Book of the Day: Foundations of a Love Economy

Book. Dare to Care. A new foundation for economics and finance. Louis and Sandra Bohtlingk.

The video introduction by the author of the book is followed by an excerpt from the foreword, which contains an appreciation of the book’s approach by Hazel Hederson.

1. Watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOr0SLsh1F8

Read the foreword by Hazel Henderson:

“My first encounter with Louis Bohtlingk was in late 2010 in an hour-long phone conversation. We explored each others’ mission and goals for transforming finance, money-creation and our shared belief that the way economies are structured function to distort human behaviour and inhibit our natural impulses toward trust, bonding, sharing and cooperation. At that time, Louis had not encountered my life’s work of researching and developing the concept of the Love Economy and creating new metrics beyond economics to measure the unpaid sectors and overall quality of life. As I explained my passion, based on what I had learned from my mother, Louis and I shared an epiphany. Louis invited me to co-author a book with him, as we compared our life experiences and what he and his wife Sandra have discovered during their workshops on “Meeting the Mystery of Money.” I saw the immense value of their many years of empirical research on how dysfunctional economic structures and theories can stunt human development, upset relationships, cause unnecessary conflicts, warp lives and foreclose on possibilities for our children in creating more loving, harmonious societies.

Louis and Sandra’s work had been recommended to me by my two dear, long time friends John Steiner and Steve Schueth and this convinced me to help Louis with this book. I urged Louis to be the author of this book, and I acceded to his plan to visit with me for the month of November 2010 for daily consultations in drafting his book. In this way, we sought to blend our experience with what was wrong with economics, the current dysfunctional, social structures and beliefs based on these false theories; to elucidate the overlooked “Love Economies” existing unnoticed by economic statistics; and lay out the rich menu of deeper, more cohesive ways of being and behavior within our human behavioral repertoire. I have always known that each human being is a wondrous package of potential, shaped by evolution, nature and nurture – for good: the glass being at least half full. As Louis and I sat in my living room each day, we explored the many social forces influencing human behavior. I had also agreed to write this Foreword, and I enjoyed introducing Louis to my own research and to key books in my 5,000 volume library at Ethical Markets Media. This typical global internet company, ranked a 6 on Google with over 30,000 links, is based in the garage of the 100 year old house I share with my spouse of 20 years, computer pioneer Alan F. Kay.

One of my dearest friends and mentors, E. F. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful, who wrote the foreword to my first book, Creating Alternative Futures, subtitled “The End of Economics,” always told me that being a successful change agent meant choosing not to take credit or fame but to “fly under the radar.” I followed his advice and realized that to challenge the vanities, absurdities and power of the economics profession I would not need to grow an organization but instead become a strand of cultural DNA, a living, stable molecule of information that does not grow – but replicates itself. For years, my personal business card read “intellectual boutique for re-designing cultural DNA.” I saw economics as a piece of malfunctioning source code, deep in the hard drives of our institutions and colonizing the minds of people – truly a dysfunctional strand of cultural DNA, replicating misinformation in our body politic that needed teasing out and correcting. This effort brought me a sustainable income and livelihood over the past 40 years, writing and thinking, and as a lecturer for many organizations who heard my high-fidelity birdcall.

Since I published my first of several articles in the Harvard Business Review in 1968, I have circled our beautiful planet speaking to groups in over 50 countries. All wanted to know what was wrong with economics and how I had moved toward systems thinking and multi-disciplinary analyses of our dysfunctional, conflict-ridden societies at war with nature. I joined with groups of renegade scientists and futurists and served as a science policy wonk on advisory councils at the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment, the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Engineering, as well as with the Calvert group of socially responsible mutual funds in Washington, DC. All these various organizations were trying to see beyond conventional economics, long before its disastrous effects on all our lives in the financial meltdowns in Latin America and Asia. The Wall Street collapse of 2007-2008 is still causing pain, hunger and misery to millions of innocent victims around the world. Without deep reforms, we all are risking another collapse.

