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Economic Ideas: Plato, Aristotle, and the Ancient Greeks, Part 1
ECONOMIC IDEAS: PLATO, ARISTOTLE, AND THE ANCIENT GREEKS, PART 1 The ancient Greeks left a wealth of knowledge through their surviving writings on a wide variety of themes, including science, logic, philosophy, literature, and the arts. In addition, the city-state of Athens is considered the birthplace of intellectual freedom and democracy – lasting legacies that […]
How Will You Cope With A Lower Standard of Living?
How Will You Cope With A Lower Standard of Living? The forces are mounting that will eventually overwhelm most Americans and send their standard of living to unknown depths. Americans that have only known the post WWII prosperity are ill equipped and educated to deal with depression level living. Easy credit and instant gratification have created […]
Why Is Market Fundamentalism So Tenacious?
Why Is Market Fundamentalism So Tenacious? One of the great economists of the twentieth century had the misfortune of publishing his magnum opus, The Great Transformation, in 1944, months before the inauguration of a new era of postwar economic growth and consumer culture. Few people in the 1940s or 1950s wanted to hear piercing criticisms of […]
What you “Owe to Society”
What you “Owe to Society” The “Club Dues” Theory of Taxation Sadly this is an ancient thesis that’s being revived now in a country that was founded on denying it. The idea is well expressed in a recent book by Professor William E. Hudson, titled, The Libertarian Illusion: Ideology, Public Policy, and the Assault on the […]
The Individual and His Future
The Individual and His Future “It’s instructive to read what authors wrote about core values a hundred or two hundred years ago, because then you can appreciate what has happened to the culture of a nation. You can grasp the enormous influence of planned propaganda, which changes minds, builds new consensus, and exiles certain disruptive […]
The Era of Breakdown
The Era of Breakdown The fourth of the stages in the sequence of collapse we’ve been discussing is the era of breakdown. (For those who haven’t been keeping track, the first three phases are the eras of pretense, impact, and response; the final phase, which we’ll be discussing next week, is the era of dissolution.) […]
Our Social Depression
Our Social Depression This erosion of opportunities to complete life’s stages and core dramas is rarely recognized, much less addressed. The consequences of economic stagnation are not limited to finance: stagnation is causing a social depression. We can best understand this social depression by examining how the natural stages of human life are being disrupted. Each stage has […]
A Resilient Society
A Resilient Society The final video in a four-part video series. Released in conjunction with Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels. Resilience is a word that’s gaining a lot of currency in recent years, as more and more people realize there are some shocks headed our way. But what would a more resilient society look like? This […]
Looking for Some Answers
Looking for Some Answers A few months back John Michael Greer, over at the Archdruid Report, wrote an essay about how we might begin to tackle the huge mental and emotional burden of dealing with collapse. It was noted that, for the most part, the majority of people simply don’t want to think about or discuss the […]
Achieving Sustainable Societies: Lessons from Modelling the Ancient Maya | Solutions
Achieving Sustainable Societies: Lessons from Modelling the Ancient Maya | Solutions. In BriefThe ancient Maya provide an example of a complex social-ecological system which developed impressively before facing catastrophic reorganization. In order for our contemporary globally-connected society to avoid a similar fate, we aim to learn how the ancient Maya system functioned, and whether it […]
