A friend of mine from India tells a story about driving an old Volkswagen beetle from California to Virginia during his first year in the United States. In a freak ice storm in Texas he skidded off the road, leaving his car with a cracked windshield and badly dented doors and fenders. When he reached Virginia he took the car to a body shop for a repair estimate. The proprietor took one look at it and said, “it’s totaled.” My Indian friend was bewildered: “How can it be totaled? I just drove it … [Read more...]
Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it
What does genuine economic progress look like? The orthodox answer is that a bigger economy is always better, but this idea is increasingly strained by the knowledge that, on a finite planet, the economy can’t grow for ever.But what is a steady-state economy? Why it is it desirable or necessary? And what would it be like to live in? The global predicament We used to live on a planet that was relatively empty of humans; today it is full to overflowing, with more people consuming more … [Read more...]
Trump Trauma
While we mourn the tragedy that fear, prejudice and ignorance “trumped” in the US Presidential election, now is the time to go deeper and broader with our work. There is a growing recognition that the scary situation we find ourselves in today has deep roots.To better understand what happened—and why—we need to broaden our horizons. If we zoom out a bit, it becomes clear that Trump is not an isolated phenomenon; the forces that elected him are largely borne of rising economic insecurity and … [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...]
Why are my highly educated friends so ignorant about trade?
Trump is a catastrophe, but so was the TPP.Since Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, I’ve found myself talking for the first time with a lot of my 20-something friends about trade agreements.My friends didn’t vote for Donald Trump. Most are from “liberal” parts of the US. They went to good schools for 12 years, worked hard, got good grades. Many went on to top colleges and universities, places like Stanford, Yale, NYU, UCLA.And yet most of them know almost … [Read more...]
Strangely Like Gulag: Schooling and the Industrial Machine
For many years, I’ve seen more and more of my rural and tribal neighbors pack their children off to school. Now, every morning between 8:00 and 9:00 am in this upwardly-mobile-yet-backward district, the country roads are full of children commuting to school, hoisting bags laden with what they believe is the wisdom and knowhow of modern culture. They are going for vidyabhyaasam (education, or more literally speaking, ‘the exercise of knowledge’), and they go to the keepers of this knowledge – to … [Read more...]
How Globalization Divides Us: Perspectives on Brexit from a Dual Citizen
When I woke up on June 24th and checked the news, I cried. Along with millions of people around the world. I’m a diehard believer in independence, freedom, democracy, and strong local economies. For some, the Brexit result represented those things. If that had been the reality, I would’ve supported it too. But like every other choice offered in the global economy these days, Brexit was a false one. Getting out of Europe does nothing to address the real problems in UK society—or the world. We’re … [Read more...]
From Livelihoods to Deadlihoods
In India, economic development and modernity have transformed livelihoods into deadlihoods. They are wiping out millennia-old livelihoods that were ways of life with no sharp division between work and leisure, and replacing them with dreary assembly line jobs where we wait desperately for weekends and holidays.Economic progress, we are told, is about moving from primary sector jobs to manufacturing and services. And so the livelihoods that keep all of us alive – farming, forestry, … [Read more...]