Year: 2011

How you can become a commoner

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Commoning represents a “third way”—not locked into the profit-driven mechanics of the market nor solely dependent on government agencies—that enables everyday citizens to actively make decisions and take actions that shape their future of their communities. Although most folks who do it, probably don’t call it “commoning”— they simply think of it as “common sense” or the “common good”.

Dissident economists on the warpath

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As an academic economist I find I am living in interesting times. Yes, really. The profession is in crisis, and much blame is being laid at the door of those who teach politicians how the economy works, and who engage in research to support this teaching. The fact that the financial crisis was predicted only by dissident economists, and the lamentable failure of mainstream economists to explain what has happened, much less provide solutions, has led to severe criticism.

Farm prices, food prices, and biofuels

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It’s worth noting that the energy content of the human food supply is about a sixth of the energy content of the human fuel supply (about 86 mbd of liquid fuels, equivalent to somewhere in the neighborhood of 120-130mbd of ethanol). This is the core problem with converting food to fuel – we are taking from a small pool to try to make up for deficiencies in a large pool, and we will have a much bigger effect on the level of the small pool than the bigger pool.

What punctured the North-African balloon? Crude oil and social unrest

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A society is not as simple as a balloon but it can easily explode in revolutions, collapse, breakdowns, civil wars and all sort of rapid and unpredictable changes. Societies, it seems, are fragile, at least in terms of the stability of their governments. This behavior looks normal to us because we have seen it happening many times. But, just as for balloons, it is difficult to explain exactly why societies “explode.”

Oman’s unrest may be a domino, not just to suppliers, but also to customers

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There are reports that the unrest in the Middle East has spread to the Sultanate of Oman. While at the moment there have been only one or perhaps two deaths, small in number relative to the larger number of fatalities in countries like Libya, such a milepost, nevertheless, is sadly likely to indicate that the situation will get much worse. … Oman is not a member of OPEC, but contains the largest oil reserves of any country outside that group in the Middle East.