Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The three-century-long reign of the market economy is nearing its end whether we like it or not, wrote late British economist David Fleming in Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy.
$50 per barrel oil is clearly less impossible to live with than $30 per barrel oil, because most businesses cannot make a profit with $30 per barrel oil. But is $50 per barrel oil helpful?
In Vermont, a famously beautiful and progressive land that has also offered us a viable presidential candidate, there was virtually unanimous support in the legislature for recognizing limits to economic growth, the problems caused by growth, and the solutions inherent to a steady state economy.
It is time to reframe the debate to recognize that we have pushed growth in material consumption beyond Earth’s environmental limits.
The people’s voice has taken centre stage once again in recent months, in which a call for sharing is palpable in the many agendas for social justice and true democracy.
Public health is an alternative indicator of well-being and is strongly correlated to levels of equality or inequality. Greater equality means greater well-being for everyone and a smaller need for the state – yet inequality has been increasing dramatically.
Politics in the United States subsists on a single myth whose narrative is central to all positions, even most of the ones located at the fringe.
Every human society without exception gives some members more say in making decisions than others.
Opening a newspaper or listening to the radio news exposes us to a flood of catastrophic messages: devastating droughts, failing states, terrorist attacks, and financial crashes.
The existing economy is already environmentally unsustainable. It is utterly implausible to think we can “decouple” economic growth from environmental impact so significantly, especially since recent decades of extraordinary technological advancement have only increased our impacts on the planet, not reduced them.
An alarming new study has shown that the world’s forests are not only disappearing rapidly, but that areas of “core forest”…are vanishing even faster.
A few months from now, this blog will complete its tenth year of more-or-less-weekly publication. In words the Grateful Dead made famous, it’s been a long strange trip…
