If anyone could see into the future of the British economy it was John Maynard Keynes.
]]>The secret of super-forecasting? It’s a willingness to change your mind.
I do not exist and yet I am everything. You know what I am. I am History. Now make me good.
… and Bhutan’s famous Gross National Happiness, which uses thirty-three metrics to measure the titular quality in quantitative terms.
All these indexes are attempts to portray civilization in our time using the terms of the hegemonic discourse, which is to say economics, often in the attempt to make a judo-like transformation of the discipline of economics itself, altering it to make it more human, more adjusted to the biosphere, and so on. Not a bad impulse!
But it’s important also to take this whole question back out of the realm of quantification, sometimes, to the realm of the human and the social. To ask what it all means, what it’s all for. To consider the axioms we are agreeing to live by. To acknowledge the reality of other people, and of the planet itself. To see other people’s faces. To walk outdoors and look around.
A novel attempting to imagine civilization coming through climate change stronger for it.
]]>In World War II, Britain invented the electronic computer. By the 1970s, its computing industry had collapsed—thanks to a labor shortage produced by sexism.
]]>One of the important contributions of the past 30 years of research has been to clarify the concepts involved in the tragedy of the commons. Things are not as simple as they seem in the prototypical model. Human motivation is complex, the rules governing real commons do not always permit free access to everyone, and the resource systems themselves have dynamics that influence their response to human use. The result is often not the “tragedy” described by Hardin but what [Bonnie] McCay has described as a “comedy”—a drama for certain, but one with a happy ending.
]]>… though money is an idea, basically, it represents stuff, and stuff is made of carbon
An interview with the woman spearheading the new discipline explaining how human social structures impact the environment.
]]>These prices are fake. And in being fake, they are warping our whole system: our relationship to the environment, to animals, and to ourselves.
]]>[Hunter-gatherers] considered themselves affluent and enjoyed a degree of affluence as a result of that. Yet we seem to be trapped in this cycle of ever pursuing more and greater growth, greater wealth, greater anything. It seems that our aspirations now grow endlessly.
A conversation on how consumerism is making us unhappy and what a different culture might look like.
]]>Capitalism thrives not by destroying natures but by putting natures to work as cheaply as possible.
]]>A two-pound chicken tastes better with friends
A two-pound chicken tastes better with two
And I know where to find you
So, listen to the words I say!
A spirited defense of socialism for dark times.
]]>… as the number of cargo ships has increased, so has a problem: workers stuck on ships that have been completely abandoned by the owners, leaving them stranded out at sea without basic supplies like food.
]]>Paying money to this teacher I came to an understanding of the values of “This World.”
]]>… a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems
A few case studies of man setting out to fix his environment.
By zooming in on tiny fish and out to the entire stratosphere, it beautifully captures the staggering scope of climate change and its challenges. In highlighting the scientists and engineers working on it, the book offers a somewhat more hopeful picture of our possible future: less apocalyptic but still incredibly strange. See 99pi’s “Model Organism” for a taste.
The book also makes a strong case for being skeptical that we even can engineer our way out of climate change. While it nods to the “but what other choice do we have” counterargument, I hope that readers come away from this tension in the book more confident than ever in our need for decarbonization and I hope that readers won’t leap to even worse ideas than those highlighted in the book, such as fatalism or population control. As one character in the book memorably put it:
]]>Pissing your pants will only keep you warm for so long.
An acclaimed meditation on our material existence, some of the photos from this book can be previewed on The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), Menzel’s Website or on Google Drive.
]]>This decision is about business. Just not exactly in the way he meant.
On why there are so few actors with disabilities.
]]>The world went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money. The graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on was a process of dispossession
]]>Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.
A classic of modern psychology, Stumbling on Happiness explains in detail the cognitive biases that prevent us from accurately predicting what will make us happy.
]]>One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end.
Frase imagines a two-by-two matrix of possible post-capital economies and leaves us to imagine which future we want to work toward.
]]>If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence—to make such relations seem moral—than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.
A thorough deconstruction of the idea of money and a scandalous exposé of the history of our global order from the perspective of one of man’s most powerful ideas.
]]>The rate of change is visibly unsustainable. The profiteers call this process “disruption,” while commentators on the left generally call it “neoliberalism” or “late capitalism.” Millennials know it better as “the world,” or “America,” or “Everything.” And Everything sucks.
Explaining the economic moment we are caught in, its tangled roots, and the challenges of trying to fight our collective, exponential momentum.
]]>Sprawling industrial complexes where armies of thousands [of workers] manufactured products from start to finish gave way to smaller, more specialized plants that shipped components and half-finished goods to one another in ever lengthening supply chains. […] Once the world began to change, it changed very rapidly.
The remarkable story of how a metal box changed the world.
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