Yesterday I went to the post office to mail a package to my daughter overseas. She’s been in the military for years, so I’m familiar with the process. Hauling the big box on my hip, I greeted the post mistress and asked her for a customs form. “Oh, you have to do that online now,” she said. “Because of international regulations, we aren’t allowed to use paper forms anymore.” So I wrestled the box back out to the car and drove home, to spend an hour of stroke-inducing frustration figuring … [Read more...]
Adopt a Local Business
Many of us show our compassion and generosity through acts of adoption. Adopt a tree, adopt a baby giraffe, adopt a schoolchild, etc. For the last two weeks, my partner Audrey and I adopted a lovely four-legged pooch named Annie. Her “person,” a close friend, had to travel to Western Massachusetts to be with her dying mother. I’m not exactly a dog person – I didn’t grow up with dogs, and throughout my adult life my travel schedule has made me reluctant even to adopt a cactus. But Annie’s visit … [Read more...]
Comparative Resilience: 8 Principles for Post-COVID Reconstruction
This past weekend, a bright Georgetown undergraduate asked me how I squared my passion for localization with the theory of comparative advantage. For economics newbies, he was referring to David Ricardo’s argument that every community should find one product to specialize in and trade for everything else. I gave my usual response that the theory is great – except for the thousands of goods and services that are cheaper to produce locally – but that answer left me uneasy. Once the dust settles … [Read more...]
The Folly of Farm-Free Food
“Beware of simple solutions to complex problems. That is a crucial lesson from history; a lesson that intelligent people in every age keep failing to learn.”[1] Having wisely counseled thus just 5 years ago in a trenchant critique of ecomodernism, environmental journalist George Monbiot’s recent op-ed in The Guardian surprised a lot of people. In fact, one is left dizzingly disoriented by Monbiot’s recent about face, in which he promotes farm-free, ‘lab-grown food’ using the very arguments he … [Read more...]
The Real Economy
An essential element of a functioning community is that all roles are filled, that people individually and together do what is necessary for the success of the community. In this era of climate change and contracting energy resources, one important and potentially divisive issue is household roles. Many American households these days are just fueling stations for people who sleep and microwave in order to return to work or school. When both parents work and the kids spend all day outside of … [Read more...]
Variety, Survival, and the Revenge of the Luddites
Since human creativity will have to move in new directions as the Industrial Revolution runs down, you may be wondering what kinds of technology are suited to a sane life. You may picture what is called nowadays a low-tech lifestyle. Despite its popularity among cutting-edge thinkers and designers, a low-tech lifestyle is hardly avant garde. The majority of the human population lives and has always lived with less advanced technology than most modern Westerners do. Many live a simpler life … [Read more...]
Local is Our Future
[The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of Local is Our Future: Steps to an Economics of Happiness, a new book by Helena Norberg-Hodge, published by Local Futures in July 2019.] For our species to have a future, it must be local. The good news is that the path to such a future is already being forged. Away from the screens of the mainstream media, the crude ‘bigger is better’ narrative that has dominated economic thinking for centuries is being challenged by a much gentler, … [Read more...]
The Farms of the Future
Hou Xueying, a mother from Shanghai, was tired of food safety scares and of a city life disconnected from the land. So she moved her family to the country to learn about sustainable farming. Her parents disapproved; they had struggled to give her a comfortable life in the city — they could not understand why she would throw it away. When she got to the country, she found that the older generation of farmers could only tell her how to grow as they did, using chemical fertilizers, toxic … [Read more...]
Growthism: its ecological, economic and ethical limits
We have many problems – poverty, unemployment, environmental destruction, climate change, financial instability, etc. – but only one solution for everything, namely economic growth. We believe that growth is the costless, win-win solution to all problems, or at least the necessary precondition for any solution. This is growthism. It now creates more problems than it solves. A journey of no return, not a circular economy The economic process is not a mechanical analog that can be run … [Read more...]
How bad is global inequality, really?
Most everyone who’s interested in global inequality has come across the famous elephant graph, originally developed by Branko Milanovic and Christoph Lakner using World Bank data (see below). The graph charts the change in income that the world’s population have experienced over time, from the very poorest to the richest 1%. We can update the elephant graph using the latest data from the World Inequality Database, which covers the whole period from 1980 to 2016 using a method … [Read more...]