By Laurie Macfarlane, Open Democracy
In the age of the ‘self-made’ millionaire, the lottery of birth is more important than ever. As George Monbiot once said: “If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.”
By Eric Beinhocker, Oxford Martin School
The biosphere and econosphere are deeply interlinked and both are in crisis. Industrial, fossil-fuel based capitalism delivered major increases in living standards from the mid-18th through late-20th centuries, but at the cost of widespread ecosystem destruction, planetary climate change, and a variety of economic injustices.
By Jason Hickel, Jason Hickel blog
The debate about global poverty is important. But our collective understanding of this matter will only be served by intellectually honest and sincere engagement with the arguments at hand.
By Jody Tishmack, Anima/Soul
Chris Martenson’s recent article about collapse and the plummeting of biodiversity made me think about what it feels like to be left behind. Few people living in affluent countries or communities understand what this means.
By Margaret Welsh, New Economics Foundation
The fires raging on moorland outside Manchester have fallen off the front pages of the national press. But they tell a vital story of climate change, land management, and our broken economic system.
By Brian Davey, Feasta
In 1899 the maverick economist Thorsten Veblen portrayed the power elite of his day in The Theory of the Leisure Class.
By Steven Gorelick, Local Futures Blog
A transition to renewable energy is often given a significance that goes well beyond its immediate impact: it would somehow make our exploitative relationship to Nature more environmentally sound, our relationship to each other more socially equitable.
By Bill Laurance, The Conversation
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.
By Brian Davey, Feasta
This chapter explores the features of sustainable commons and the extent of commons today. It describes the practice of commoning as a possible response to the ecological crisis.
By Beatrix Campbell, Open Democracy
In the last quarter of the twentieth century the world’s institutions reached a consensus: they came together to hail the goal of gender equality. Ironically, this was at the very moment when we were witnessing the limits, the exhaustion, of the equality paradigm.
By Andreas Weber, Shareable
The premises of neo-Darwinism and neoliberalism constitute the tacit, taken-for-granted understanding of “how the world works”.
By Tony Noerpel, Blue Ridge Leader
We see these boys as vulnerable children who need to be in free public schools getting an education. Milton Friedman saw them as production capital or consumer units.