The invisible hand of the free market governs everything and the hardworking get prosperous while the lazy suffer poverty.

Sounds pretty familiar and very rational, doesn’t it…

But check it out again with the religious equivalents of the core terms replaced in:

God of the creation governs everything and the faithful get in heaven while the heathen suffer hell.

As you can easily notice, ‘Invisible Hand’ is a replacement for ‘God’, ‘free market’ is a replacement for ‘the creation’, ‘the hardworking’ is a replacement for ‘the faithful’ and ‘the lazy’ is a replacement for ‘the heathen’.

That’s because Capitalism is a Christianity replacement.

So much that it even replicates the Church organization of Medieval Christianity:

The economists (clergy) continually advocate (preach) free market economics (the faith) and interpret the economy (holy book) on behalf of the society (the believers). The critical economists (heretic priests) are outcast by the establishment, not given airtime, ridiculed or censored.

Whatever happens in the economy is interpreted and ‘somehow’ explained by the economists (clergy), and in those explanations, anything good that happens is due to free market economics (the faith), and anything bad that happens is due to straying away from free market economics (having any other faith).

According to the sermon, all that the hardworking (faithful) need to do is to work hard (have faith) and keep staying the course. Because ‘the invisible hand’ will fix all problems, crises, issues without them needing to do anything in particular. All they need to do is to have faith, and putting their trust in the religion by trusting the clergy of the church. Whose only solution to every single problem is more free market (more faith), and if a solution does not work at all, its because the society was not faithful to the free market enough.

Most interestingly, this setup also mirrors the development of Christianity and its Church from their inception to late modernity:

While the economist community that is comprised of economists sanctioned by the religion acts as the clergy of the religion, modern media which took the place of individual church buildings as a medium of communication acts as their medium to preach the religion to the society. This setup is amended by the education institutions and scientific institutions which act as the appendages to the Church, where children are educated/indoctrinated to the religion and its tenets from an early age by instilling them with ideas of competition, consumerism, materialism based success and in general a complete worldview that is created based on the religion’s tenets. The higher education and scientific institutions continue the education/indoctrination, creating the subsequent generations of clergy to preach the religion and run the institutions.

Incredibly, this arrangement also replicates the relationship of the medieval church and the nobility

Medieval church in middle ages acted as the opinion-shaper which molded the society’s opinion and beliefs to comply with then-existing feudal/aristocratic system.

The church advocated hard work and poverty, material conservatism to its faithful. Whereas clergy, especially higher members of the church lived much more comfortable and wealthy lives compared to average population, to the extent that highest members of the church being de facto princes in their own right.

The church also acted as the agent which rationalized the power of the minority rich, who were the feudal aristocratic nobility: While the faithful needed to suffer poverty and work hard, the nobility could enjoy material wealth, luxury and live extravagant lives because it was their god given right to rule.

So the medieval church basically acted as the propaganda/conditioning organ of the establishment by conditioning the public to accept the existing arrangement and rationalize the power of minority elite over them. The people worked hard to create economic value while the minority rich elite collected most of that economic production as theirs without doing any comparable work, because they were the property-owners of the region. Their ownership of that property was rationalized as a god given, holistic right.

Which is exactly the case with modern church of holistic economics: The economic church continually rationalizes the existing system and excuses/explains the power of a minority extreme rich segment who controls the system despite the suffering of a large majority to create the wealth that concentrates in the hands of a very tiny minority. Just because they have been able to concentrate ownership of entire economy in their hands.

Which results in dysfunctional, broken societies.

The above infographic is not even up to date with the latest state of affairs, since now one needs an income of $500,000 /year to be able to enter top %1 in US.

Americans now need at least $500,000 a year to enter the %1

The income needed to exit the bottom 99% of U.S. taxpayers hit $515,371 in 2017, according to Internal Revenue Service data released this week. That’s up 7.2% from a year earlier, even after adjusting for inflation.

Since 2011, when Occupy Wall Street protesters rallied under the slogan “We are the 99%,” the income threshold for the top 1% is up an inflation-adjusted 33%. That outpaces all other groups except for those that are even wealthier.

The role of the church of holistic economics is to justify that situation by advocating that the owners of the economy who amass ever increasing amounts of wealth solely due to their ownership/control of the economy, have that much wealth and control because of their ‘hard work’. Whereas the Church is tasked with also keeping the system going by continually advocating for the policies which created this picture of dysfunctional inequality.

The recipe from the holy book is always the same: More deregulation, more ‘free market’ (faith), more hard work for the faithful. Despite this would inevitably end up making the dysfunctional situation worse, more faith is the only thing the faithful should do.

And the church even affects the believers’ behavior towards others

The believer of the system of Capitalism does not even want to entertain any other idea or system – because if he or she does that, s/he will have broken faith, which means that s/he wont be able to attain salvation (get rich). Because if he entertains any other idea or system, he will lose faith in the religion, therefore he is going to be lost and he is going become a heathen (poor). The only way to salvation (getting rich) is hard work (having faith).

