The system of interaction of humans by which the production and exchange of goods and services are organized, leading to particular forms of distribution and possession of income and wealth.
The perceived need to promote a growth economy is one of the deepest held meta-beliefs underpinning industrial civilization. Capital formation and accumulation is the highest goal of the economy, and debt is the vehicle. But whose debt? Well, just about everyone’s. The vast majority of citizens must take on debt to own a car, a … More Seeking the Good Life: Growth is Not Development
[Image Credit R. Christie. A google search yielded no graphic image that reflected more or less inequality in a society, so I drew one. Notice where the widest parts are. More inequality exists where the bottom of the figure is wide (the very poor) and the top (mega-billionaires) is narrow. Less inequality is shown by … More Inequality is a Verb: It is a Process, Not Just a Condition
[Photo credit: Al Jazeera] I’m sorry, but billionaires have no excuse for promoting ignorance as knowledge. They cover their tracks well, but have all the access in the world to find the truth of anything. But that is not what their pontifications and prognostications are all about. As always, they are about their obsessive compulsive … More Billionaires Who Carefully Know Nothing and Care Less
Photo credit: NASA, via Unsplash Earthrise viewed from our moon gave many a broader perspective on the living Earth. There are so many well written and seriously researched analyses of where we are today and where we need to go, that there is simply no way to read them all. Most debates within that literature … More The Missing Debate: Modernist Illusions and the Urgency of Now
Of course, in the United States and in other industrialized nations many people wish they were billionaires. That is what the culture of consumerism has taught them. Even the billionaires who turn out to be scoundrels at best, are idolized for their wealth however ill-gotten. The “greed is good” value system of ‘Gordon Gecko’ (played … More Energy Equity Requires No Billionaires
Image credit: NBC News. This post was first published on my new Substack platform, Illusions Transformed. The idea that economic growth is the road to progress is so ingrained in the minds of we ‘moderns’ that the growing disconnect between capital accumulation and human wellbeing is hardly noticed. Yes, we know about poverty, but the … More The Great Battle: Economic Growth vs. Human Wellbeing
I read a some articles and listened to a couple of podcasts over the last week or so, all of which, taken together, were quite sobering especially in the context of the great changes we increasingly see these days. That led me to the following thoughts on the difficulties so many have in accepting the … More Financially Deaf, Ecologically Dumb, and Energy Blind
If you look at the world from an independent perspective, some things are obvious, others not so much. The Industrial Age has generated vast quantities of raw data and information (data structured to make sense). Ordinarily we are not aware of much of what our brains are doing, and that is probably a good thing … More The Shapeshifting Dominator and Us
My thoughts here were stimulated by a ‘Letter from the Director’ by Beth Sawin, Director of the Multisolving Institute, which I read last month. In that letter, she rightfully struggled over the ‘bad news’ that six of the nine key planetary boundaries between Earth System health and systemic danger had by then been breached. That, … More To Do or To UN-do: Is That the Question?
Such simple words, Freedom and Necessity. What do they mean? Their meanings seem obvious, right? Well, not quite. Freedom to what? Freedom from what? What is necessary, really? Are there conditions or limitations? Read the fine print, there are always conditions. Freedom We could go back to the various origins of the idea of freedom, … More On Freedom and Necessity: A Reality Check
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 