The notion of economic growth as a regular, ongoing, self-sustained process no longer holds up to critical analysis. Even during what’s been called “The Glorious Thirty” – the years between the end of World War II and the 1974 oil crisis – growth occurred almost solely in industrialized countries and involved a minority of the world population; it was built on the senseless waste and pillaging of limited natural resources, access to cheap fossil fuels, dependency on killer technologies and the … [Read more...]
Will the Poor Always Be With Us?
It’s a familiar story. On his final journey toward Jerusalem, Jesus stops in Bethany to eat at the home of Simon, a leper. A woman enters with an alabaster jar of expensive ointment; she breaks the jar and pours the ointment on his head. Her gesture invokes the fury of some of those present. The ointment was worth a year’s wage, they grumble. It could have been sold, and the money given to the poor.“The poor will always be with you” was Jesus’ righteous and innocent enough reply. Jesus … [Read more...]
The Sharing Economy: It Takes More Than A Smartphone
I ran into my friend Rick the other day in a small town near our homes in northern Vermont. He was just coming out of the bookstore, holding a pink plastic bag that, I would soon learn, contained a dozen eggs from his flock of free range hens. After a bit of small talk, Rick asked, “you don’t by any chance have a pair of jumper cables in your car?” I did. “Would you be willing to drive over to the post office and jump my pickup truck? I’ve been trying to park on hills until I can get a new … [Read more...]
An Economy of Meaning – or Bust
It’s not often that a scientist gets to use the words love, creativity, and wisdom in a paper, especially when writing about economics. Perhaps that’s because economics, the dismal science, is obsessed with dismal systems – make that abysmal systems, relative to need.To be clear, I’m not speaking of the specific policies of the US, the EU, China, the World Bank or others. I’m speaking of dominant economic systems as wholes – especially their underlying conceptual models (macro and micro) and … [Read more...]
Clean energy won’t save us – only a new economic system can
Earlier this year media outlets around the world announced that February had broken global temperature records by a shocking amount. March broke all the records too. In June, our screens were covered with surreal images of flooding in Paris, the Seine bursting its banks and flowing into the streets. In London, floods sent water pouring into the tube system right in the heart of Covent Garden. Roads in south-east London became rivers two meters deep.With such extreme events becoming more … [Read more...]
Current Trade Treaties: “a revolution against law”
A respected human-rights expert at the United Nations, Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, has joined the global movement opposing trade treaties like TPP and TTIP. And he has novel and powerful legal arguments.In international law, de Zayas says, there is a hierarchy of agreements, and at the top is the UN Charter: “in case of conflict between the provisions of the UN Charter and any other treaty, the Charter prevails.” In other words, trade treaties that lead to a violation of human rights — or … [Read more...]
The Post-Wall Street Era Will be Local
On a shelf of the Phoenix Bookstore, located in the heart of the ecovillage of Findhorn in the north of Scotland, the title Going Local (Free Press, 2000) caught my eye. The book was written by the American economist Michael H. Shuman. It was June 2002, and I had come to Findhorn to attend the international “Restore the Earth” conference, during which Vandana Shiva, Winona LaDuke, Helena Norberg-Hodge and some others were to present their ideas. Shuman, in his book, underlines the importance of … [Read more...]
Resisting the Technocratic Paradigm
Ever since the release of Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato Si’, people in our circles have been waxing rhapsodic about its message: finally, a powerful global figure is explicitly calling for fundamental structural change.Unfortunately, the media has pigeon-holed the encyclical as a “climate change” document, and so Francis’ deep and broad critique of the modern economic system – with particular emphasis on its links to reductionist science and technology – isn’t getting the attention it … [Read more...]
Small Loans, Big Problems: The False Promise of Microfinance
Ever since Bill Clinton and the World Bank enthusiastically embraced the microfinance concept in the 1990s, we at Local Futures have been skeptical of its benefits, seeing it as part of a whole package of “market solutions” to our social and environmental crises that, in the long run, make things much worse. We have pointed out that these loans often target rural populations who were not previously in debt: they represent the long arm of capitalism reaching into remote rural areas, encouraging a … [Read more...]
The Global Economy’s “Impeccable Logic”
By Steven GorelickEver since the Occupy movement coined the terms “the 1%” and “the 99%” to point out disparities of wealth and power, the gap between rich and poor has received a lot of attention. In his highly-regarded 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, for example, Thomas Piketty’s central thesis is that wealth inequality is bound to increase in modern capitalist economies. This was underscored by a recent Oxfam report, which tells us that the world’s 85 richest people now … [Read more...]