The holiday period provides us with a unique opportunity to express the new awareness that must inform a less commercialised and sharing-oriented world. Rather than spending all our time partaking in conspicuous consumption, why don’t we commemorate Christmas by organising massive gatherings for helping the poor and healing the environment? At this time of year, our overconsuming lifestyles in[Read More...]
These are notes from a short lecture given at Nottingham University on 28th November 2017. Click on the images to enlarge them. 1 Production Increase During the 17th and 18th centuries the rise of mercantile power, colonialism and a slave economy was associated with the development of the idea that “improvement” meant production growth and was an indicator of a[Read More...]
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 proponent was me. First, let me say that I have a lot of respect for Milanovic’s work on inequality. [Read More...]
Any sensible government must learn to unleash the energy of its people and get them to perform instead of trying to get a bureaucracy to perform ―Verghese Kurien, I Too Had a Dream Tackling poverty requires an approach that must start with the people themselves and encourages the initiative, creativity and drive from below. The strategy must be at the[Read More...]
Bitcoin mining – the mechanism of creating Bitcoins and approving transactions on the blockchain – consumes prodigious amounts of electricity due to the use of a ‘Proof of Work’ cryptographic algorithm. While some Bitcoin is mined using clean energy (hydropower and geothermal energy, mainly) most Bitcoin is mined using coal, because coal power is both ubiquitous and cheap. Unfortunately,[Read More...]
The Seven Social Sins of the World: Wealth without work Pleasure without conscience Knowledge without character Commerce without morality Science without humanity Worship without sacrifice Politics without principle — given by Mohandas Gandhi to his grandson Arun shortly before his assassination BITCOIN AND BLOCKCHAIN The world is on fire lately with the exponential growth of Bitcoin and other electronic cryptocurrencies. While[Read More...]
The present-day education reformers believe that schools are broken and market solutions are the only remedy. Many of them embrace disruptive innovations, primarily through online learning. There is a strong belief that real breakthroughs can come only through the transformative power of technology or the invisible hand of the market. However, findings suggest that this strategy has not lived up[Read More...]
by Francis Thicke, with an introduction by Steven Gorelick The organic food movement suffered a major setback recently, when the US National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) voted in favor of allowing hydroponically-grown products to receive the “organic” label. This decision should not have come as a surprise to those who have watched the organic movement steadily taken over by big[Read More...]
When ideas fail, words come in very handy. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe We live in an age when noisy posturing too often substitutes for reasoned debate and brash opinion trumps hard fact. The thread of the argument often disappears in a blizzard of gee-whiz statistics, acronyms, and catch phrases in interviews with eminent folks of all kinds. Yet the[Read More...]
The Labour Party in the UK, which has a good chance of taking political power at the next election, has been involved in a process of policy development which involves taking up ideas from the commons movement and is focused around the revival of and protection of commons. In one week I have now been to three public events commemorating[Read More...]
