Peer2Politics

Since the crash of 2008, university students around the world have been rebelling against how they are taught economics. No other academic discipline has ever endured such criticism.

For more than two hundred years, mainstream thinking has regarded the market as the primary source of material “progress.” And indeed, to a large extent that’s been true. But yesterday is not forever. Today the market is approaching a point of diminishing returns – systemic diminishing returns. It is yielding less well-being per unit of output by practically any measure, and more problems instead: obesity instead of good health, congestion instead of mobility , time deficits instead of leisure, depression and stress instead of a sense of well-being, social fracture rather than cohesion, environmental degradation rather than improvement.

On this episode of Meet the Renegades, Ross Ashcroft welcomes Christian Felber - author, lecturer and founder of the Economy for the Common Good.  

A collection of alternative economic insight from the world's leading thinkers. A new way to think of the systems of the world. Welcome to Evonomics.

Vision Mapping is the first of two workshops that combine digital mapping, strategic foresight and prototyping within an Appreciative Inquiry (AI) framework.
The Vision Mapping process begins with a “discovery” phase were participants will uncover the resources, strengths and assets we have as a community. Once participants get clarity on their assets, they move on to the “dream” phase where they can envision the best of what can be and begin to “map the future”.
Digital maps provide an editable sandbox to conduct the discovery phase of community asset mapping and provide a canvas from which to dream in a geo-spatially rich way. Participants can use the digital map to project their visions in ways which are spatially specific to feed social conversations about the future.

However, both the Keen-Minsky debt school and the behaviourist ‘animal spirits’ school have one thing in common.  They see the flaws of capitalism in the financial sector only. In contrast, Marx posits the ultimate cause of capitalist crises in the capitalist production process, specifically in production for profit.  That does not mean the financial sector and, in particular, the size and movement of credit does not play any role in capitalist crises.  On the contrary, the growth of credit and fictitious capital (as Marx called speculative investment in stocks, bonds and other forms of money assets) picks up precisely in order to compensate for the downward pressure on profitability in the accumulation of real capital.

In their penultimate paragraph, B. and M. make a welcome call for discussion about "what kind of society we should construct around a labor-light economy" and ask "How should the abundance of such an economy be shared?"

Human beings, notes Sam Bowles, a Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, are complex, psychological beings given to all sorts of motivations well beyond naked self-interest. That might be news to the economics profession, which posits a one-dimensional image of 'homo economicus', a rational, utility-maximizing agent, largely driven by the so-called "invisible hand" of the marketplace. Incorporating the disciplines of a multiplicity of social sciences, Bowles produces compelling evidence that self-interested financial incentives can in fact produce behavior that is inefficient and violates a society's morality.

We help our community businesses, because they deserve the same great customer service and low prices that big corporate businesses get. And we've grown our company by earning the trust of each and...