Louis and I talked continuously about all these issues of confusing money with real wealth (healthy, knowledgeable humans and the vast ecological assets of Nature) and how this had led to error-prone money-creation, the politics of economics and credit-allocation and their ultimate source in human ego-drives for power and control. For many years, I had discussed these same issues in patriarchal societies with my long-time friends Riane Eisler and her spouse David Loye. David’s many books influenced me as a futurist and his later partnership with Riane has led to their collective and individual work through their Center for Partnership Studies. Louis and Sandra had also observed corrosive effects of patriarchal structures within the family, evident in their workshops.

Thus, I have special joy in writing this Foreword, since it brings together so many strands in my life, as well as those of Louis and Sandra and those they touch. I am particularly thrilled that my Love Economy work can reach further, as well as the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators. We no longer need economists or any single discipline to measure national progress. We can use the multi-disciplinary systems “dashboard” approach Calvert and I pioneered, allowing a single website to display 12 indicators tracking national trends, including those not properly captured by GDP and money measures: health, education, environment, human rights, energy efficiency, re-creation and even infrastructure, which is also ignored in GDP.

That is why Ethical Markets Media has funded surveys on Beyond GDP with global polling firm, Globescan, which confirm since the 2007 conference I co-organized in the European Parliament (www.beyond-gdp.eu) that ordinary people in 12 countries widely understand the need for including all these indicators of quality of life in GDP. Correcting GDP by including all the forms of wealth beyond money: well-educated populations, efficient infrastructure and productive environments could show that so-called “insolvent” countries in the euro-zone are actually more prosperous and healthier than the financial markets and their bond vigilantes understand from their focus on GDP, as I wrote in “GDP: Grossly Distorted Picture” (CSRWire January 23, 2011).

These and other sins of omission and faulty theories instead lead market players to buy credit default swaps, betting that these European countries will default – hoping for a killing. Similar economic models caused the financial collapse and now fuel current speculation in oil, food and other commodities, causing hunger, hardship and political uprisings. The “austerity” and budget cuts in many countries, including the USA, are part of the latest form of class warfare between Wall Street and Main Street. Main Street is losing as economic fundamentalists force cuts on teachers, fire-fighters and police; strip their rights to union collective bargaining and jeopardize their pensions. I deeply hope Dare to Care becomes a huge best-seller and can help to finally end the ideologies of economics and even its reformist hybrids: ecological economics, social economics, behavioral economics (all stolen from other disciplines and more scientific research) as I described in The Politics of the Solar Age in 1981. Economics has colonized public and private decision-making for too long, as conferees agreed in the 2004 “What Next in Economics” I co-sponsored here at Ethical Markets with Sweden’s Dag Hammarskjold Foundation. I agree with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan (not the movie!), that economics is actually useless for decisions in our modern world and that business school curricula should be reformed or they should be shut down. While those statements may sound extreme, I believe they are part of a necessary challenge if we want to lead our lives based on what’s for the benefit of all of humanity (what Dare to Care is fundamentally about). I urge all readers to also read our 2010 statement on Transforming Finance, recognizing finance as a part of the global commons and to join the over 80 world experts in signing it at www.TransformingFinance.net.

Lastly, I salute my fellow researchers of the Darwin Project (www.thedarwinproject.com) led by David Loye’s books, Darwin’s Lost Theory of Love and others by him and Riane Eisler, which show how Charles Darwin’s work was hijacked by Victorian elites in Britain to justify their social privilege as “the survival of the fittest.” This poisoned phrase, as admitted by The Economist in 2005, was coined not by Charles Darwin but by Herbert Spencer, its editor, and had led to the narrow focus of the economics profession on competition, as I recounted in my Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2007). The Economist went on to admit that economics has ignored the other half of human behavior and societies: cooperation.

This is what my work, including my Love Economy research and Louis’ Dare to Care seek to bring to the light of day.”

1 Comment Book of the Day: Foundations of a Love Economy

  1. AvatarSandwichman

    “One of my dearest friends and mentors, E. F. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful, who wrote the foreword to my first book, Creating Alternative Futures, subtitled “The End of Economics,” always told me that being a successful change agent meant choosing not to take credit or fame but to ‘fly under the radar.'”

    Is this a foreword to a book or a rehearsal script for a job interview?

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