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Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible ‘expert’ advice for their retirement. Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).
hi team
A new round of little tax cuts came into force today. If you feel so moved, it would be great if you’d do something interesting with the extra cash and write about it on giveitup.org.nz.
thanks
Money is toxic. It’s obvious. Jesus, Gandhi and the GFC. Your new job is to try and get by with less and less of it. Grow more, swap more, walk more, make more, borrow more, give more. Try and convince your kids to support you in your retirement (what other choice do you have?). Wes Jackson says that high energy destroys information. Money keeps you from loving your neighbours and from receiving their love. Your salary is your exposure. Give it up!
Global Recession; An opportunity to create a more sustainable and desirable future
13 March 2009
Robert Costanza
Jeanette Fitzsimons:
[lots of claps]
300 respondees on a Friday night – pretty good.
[Very warm feeling]
Bob Costanza:
My and Jeanette’s ideas are very close. The idea of using the current crisis to move green is getting some mainstream currency. Don’t want to get back on the same track we were on. Opportunity to rethink entire agenda. Anthropocene now, not Holocene. Human activities changing major global cycles. Full world. When our economic ideas were being formed, natural capital was abundant, built capital was scarce. ‘The folly of growth’ NewScientist. Oil peak. Net energy production even worse curve than gross. Oil reserves concentrated in unstable parts of the world. Climate disruption – rather than ‘climate change’, or ‘global warming’. (more…)
Paul Graham: “The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid-seventies. … When Microsoft and Apple were founded.”
Dear Mr. President, you are presiding over an epochal contraction, not a pause in the growth epic. Your assignment is to manage that contraction in a way that does not lead to world war, civil disorder or both.