This blog is also available in Russian and Spanish. With Christmas coming up, household consumption will soon hit its yearly peak in many countries. Despite homely pictures of tranquility on mass-produced greeting cards, Christmas is more about frenzied shopping and […]
Ten Years After the Crash: more of the same, or a new beginning?
The year 2008 was a momentous one. The ‘anniversary’ headlines are of course all about the financial crash. As Nick Mathiason in The Guardian put it at the time: “It was the year the neo-liberal economic orthodoxy that ran the […]
Reading Tagore to Become Human
In 1922, Rabindranath Tagore published one of his most important works, the play Mukta-Dhara. The story, rich in symbolism, is a simple yet powerful one. A child of mysterious birth is found abandoned by a mountain waterfall. He is adopted […]
Where Time Went (and why we have so little left)
“Sleeker. Faster. More Intuitive” (The New York Times); “Welcome to a world where speed is everything” (Verizon FiOS); “Speed is God, and time is the devil” (chief of Hitachi’s portable-computer division). In “real” time, life speeds up until time itself […]
Technology and Its Discontents
Tucked within the pages of the January issue of the Agriview, a monthly farm publication published by the State of Vermont, was a short survey from the Department of Public Service (DPS). Described as an aid to the Department in […]
Livin’ the Screen Life: #productsmakemehappy
Important official legal disclaimer: This is a short work of fiction. Any resemblances to real people, people you may know, people you think you may know, etc., is entirely deliberate. When I’m at work I’m staring at a screen. When […]
In Defense of Degrowth
The economist Branko Milanovic recently wrote a blog post titled “The illusion of degrowth in a poor and unequal world.” He penned it, he says, following a conversation he had with a proponent of degrowth. As it turns out, that […]
Averting the apocalypse: lessons from Costa Rica
Earlier this summer, a paper published in the journal Nature captured headlines with a rather bleak forecast. Our chances of keeping global warming below the 2C danger threshold are very, very small: only about 5%. The reason, according to the […]
The Problem with Techno-Optimism
Today there are high hopes for technological progress. Techno-optimists expect massive benefits for humankind from the invention of new technologies. Peter Diamandis is the founder of the X-prize foundation, whose purpose is to arrange competitions for breakthrough inventions. His aim […]
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 […]