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from Lars Syll In the postwar period, it has become increasingly clear that economic growth has not only brought greater prosperity. The other side of growth, in the form of pollution, contamination, wastage of resources, and climate change, has emerged as perhaps the greatest challenge of our time. Against the mainstream theory’s view on the economy as a balanced and harmonious system, where growth and the environment go hand in hand, ecological economists object that it can rather be...

from James McMahon and Blair Fix The most important feature of private ownership is not that it enables those who own, but that it disables those who do not.— Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler A key aspect of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s theory of ‘capital as power’ is that it treats property not as a productive asset, but as a negative social relation. Property, Nitzan and Bichler argue, is an institutional act of exclusion. It is the legal right to sabotage. If this idea...

from Lars Syll If the German government were to stop Russian energy imports, the German economy would be able to adapt to the new situation. This is shown in a recent study by the research team led by economists Prof. Dr. Moritz Schularick and Prof. Dr. Moritz Kuhn … The researchers analyzed the potential economic impact of a cut-off from Russian energy imports. The result: The consequences would be substantial, but manageable. Germany would not run out of energy … According to the...

I had a couple of article come out today on the flood disaster. Amazingly, the Courier-Mail ran a piece pointing out the link to global heating and the fact that the costs of climate disasters far outweigh our earnings from coal. Also, a piece in The Conversation, explaining why terms like “1 in 1000 year flood” need to be retired in favor of probabilities, updating using Bayesian reasoning. And an interview here with Chinese agency Xinhua on implications of Putin’s war on...

In January 1980 Jimmy Carter enacted a grain export embargo against the Soviet Union because of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The embargo was ineffective as the resulting gap in Soviet imports, at the time and for quite some years to come a net grain importer, was filled by countries like Argentina. In 2022 things have changed. After 2000, Russia as well as Ukraine became major grain exporters, playing an important role in global food supply chains. In both countries...

The ten richest billionaires- all men- have seen their wealth more than double from $700bn to $1.5 trillion between March 2020 and November 2021, according to calculations by Oxfam based on Forbes billionaires. They now own six times more wealth than the poorest 40% of the global population, some 3.1 billion people. Source: ForbesTaken together, the world’s billionaires saw their wealth increase by $5.2 trillion to $13.8 trillion between March 2020 and November 2021. This is more than the...

from Peter Radford Intellectual vanities abound in a technocratic society.  It seems inevitable that as we push the boundaries of knowledge further and further into the space of potential beyond our current state that the division of labor presses down on us.  We become, each of us, more distant from any sense of self-sufficiency.  Such a state is an absurdity in our technologically infused and dependent world.  We have become enmeshed in the very supplementary support system we...