Revisiting The Limits to Growth
The choice is that either we end up with unmanaged decline, which would be catastrophic, or a managed levelling out of our economies, shaped by a shift in social values and expectations.
new economy
Fighting Fire with Fire?: Reviews
These are two very different books but with much in common. Both are concerned with how to respond to the climate and ecological emergency. Jonathan Neale’s (JN) focus is on the global level, while that of Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton (L&L-L) is primarily on the UK.
Tim Jackson and the Quest for Post Growth
Ecological economist Tim Jackson is one of the few serious scholars trying to imagine what a post-growth world might look like.
Hammers, Nails and New Constructions – An Obvious Case for Economic Pluralism
Scientific control leads to rigid dogma in academics; science should be open as an axiomatic condition. Pluralism helps to avoid theories unfit to their realms of use.
What Could Possibly Go Right?: Episode 46
Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College, a member of the MacArthur Foundation Connected Learning Research Network, and co-founder of the Center for a New American Dream. She addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
Making in a post-pandemic world: How U.S. makerspaces are recovering from the pandemic
Makerspaces are returning, some stronger than ever. More than a year after the pandemic arrived in the U.S., makerspaces are reinventing community and creativity for a post-pandemic world.
Reclaiming hope from the dismal science
“Empowering and elegiac” might seem a strange description of a book on economics. Yet the prominent author and former economics minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis, chooses that phrase of praise for the new book Post Growth, by Tim Jackson.
We’re launching a new series on the reparative economy
The reparative economy seeks redress for centuries of harm, and goes beyond financial compensation by tackling the root causes of inequality and exploitation.
From Profit-taking to Life-making: Quality Care for People and Planet
Sociologist Sara Farris explains how the lens of social reproduction offers a way to understand the structural under-valuing of the work that keeps society on its feet.
Skewered on the Horns of Plenty
How do we transition to a low carbon energy system when plentiful resources are no longer available? Our past Horn of Plenty has become a trap from which we in the developed nations increasingly find difficult to extract ourselves.
Regarding Mutualism, Cooperativism, and Other (Interstitially) Anti-Capitalist Alternatives
If future historians wish to find some silver lining in COVID-19, the rise in mutualism in response to the shut-downs and dislocations it made necessary may be a good candidate.
Resources for a better future: GDP
Maybe we should rethink our metrics, measurements, and very meanings of progress, and start reorganising our economies in ways that celebrate human and non-human nature, rather than constrict it.