What would be the overarching rationale for the cancellation? To ensure that low-income countries constitute a strong and economically successful defense against climate change.
So, yes, we need to condemn globalization loud and clear. And we need a cohesive strategy that moves us sensibly and sanely in the opposite direction.
Let’s keep pushing businesses to behave better and to innovate in ways that are genuinely beneficial for us and the environment, and let’s celebrate them when they do. But we should not expect – and we certainly should not depend on – commercial salvation.
The way we do business and the way we live our lives is ingrained in a growth at all costs mindset. But that “cost” is the very systems that keep us alive. Finance can follow this new path. We believe it must.
Perhaps more of us can look for the joyfully modest people in our lives, learning what we can from them instead of from the malignantly selfish, algorithm-drive madness running rampant today. That seems like genuine progress, however slowly it is made.
Whether today or in the deep past, when political power is wielded autocratically, the checks and leveling mechanisms that dampen inequality will tend to break down, and, over time, disparities in wealth will move closer toward their maximal potentials. In this way, the past is a mirror for what we now see.
Even if I don’t fully agree with Wilkinson’s thesis that development is driven by need, I think he demonstrates quite well that in a long term perspective, we actually spend more and more effort to maintain human societies. Most of that work is today based on external energy resources and overuse of biological and mineral resources.
I believe we are careening toward a biophysical and cultural crisis that will very likely destroy money — along with a great many other things. But I also believe that we are falling toward abundance again.
As soaring consumer prices, supply chain disruptions, and reductions in government-provided funding and services threaten communities, localists can help bolster local markets and inspire mutual aid efforts, helping mobilize folks to take more responsibility for their own collective resilience and well-being.
Tomorrow’s worlds are built on reality. We need to tell a counter-narrative of the good life, of common decency, of hope, with creativity, solidarity, audacity… and joy. Which is what we need now more than ever!
