Year: 2012

Economics as a public art

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Last week I sat next to a tutor in Political Geography at dinner at an Oxford college. He told me that when his students first come to him, they all believe that human behaviour is simply that of individualistic profit-maximisers. If this is the belief of young geography students, what hope is there that young economists will think otherwise?

David Graeber: anthropologist, anarchist, financial analyst

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After all, no one needs to understand why US firms are shedding jobs, or take a sober look at the current financial regime in the light of the 5,000-year history of debt. Students should just put their heads down and do the sorts of degrees that will give them technical jobs. Pay no attention to The Man behind the curtain!

World energy consumption – beyond 500 exajoules

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Today’s post goes into the global consumption of energy and provides a dataset in Excel for researchers on global primary energy consumption from 1830 to 2010. We are now burning 10 times as much energy as a century ago to provide the goods and services we consume. Energy consumption is still increasing rapidly

 

‘Breathing new life into the concept of resilience’: the notes from my ‘Four Thought’ talk

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I wondered whether in seeing resilience just as something we do in order to be prepared for a crisis, we were missing a trick: that we might instead see it as an opportunity. How might our settlements look if we began to think in terms of resilient food, resilient energy, resilient economies? Might this shift in thinking actually contain the potential for an economic and cultural renaissance for the places we live? It felt to me to be a powerful question.

Biketopia exists!

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I like to think of utopia as the space where idealism meets reality. Over the years, I have found few radical social change projects that met reality without failure or conflict, especially within a capitalist economy. Transformative projects often fail to take off and end up disillusioning their founders and volunteers. The Bike Kitchen model is one of those unique exceptions that we can try to learn from.

5 ways to make your dollars make sense

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Americans’ long-term savings in stocks, bonds, pension, life insurance, and mutual funds total about $30 trillion. But not even 1 percent of these savings touches local small businesses, the source of half the economy’s jobs and output. Is it possible to beat Wall Street’s 5 percent long-term performance by investing in your community? The answer is a resounding yes!

The nature of empire

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The twilight of cheap abundant energy is in many ways the dominant theme of global politics in our time, but another factor is coming to play an important role as well — the waning of America’s global empire. Impolite as it may be to mention the relation between America’s gargantuan military budgets and global network of bases, on the one hand, and the vastly disproportionate share of the world’s energy, materials, and industrial products Americans receive, on the other, the reality of America’s empire and the course of its decline have to be factored into any sense of the future ahead of us, and to do that, the nature of empire as a social, political, and economic reality has to be explored.