Economy featured

How Getting Rid of ‘Shit Jobs’ and the Metric of Productivity can Combat Climate change

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Work can be “shit” or it can be good. Sociologists and psychologists have developed various frameworks to explain what makes a job good or bad. And we’ve identified a few common factors. A good job is socially useful, it provides material security, it is varied and creative, and it offers us a degree of autonomy. A shit job does nothing for society, fails to help us meet our material needs, is repetitive, and offers little autonomy.

The Just Transition, Economic Democracy, and the Green New Deal

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Two recent books takeup the challenges of radical social and institutional transformation to make a GND maximally effective. One outlines the requirements for a maximally participatory democracy, but raises questions about its ideological valences; the other outlines a multilayered effort in one US city, leaving us with questions about organizational capacity to pull off the GND. Inasmuch as these works draw mainly on non-US examples, they magnify the challenges that remain here.

Corporations in the Crosshairs: From Reform to Redesign

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Transnational corporations, the engines of global capitalism, have become the target of efforts to create an economic system both socially just and environmentally sustainable. The unprecedented power and impact of these leviathans on society and ecology raises critical questions: What is corporate purpose? To whom should corporations be held accountable? And how, in fact, can that be accomplished?

Climate Change and the Attention Economy

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The questions posed by the ecological crises – notably the climate emergency – are a series of provocations. These questions drive us back not only to intimate connections between our actions and the fate of the earth and our atmosphere, but to the intimate realm of our attention and capacity to care both individually and collectively.

What has a Year of Experiments Taught us about Basic Income?

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As a long-time proponent of basic income, and as someone who has been involved in pilots in four continents, the past year has been a roller coaster, perhaps summarised as two steps forward, one step back, with marks for progress as six out of 10. It will take acts of courage to move forward decisively in 2019, but more doors are opening.

Dollars to Doughnuts: The Shape of a New Economy

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In my book, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist, I try to reframe economics through the power of images. The diagrams that we draw profoundly shape our thinking. If we’re going to thrive in the twenty-first century, and if economists are going to be helpful in doing so, we need to rename and redraw the economy.

Capitalism – a Self Organizing Structure That Leads to Self Extinction

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We live with the belief that we have created an economic system called capitalism and that we have control over it though government policy and taxes.   What if the tables were turned and capitalism only describes a self organizing system that creates itself in an environment of surplus goods and services? 

Dangerous Nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s

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Well-done, compact cities and towns are incredibly livable and pleasurable, as well as more financially sustainable. Humans are very adaptable and resilient, and the transition to whatever is next should also give us more excitement than sorrow or remorse.

The America of the 50s and 60s is over. The party has long since petered out. That’s a good thing. Let’s clean up and move on to something better.

The Triad of Commoning

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When patterns are expressed in a succinct form — as in “Ritualize Togetherness” and “Practice Gentle Reciprocity” — the phrase sounds like a principle. But patterns and principles are not the same. Each points to a different way of understanding the world and bringing about social change.

Your Money or your Life? Putting Wellbeing before GDP

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The work on progress indicators is all well and good, especially in challenging the political priority given to GDP. However, over the years I have grown more sceptical of the possibility of measuring, accurately and fully, the state of nations and the wellbeing of their people.