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Within the degrowth and décroissance movement, Illich is an important source for inspiration. Conviviality has especially significance to the discussion on the role of technology in a society beyond growth. The reception of Illich within degrowth often falls in line with a rejection of globalized capitalism, globalized chains of production and global business – the signifiers of productivism, counterproductivity and the heteronomic order of economic growth fetishism.
The new president needs a fresh approach to trade.
The real incomes of about two-thirds of households in 25 advanced economies were flat or fell between 2005 and 2014. Without action, this phenomenon could have corrosive economic and social consequences.
In just two decades, the total value of the energy being produced via fossil fuel extraction has plummeted by more than half. Now $3 trillion of debt is at risk.
Politicians, journalists, lobbyists, CEOs, and corporate bureaucrats rarely talk to anyone except each other. They constitute a distinct intellectual universe. Within this universe, economic policies are designed primarily for political marketability; economic science exists largely to provide impressive diagrams and equations to sell them with. Phrases designed in think tanks and focus groups (“free markets,” “wealth creators,” “personal responsibility,” “shared sacrifice”) are repeated like incantations until it all seems like such unthinking common sense that no one even asks what the resulting picture has to do with social reality. True, the bubble logic can be maintained only by a certain studied ignorance of how the economy really works.
it is naïve to think that we can extract the merits of the sharing economy without investing in the infrastructure and social welfare state that undergirds that economy.
The world is entering a period of stagnation, the new mediocre. The end of growth and fragile, volatile economic conditions are now the sometimes silent background to all social and political debates. For individuals, this is about the destruction of human hopes and dreams.
Digital technologies are having dramatic impacts on consumers, businesses, and markets. These developments have reignited the debate over the definition and measurement of common economic statistics such as GDP. This column examines the measurement challenges posed by digital innovation on the economic landscape. It shows how existing approaches are unable to capture certain elements of the consumer surplus created by digital innovation. It further demonstrates how they can misrepresent market-level shifts, leading to false assessments of production and growth.
A key finding of our research is that climate change poses a fundamental challenge to business as usual. While corporations frame climate change through the optimistic prism of innovation, technology and “green” products and services, the unpleasant reality is that our existing economic system fundamentally undermines a habitable climate.
cette révolte des masses qui conduit à une forme d’autoritarisme politique et à une dictature populiste résulte des « politiques de non-reconnaissance » conduites un peu partout en Europe, selon la doxa néolibérale. Tous les fascismes européens ont commencé de la même façon : transformation d’un manque de dignité des masses populaires en fait politique pour retrouver la fierté nationale. On peut craindre que le fascisme qui a déjà pris une forme d’exercice de pouvoir et une méthode de gouvernance renaisse en Pologne.
A successful transition will depend on a diverse collection of efforts, including urging negative population growth; supporting sustainable consumption and degrowth; promoting the commons paradigm; working with religion to foster an ethic for an equitable and sustainable planet; furthering justice; improving the sciences; promoting agroecology; facilitating local markets; encouraging progressive forms of corporate ownership, governance, and practice; and warning of limits and the possibilities of tipping points. We will need all of these efforts and more to shift to a socially just and environmentally sustainable world. We will even need the insights of economists, but with a diversity of forms of economic thinking. We will need markets, but we will have to be far more aggressive in telling the “invisible hand” where to go. Hopefully, exposing the interrelationships between economism and the Econocene will help us see the depth and breadth of the problem and the role each of us can play in a collective solution.
The climate circus would be farcical, if the fate of billions were not at stake
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The idea of AWE is both simple and promising. The current generation of wind turbines work relatively well, but it is also a technology that's rapidly reaching its technical limits, given by the weight and the cost of the tower that supports the rotor. So, why can't we just get rid of the tower and have the rotor fly in the air?
shorter work weeks are not just good for your well-being, they are great for sustainability and future-proofing the economy too.
For progressives the narrative on the digital economy should be clear: they must embrace digital technology to boost growth, increase productivity and employment and change labour law and social protection rules where necessary. But taking a look across the European political landscape shows that in most countries the centre left mostly offers rhetoric, not reality, and often not even that. In particular, on the issues of labour law and social protection, one of the natural habitats of the left, there are hardly any answers on the table as to how some of the most dynamic and innovative but at the same time disruptive businesses can be integrated in Europe’s economic and social structure.
The American left and progressives have no future if they cannot imagine a new language that moves beyond the dead-end politics of the two-party system and explores how to build a broad-based social movement to challenge it. One fruitful beginning would be to confront the fact that our society is burdened not only by the violence of neoliberalism but also by the myth that capitalism and democracy are the same thing. Capitalism cannot rectify wage stagnation among large segments of the population, the growing destruction of the ecosystem, the defunding of public and higher education, the decline in life expectancy among the poor and middle classes, police violence against Black youth, the rise of the punishing state, the role of money in corrupting politics, and the widening gap in income and wealth between the very rich and everyone else.
Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.
De 'nieuwe' derde optie die bestaat voor Europa, is kort samen te vatten: eenheid in verscheidenheid. In een tijd waarin goederen en diensten steeds meer op maat kunnen worden gemaakt, past geen Europese Unie die pluriformiteit en diversiteit tussen lidstaten als een probleem ziet, en begrotingsbeleid en fiscaal beleid steeds meer wil uniformeren en centraliseren.
'intelligentsias manufacture unrealities in eras of decline because their position at the top of the heap depends on doing so. If they are to validate decline as real, then they undermine the very order in which they are at the top. Who knows what might happen then? People might begin to blame them for having been agents of decline in the first place. Thus, their first and greatest incentive is to push the myth that there is no decline. Whatever the intelligentsia in an age of decline does, it cannot validate, prove, even often discuss, the possibility of decline as real, actual, happening, true.'
In embracing the monetary valuation of nature as a strategy for mobilizing support for environmental conservation, environmentalists are resigning themselves to a political status quo that can only comprehend value in terms of money and markets. By viewing ecosystems and their services through a pecuniary lens, monetization profoundly changes our relationship with nature, and, if taken to the point of commodification, can subject the fragility of nature’s balance to the destructive logic and volatility of markets.
Liberal immigration policies can be enforced only by winning public support, not in spite of public opposition. Winning such support is not a chimera, there is no iron law that the public must be irrevocably hostile to immigration. Large sections of the public have become hostile because they have come to associate immigration with unacceptable change. That is why, paradoxically, the immigration debate cannot be won simply by debating immigration, nor the migration crisis solved merely by enacting migration policies. Anxieties about immigration are an expression of a wider sense of political voicelessness and disengagement. Until that underlying political problem is tackled, the arrival of migrants on Europe’s shores will continue to be seen as a crisis.
we have wasted the past seven years propping up a bankrupt economic model. Before things get any worse, we need to replace it with one in which the financial sector is made less complex and more patient, investment in the real economy is encouraged by fiscal and technological incentives, and measures are brought in to reduce inequality so that demand can be maintained without creating more debts.
'Uber is an ideological campaign, a neoliberal project whose real products are deregulation and the dismantling of the social contract.'
Either these commodities are about the turn the corner as renewed strength in the United States--the biggest buyer of commodities next to China--revives industrial metal and crude oil demand--or the Federal Reserve is misreading the tea leaves and crashing commodity prices signal a world and U.S. economy in distress.
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Must-read book for anyone interested in the real, planetary limits-based future of business and economics.