John Thackara on Designing for Life
John Thackara is one of the brilliant irregulars exploring how humankind can make the transition to a climate-friendly, relocalized, post-capitalist world.
building a resilient economy
Inflation is squeezing workers. We need a £15 minimum wage
It’s time for some bold thinking on how to fairly protect those in work from the worst of its impact. A £15 an hour minimum wage by 2024 should be the target.
Beyond the Growth Imperative
Tim Jackson’s new book, Post Growth: Life after Capitalism (Polity Press, 2021), follows his ground-breaking Prosperity without Growth (2009, updated in 2017). Whilst the previous work reflected, partly, the austerity-driven answers to the Great Recession, Post Growth falls into a different world.
Green growth vs degrowth: are we missing the point?
So, let us reach a truce and build a mass movement to take on the real enemies of environmental justice. The stakes are too high to do anything else.
What Could Possibly Go Right: Episode 1 Saru Jayaraman
Join Vicki Robin for the premiere episode of her conversations with cultural changemakers, What Could Possibly Go Right? Saru Jayaraman, President of One Fair Wage, shares insight into the current perfect opportunity for wage change in the food service industry.
The Pandemic as a Catalyst for Institutional Innovation (Part II)
Our years of leisurely critique of neoliberal capitalism are over. Now we need to take action to escape from its pathologies and develop new types of governance, provisioning, and social forms.
Clean Tech Versus a People’s Green New Deal
Is there a way to imagine a different GND, a global Green New Deal? I think so. But it might have to start by recognizing the ecological laws of limits and a social ethic of redistribution of wealth and resources, and equality. It would argue for developmental convergence, including in energy use, between wealth and poor, within and between countries.
False Hopes for a Green New Deal
The Green New Deal pivots on a central lie of continued growth, promising this growth and employment whilst pretending it can magic away the environmental and humanitarian consequences. The result of this is that on all three counts – infinite growth, reliance on fossil fuels, and colonial resource extraction – the Green New Deal is unable to challenge the prevailing order.
A Charter for the Social Solidarity Economy
The Social and Solidarity Economy is based on individuals and communities arising from social initiatives. Material benefits are not the essential building block of its identity. Rather, it defines itself by the quality of life and well-being of its members and the whole of society as a global system.
Creating a Sustainable Future
Enough is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources presented by Rob Dietz. This is the first in a new lecture series sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
An Economy That Does Not Grow?
While it may be clear that the wager on endless growth is a bad one, a more difficult question arises: “what would be the characteristics of an economy that does not grow?”. In his book “Macroeconomics Without Growth1” Steffen Lange attempts to construct a framework for answering this question
The Insurgent Power of the Commons in the War Against the Imagination
It is in that capacity that I come before you today, as a commoner. Much more about that shortly, but suffice it to say that the commons, to me, is a vehicle for social and political emancipation.