For Joseph Stiglitz (reinforcing yesterday's post on the problems of economists dealing with 'econoworld' not the real world);
Most economists are suffering from “cognitive dissonance: you spend your life proving markets are efficient & then you spend the rest of life dealing with the obvious inefficiencies of the market economy'!
It'd be better if economics started with the real world not the world in theory.
To be fair, many have they just are barely ignored/downplayed
@ChrisMayLA6 well if the currently 'accepted' economic models have failure/dissonance built in then perhaps we should try a radically different model that at least aims to head in the right direction, with 'thriving' & 'sustainability'* as its core goals, not 'growth'!
“Humanity’s 21st century challenge is to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet. The Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries is a playfully serious approach to framing that challenge, and it acts as a compass for human progress this century.”
Kate Raworth, “renegade economist focused on making economics fit for 21st century realities.”
"In the degrowth literature, a caricature of the typical economist is presented as believing in unlimited economic growth, and that growth should be pursued regardless of its environmental impact. This is a straw man. It would be a naïve economist who did not recognise that constraints exist. And economists usually limit their projections to a few decades to come, rather than to the infinite future, in which they supposedly believe in unlimited exponential economic growth. Certainly, there are theoretical economic growth models which portray the possibility of exponential growth into the infinite future, but economists have had enough common sense not to assume stylised theoretical models are the be-all-and-end-all when it comes to public policy."
Then why, Mr. Tunny, is it so hard to find an economist who can tell us when the economy should stop growing?
The core of #degrowth goes beyond trying to minimize resource use but, rather, challenges the idea that growth is, in fact, good.
Kate Raworth ( #DoughnutEconomics ) describes current economies as 'needing to grow regardless of if they make us thrive' because we are "addicted to growth" in many ways.
Challenging the assumption that growth is good (particularly when defined as rising GDP) is what causes many mainstream economists to baulk.
You are much closer to sleeping on the streets than sleeping in the mansion of a billionaire. And the envious desire to sleep in the mansion of the billionaire is what is destroying our environment. We have allowed the greedy and cruel to dominate and their insatiable greed and cruelty will inevitably lead to environmental destruction. https://gerrymcgovern.com/fairness-and-kindness-are-not-weaknesses/
@gerrymcgovern And Kate Raworth's #DoughnutEconomics provides an excellent framework for thinking about how we to move toward that goal. I strongly recommend it.
When it comes to the world of business, #DoughnutEconomics has a laser-like focus on the deep design of business itself. Find out why in this powerful and personal @TEDx talk by my brilliant colleague @ErinchSahan@DoughnutEcon
Spain has long had one of the highest levels of unemployment in the European Union. To all intents and purposes, a modern and prosperous country, a mature democracy, with universal health coverage and regarded enviously by many of its neighbors for its quality of life, Spain is also a popular tourism destination, attracting visitors from all over the world.
How does Spain manage to keep its very high unemployment figures from generating streeet demonstrations and social conflict? Has it discovered something that other countries do not know?
One reason there is no rioting on the streets is that half of the adult population depends on some kind of government assistance, a state pension, or publicly funded employment (link in Spanish).
Cash is freedom. That has been Denver Basic Income Project founder Mark Donovan’s refrain as he led a program that provided more than 800 homeless people in the Denver area with no-strings-attached cash payments every month for the last year.
For recipients Dia Broncucia, 53, and Justin Searls, 45, those payments have been a manifestation of a different concept: hope.
The money got them off the street, played a critical role in helping Broncucia recover from Stage 3 breast cancer and was a catalyst as the couple charts a new course for their lives after getting sober following years of drug use.
Capitalism and neoliberalism have been tried for long enough; for the great majority of us, they have failed to provide the comforts promised.
It's time we moved to other economic systems where, as George Monbiot writes at the end of his essay, money works for us rather than us working for money.
Modern Monetary Theory and its variations might have the answers; but unless we try them in the real world, we won't know.
Ultimately, the effects of any income guarantee hinge on the details. How much does it pay? Who gets it? How’s it financed? How does it relate to the rest of the welfare state? But most of the real proposals that have made their way through the policy world share a noteworthy trait: When the dust settles, they just wouldn’t be that radical, in either direction.
Generally, most people at the bottom of the income ladder would be better off, those in the middle would break even as they pay about as much in higher taxes as they’d receive from the basic income, and those at the top would be a little worse off. Society would neither ascend into utopian communism nor collapse into bleak idleness. There would just be less poverty and higher taxes.
I see this as good news. If basic income won’t be the silver bullet that changes — or destroys — society, it becomes something far more politically tractable: a moderately effective policy, albeit one with trade-offs, that is well worth considering.
@EU_Commission Maybe the first step would be for the president of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to stop announcing she wants #growth. Or try to explain how she thinks growth can happen while not destroying the planet we depend on. Like @jasonhickel has said, it might be possible, but it's like making our lives much harder and risk billions of lives, for the profits of a few tens or hundreds... It's pure madness.
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It can be very easy to live our lives and only occasionally glimpse the reality. (...) But when we zoom out and look at the sum total of our impacts, the story is clear. Put bluntly, we are eating away at our own life support systems. And this has happened extraordinarily recently. If we keep going, we risk triggering a dramatic and potentially irreversible change in living conditions.
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“I imagine the growth-based economy beet-faced, with clenched, pounding fists, demanding more, faster, and now. A bottomless pit for a stomach, it eats with an insatiable appetite anything and everything within reach. This machine has grown so massive and powerful, I’m uncertain if it belongs to us, or if we belong to it.” – Nikayla Jefferson
"... people who cannot meet their most basic needs; that is where you want to see the growth of their incomes, and the growth of public services that serve them, right? ... That's where - if anywhere in the world - we want to see 'economic growth' ... and it's got to be distributive, so it's actually shared, and it's got to be regenerative, so it doesn't destroy the planet as it happens."
I love the ideas of both #doughnut#economics and #degrowth, but I have not yet come to see how either will be useful globally, unless every single #government adopts them, and because #people are the way they are, I struggle to see how they will be possible to maintain within #democracy.
Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity should be read by all community and political leaders. Reducing poverty, empowering women, addressing gross inequality, making our food system healthy for people and the planet and transitioning to clean energy are five levers we need to pull hard to advert societal collapse #amreading#ClimateEmergency#EarthForAll#ClimateJustice
The Anthropocene is a colonial construct and very misleading. Referring to the human species as the influencer of a new geologic epoch beginning less than 100 yrs ago ignores 200,000 to 2,000,000 yrs of humans living within #PlanetaryBoundaries.
"Physical needs such as nutrition, sanitation, access to electricity and the elimination of extreme poverty could likely be met for all people without transgressing planetary boundaries. However, the universal achievement of more qualitative goals (for example, high life satisfaction) would require a level of resource use that is 2–6 times the sustainable level, based on current relationships."
"If all people are to lead a good life within planetary boundaries, then our results suggest that provisioning systems must be fundamentally restructured to enable basic needs to be met at a much lower level of resource use. These findings represent a substantial challenge to current development trajectories."