Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We get a startling overview of a self-directing complex system integrating economics and the physical world in Carey King’s recent book: The Economic Superorganism: Beyond the Competing Narratives on Energy, Growth, and Policy.
To be wealthy is to have the things you need and want, the things that support your well-being and enable you to do what you like.
What this paper is exploring is why humanity, but more importantly the people who really should know better – the economists – can’t see the effects that we’re having on the planet.
Neoliberalism might be dying, but this is no reason for complacency. Some of what is now happening points to a decisively worse world: digitally enabled authoritarianism and overtly discriminatory government policy, for example.
The Wiyot Tribe and Cooperation Humboldt are working together to form a type of Community Land Trust (CLT), Dishgamu Humboldt, the first of its kind, to structurally ensure that the Wiyot tribe will maintain decision-making power in this land trust, forever.
These were the sort of genuine connections that Rebecca Rockefeller and Liesl Clark envisioned back in 2013 when they created Buy Nothing—a gift economy operated on a hyperlocal scale to bring neighbors together through sharing and community.
Published in 1972, and shrouded in controversy since that date, ‘The Limits to Growth’ is the most successful econometric projection ever made.
‘Let’s always ask ourselves: Can I do without? Can I do less? Can I make it easier? And by the way, why do I have to do that? And couldn’t I do with what already exists?’
The radical changes known to history by the innocuous name enclosure peaked in two long waves: during the rise of agrarian capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and during the consolidation of agrarian capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth.
Neoliberal capitalism expands, incorporates, and creates new non-transparent locations of power and decision-making, but also victims with distorted perceptions of self-interest and limited or no capacity for collective action.
Redistributing wealth or income isn’t a new idea, but what if redistribution wasn’t necessary at all? What if the system that created money did it in a way that was more fair or more responsive to everyone up front?
Our economic and political architecture are both inventions, created by humans for certain objectives and the international political system is no exception to this rule.
