{"id":16859,"date":"2016-01-24T18:05:19","date_gmt":"2016-01-24T23:05:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16859"},"modified":"2016-01-24T18:05:19","modified_gmt":"2016-01-24T23:05:19","slug":"moral-economy-a-different-way-of-thinking-about-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16859","title":{"rendered":"Moral economy: a different way of thinking about the future"},"content":{"rendered":"

Moral economy: a different way of thinking about the future\u00a0<\/a><\/h3>\n
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The current economic system has \u2018wealth extraction\u2019 masquerading as \u2018wealth creation\u2019 to the long-term detriment of everybody, even the super rich. New thinking is needed.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\"\"<\/a>Coal shovels at work in Randolph County, Illinois c. 1970. Katy McClelland\/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)<\/span><\/span><\/span>You know something is grotesquely wrong when the 80 richest people in the world have as much wealth as the poorer half of the world\u2019s\u00a0population<\/a>, when the combined wealth of the\u00a01000<\/a>\u00a0richest people in the UK is nearly five times the size of the annual\u00a0NHS budget<\/a>, and when unending growth is assumed to be possible in a finite, rapidly overheating planet. But conventional approaches to economic matters can\u2019t explain what is wrong.<\/p>\n

To understand these problems we need a radically different approach that goes back to basics. Most basic of all is this: the point of economic activity is simply to enable us to live well. Economies are systems of provisioning\u2014ways of providing us with the wherewithal to live a decent life\u2014and of course some ways of doing this are much better than others. Provisioning involves two kinds of relations:<\/p>\n

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    1. Relations between people, whether as buyers and sellers, employers and employees, lenders and borrowers, landlords and tenants, citizens and governments, or as providers and beneficiaries of unpaid work.<\/li>\n
    2. Our relations to the environment, as all material wealth ultimately depends on this. Looking after the environment should make economic sense, degrading it does not.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/ol>\n

      No one ever got rich or poor outside these two sets of relations. \u2018Moral economy\u2019\u2014unlike mainstream economics\u2014focuses on these and examines whether they are fair or unfair, functional for provisioning or not, and sustainable or unsustainable. Particularly at this time of economic and environmental crisis, it can provide us with signposts to a different way of doing things.<\/p>\n

      …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Moral economy: a different way of thinking about the future\u00a0 The current economic system has \u2018wealth extraction\u2019 masquerading as \u2018wealth creation\u2019 to the long-term detriment of everybody, even the super rich. New thinking is needed. Coal shovels at work in Randolph County, Illinois c. 1970. Katy McClelland\/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)You know something is grotesquely wrong […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[11922,271,391,2328,11924,10696,1503,769,11923],"class_list":["post-16859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-andrew-sayer","tag-environment-2","tag-growth","tag-infinite-growth","tag-moral-economy","tag-open-democracy","tag-relationships","tag-sustainability","tag-wealth-extraction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16859"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16860,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16859\/revisions\/16860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}