Book: Building a Whole Earth Economy through Right Relationship
Via Paul Fernhout:
Book: Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy. by Peter G Brown. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009.
“In Right Relationship, Peter G. Brown and Geoffrey Garver use the core Quaker principle of “right relationship”–respecting the integrity, resilience, and beauty of human and natural communities–as the foundation for a new economic model. Right Relationship poses five basic questions: What is an economy for? How does it work? How big is too big? What’s fair? And how can it best be governed? Brown and Garver expose the antiquated, shortsighted, and downright dangerous assumptions that underlie our current answers to these questions, as well as the shortcomings of many reform efforts. They propose new answers that combine an acute awareness of ecological limits with a fundamental focus on fairness and a concern with the spiritual, as well as material, well-being of the human race. And they outline what each of us can do to enable life’s commonwealth.”
Paul also recommends the associated video from Fora TV:
“Chapters 09 through 13 of that video are a complete indictment of mainstream macroeconomics and why it is killing the planet, because you get what you measure, and you lose what you don’t measure. So, we measure accumulation of digital ration units (dollars) a lot as GDP, but we hardly measure biodiversity or human rights issues or human happiness as “Genuine Progress Indicator”. Peter Brown talks about the US as violating human rights around the world as a consequence of consumption (somewhat like The Story of Stuff).”