Politics

Barbarian invasions

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Many authors have predicted the energy descent will result in mass migrations, leading to large scale population replacement. John Michael Greer has thus stated he considered an Arab conquest of Europe as a distinct possibility… There is certainly an American bias here. America certainly experienced a large scale population replacement in the last three centuries, with natives being progressively swamped out by immigrants from the other side of the sea. This hasn’t happened in Europe for five millenniums.

Stupak stunner: Oil well’s blowout preventer had leaks, dead battery, design flaws

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A senior House Democrat said that the blowout preventer that failed to stop an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico had a dead battery in its control pod, leaks in its hydraulic system, a “useless” test version of one of the devices that was supposed to close the flow of oil and a cutting tool that wasn’t strong enough to shear through joints that made up 10 percent of the drill pipe.

Please let laissez-faire go

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The prevailing neo-liberal ideology to which the UK is wedded rests on the idea of completely open borders to trade and capital flows. It is a dog-eat-dog world that places market competition as the prime motif of economic policy-making. Companies are free, even encouraged, to have their products made wherever it is cheapest to do so and to export them into the UK rather than have them manufactured locally.

Asia’s epic urban sagas

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South Asians are seeing more work on the ground and hearing more policy announcements about urban development than ever before. For many who live in and around towns and cities in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India (where South Asia’s biggest cities lie) this could be a good thing. The trouble is: national governments and planning authorities in Dhaka, Islamabad and New Delhi are tending more and more to follow a single ideology – economic growth will drive down poverty – and a primary route to that misplaced objective, which is greater urbanisation.

Politically impossible?

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Last week I spoke before a very committed group of juniors and seniors taking a college class on sustainable cities. One student challenged me saying, “I’m tired of people in your generation saying that everything we really need to do is politically impossible. All of us here are graduating soon, and we will be moving into positions of responsibility including ones in government. When we’re the generation making the decisions, the things we need to do won’t be politically impossible.” Point taken.

The principle of subsidiary function

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When a society’s problems are caused by too much complexity, adding more layers of complexity is a recipe for more problems. In the abstract, this is easy enough to grasp, but applying it in practice is quite another matter. Fortunately, the writings of maverick economist EF Schumacher come to the rescue with another of his counterintuitive but valuable insights.