As we saw in the previous post, the U.S. has expanded its use of energy at a typical rate of 2.9% per year since 1650. We learned that continuation of this energy growth rate in any form of technology leads to a thermal reckoning in just a few hundred years (not the tepid global warming, but boiling skin!). What does this say about the long-term prospects for economic growth, if anything?
Using a pioneering digitization project that maps out details of life in the ancient world, classics Professor Josiah Ober links the democratic politics and surprisingly robust economy of classical Greek society.
"It also just reduces barriers to a wide variety of things that we think create more sustainable local economies, like solar energy projects, community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs, worker...
This short film explores the idea of what a steady-state economy is comprised of and how it could positively impact human behavior and our survival on the planet. The consequences of the present free market economic model are discussed in terms of how it affects human behavior in an unsustainable way. Greater emphasis on teaching sustainable 'consumption skills' in school education becomes outlined.
When Neil Gershenfeld started the Center of Bits and Atoms (CBA) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2001 to explore the merging of physical and computer science, part of his proposal was an outreach programme. It should bring the CBA’s technology to classrooms and to the developing world. Outreach Fab Labs were built in Boston, in Costa Rica, in the village of Vigyan Ashram (India), and in Ghana. The MIT Fab Lab in Northern Norway, the oldest Fab Lab in Europe, was allegedly conceived in 2002, started in 2003 and formally opened in 2005. The aim, however, was to keep the number of Fab Labs at a level that would be easy to oversee and manage. The MIT’s “Physical Map of the World, April 2004” showed ten Fab Labs in the Americas, nine in Africa, eight in Europe and five in Asia, a total of 32 FabLabs. No one would have thought then that ten years later a single, small country like the Netherlands would boast as many Fab Labs as there were globally in 2004, and that the number of labs world wide would have grown tenfold.
Like a cancer, the political, interest-based, debt-money system corrupts everything it touches. It’s time it was replaced. This is the fifth article in our series on the role of money in the transformation of society.
John O. McGinnis, the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University, says we are in the midst of a sharing economy, and that’s a good thing. (Don’t get all socialist on me; a sharing economy is one driven by service and technology. We are not going to have to pool our food in the commune.) McGinnis says this type of economy is good for liberty as well.
If you want to change society—or are interested in aiding or evaluating the efforts of others to do so—some understanding of exactly how environmental circumstances affect such efforts could be extremely helpful.
In my opinion, the greatest scandal of philosophy is that, while all around us the world of nature perishes – and not just the world of nature alone – philosophers continue to talk,sometimes cleverly and sometimes not, about the question of whether the world exists. Karl Popper, Two Faces of Common Sense
Over in Davos world leaders are desperately trying to find a 'fourth industrial revolution' to keep the 'growth' juggernaut rolling, write Bennet Francis & Rupert Read. But their efforts are doomed: the real challenge we face is to build a healthy, more equal society and a green, sustainable future for us all.
THE question seems basic, but economists have yet to find a comprehensive answer: why and how do economies grow? Additional capital and labour were long considered the main factors. Then the focus shifted to higher productivity and increased human capital, the knowledge embodied in members of society.
On the train to Manchester this morning I finished a terrific book I should really have read long ago. I’m very glad I finally have. It’s Morten Jerven’s Poor Numbers: how we are misled by African development statistics and what to do about it. The title made me think it was only relevant to African statistics, when in fact anybody interested in GDP and national accounts should read it.
In part I of this series of articles, I briefly mentioned Consumeristic Individualism, as I defined the dominant ethos of our era. To be able to define it, we must start to talk about a part of our collective identities that we all know about, yet few of us recognise – namely civilization. So, the issue at hand is: What is a civilization, and what is a civilizationary ethos? And how can these forms of definitions aid our undertaking?
I know from personal experience that to launch and grow a social enterprise – even one as modest as my own micro-business school, Aidha – is no small feat. But to build an organization like the eyecare hospital Aravind Eye, or BRAC, which empowers the poor, or Doi Tung, which has become Thailand’s social “incubator”, fostering new businesses … that’s big. That is to fundamentally change the world.
Graham Turner and Cathy Alexander: Four decades after the book was published, Limit to Growth’s forecasts have been vindicated by new Australian research. Expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon
In today’s world, we have a huge amount of debt outstanding. Academic researchers Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have become famous for their book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly and their earlier paper This Time is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises. Their point, of course, is that the same thing happens over and over again. We can learn from past crises to solve our current problems.
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post. 'Does Culture ..... Monetary policy options for mitigating the impact of the global financial crisis on emerging market economies.
For most of human history, creativity was held to be a privilege of supreme beings, initially, the gods who shaped the heavens and the earth, and then it was human beings who were the creators and not the helpless, dependent subjects of the wrath of the gods. We switched our views as we began to understand how the world worked. Whether this will help the human race or cause its downfall is debatable. But it would help if we realized the responsibility that comes with the new role.
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