The Covid-19 crisis is deepening existing fissures and adding new threats to an already scarred and anxious world. As a localized health crisis became a global pandemic, many countries put broad swathes of their economies into a policy induced coma to halt the spread of the virus and ease the burden on overstretched health systems. As a result, the global economy will experience a recession this year on a scale not experienced since the 1930s. The damage will be both lasting and severe,...
Read More »From a troubled horizon to a better world?
The Covid-19 crisis is deepening existing fissures and adding new threats to an already scarred and anxious world. As a localized health crisis became a global pandemic, many countries put broad swathes of their economies into a policy induced coma to halt the spread of the virus and ease the burden on overstretched health systems. As a result, the global economy will experience a recession this year on a scale not experienced since the 1930s. The damage will be both lasting and severe,...
Read More »From a troubled horizon to a better world?
The Covid-19 crisis is deepening existing fissures and adding new threats to an already scarred and anxious world. As a localized health crisis became a global pandemic, many countries put broad swathes of their economies into a policy induced coma to halt the spread of the virus and ease the burden on overstretched health systems. As a result, the global economy will experience a recession this year on a scale not experienced since the 1930s. The damage will be both lasting and severe,...
Read More »Looking ahead after COVID: what role for the state?
As part of this series celebrating PRIME’s tenth anniversary, we are looking forward to the next ten years. This contribution by Laurie Macfarlane looks at the future role of the state. ——- John Maynard Keynes famously wrote: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” For the past 40 years, society has been the slave of a not-yet-defunct set of economic ideas. These ideas have shaped the way...
Read More »Why we’re backing Universal Basic Services (UBS)
Photo from Paris demo October 2017 (by Jeanne Menjoulet , via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Make_our_public_services_great_again_(23768004778).jpg PRIME is supporting a new programme to develop and communicate universal basic services (UBS) as a route to wellbeing for all, greater equality, full and decently-paid employment,...
Read More »Why we’re backing Universal Basic Services (UBS)
PRIME is supporting a new programme to develop and communicate universal basic services (UBS) as a route to wellbeing for all, greater equality, full and decently-paid employment, and ecologically sustainable economic activity. UBS is a framework for policy and practice that fosters collective responsibility, exercised through public institutions, to meet needs we all share. It recognises that income has two dimensions: one is money and the other is ‘social income’, derived from in-kind...
Read More »Deniality
Le dénialité est trop cher. Denial isn’t specific to Americans, though we do seem to be better at it than most. We are now at least 30 years into severe climate change, yet 30-40% of Americans are in denial; assumedly, still looking for, waiting for, a return to normal. Not only are we not going back to the way it was 30 years ago; under the best of scenarios, no one of the next 5 generations will see the weather and climate of 1990 again. Under less than...
Read More »Meanwhile, climate change is heating up nights faster than days
Climate change is heating up nights faster than days in many parts of the world, findings that could have “profound consequences” for wildlife and their capacity to adapt to the climate emergency, researchers say. The climate crisis is heating up nights faster than days in many parts of the world, according to the first worldwide assessment of how global heating is differently affecting days and nights. The findings have “profound consequences” for...
Read More »On the Green New Deal – for The Chartist
Nigel Doggett and Mike Davis of The Chartist magazine spoke to Ann Pettifor about why a Green New Deal is central to our recovery Published 20 September, 2020. How do you see the GND playing out against the Covid crisis? There are two roads to travel. One is the progressive one in which our leaders wake up to the scale of the climate threat and decide they are going to prepare. There are signs of that happening: little things like the French deciding to abolish burners in Paris streets. But...
Read More »The Combination of Things
What about all the forest fires in the West? The most proximate cause of these fires is high temperatures along with associated lightning and high winds; both of which, directly or indirectly, can easily ignite a fire in tinder dry forests. Beyond beyond being dry, many western forest are far from being healthy. There are large areas in the southern Sierra Nevada Range where the forest are dead and gone; they were the first to go. There is less damage to...
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