This also explains how people who are basically exploited by the system still keep ‘voting against their own interests’ as it is said – its because they believe that this temporary suffering will pass and they will get rich only if they keep faith.

It doesn’t stop there – the exact behavior of the faithful in Middle Ages against heathens and heretic ideologies is also replicated:

Socialism and similar non-Capitalist systems are heresies – a lack of faith – and giving any thought to any non-Capitalist (non-Christian) system is a lack of faith in God.

Furthermore, the poor (heathen) deserve poverty because they were not hardworking (faithful) enough, while the rich (the faithful) deserve all the riches they have because they were hardworking (faithful) enough. So the believers believe if they also work hard enough, they will be saved as well – and become rich.

Hence the brutal, medieval attitude of the believers of the Church of Capitalism towards the downtrodden or the poor in the society in places like US: Its because they are heathens, they deserve what’s coming to them. If only they were faithful, they could also do much better.

Even if the believer himself is not doing any better, that is…

The believer justifies his situation by just believing that he is doing better even if he actually isn’t doing any better – because, since he is hardworking (faithful), he has to be doing better, right? Because the belief says hardworking is rewarded.

Because recognizing the situation and admitting that despite working hard, the promised riches and comforts did not materialize would be a giant blow to the believer’s psyche, the believer just rationalizes and elevates his situation even if he is not doing well. Look, he is hardworking among the flock of the Church, and therefore he has various small amenities – like a car, an air conditioner, a rented house or a house which was bought at an opportune time point when one could easily buy a house.

By attributing these amenities which are pretty much standard in entire developed world to Capitalism, the believer not only reinforces his religion in his mind, but also thwarts off any potential heresy and the subsequent cognitive dissonance by validating the religion.

He has these things because the god of his religion gave them to him for having faith…

This is the underlying motive behind the tendency of not only the Church clergy’s, but also the ordinary believers’ tendency to attribute anything good that happens to Capitalism. Even if Capitalism had nothing to do with it. Its a self-defense mechanism to avoid cognitive dissonance.

The Crusades

Because Capitalism is the ‘true religion’, and because the elite which benefits from Capitalism wants to increase their riches, the religion must be spread.

Hence, the establishment and its church undertake great effort to spread the religion to any place that is heretic: The clergy incessantly advocate the religion to those who don’t believe in it, and whenever possible and if necessary, the establishment itself directly subdues heretics by force and commands their wealth.

This takes the form of never-ending propaganda by the Capitalist establishment to propagate the system to any country that is outside the system or strays afar from the system, like the immense funding that the private think thanks and the US state apparatus spend in funding different foreign movements and foreign political parties which are in alignment with Capitalism.

The propaganda done to these countries takes the same shape that it takes at home: Anything bad that happens in a heretic country is because of their heresy. And anything good that happens somewhere is because of their faith.

Which materializes in anything bad happening in those countries being due to Socialism or other heresies, whereas anything good happening being due to their scarce observance of Capitalism, the faith. So even if the US sanctions a country to starvation, the ensuing starvation is Socialism’s fault.

And if a country or a society does not heed the call through ‘peaceful’ means like these, then the crusades happen: The foreign country is subjected to sanctions, economic warfare, regime change operations and coups, escalated in that order. And if the foreign country is still non-compliant, the final stage is invoked – the foreign country is attacked or invaded in order to force a compliant capitalist government, aka forced conversion to belief.

Do they really believe what they say?

Akin to the people of those times, it is certain that a large swath of the the believers actually believe in their religion.

And in a similar vein, a large swath of the lower and mid to upper segments of elite (clergy and nobility), do believe what they are saying.

However, just like those times, the upper elite in the Church and nobility are definitely aware of the game that is being played, what is false and what is true, and they participate in the game and do what they do only to keep their power and wealth going at the expense of their own people. Except, a small minority of easily influenced personas among them who actually do believe in what they are told.

That explains the phenomenon of highly educated, intelligent figures in establishment saying incredible things which do not make rational sense – things which sound like what a village idiot would say. Those things appeal to the emotions and beliefs of the believers and enable and rationalize the policies and power of the very elite which repeat those incredibly unreasonable talking points.

A segment of educated mid to upper class professionals also are true believers – because despite their rational, and even in certain cases, atheist outlook which does not accept actual religion, they have taken up Capitalism as a Christianity replacement in order to have a belief which explains the world and gives them promises of a better future that is in their hands. While at the same time rationalizing and explaining the suffering and poverty that they see around them, to ease their conscious.

As seen, Capitalism is a direct replacement for Christianity. It replicates not only the core beliefs and explanations of Christianity, but also replicates the church system and the feudal aristocracy. It functions as a vehicle to keep the power of a minority elite over the society while justifying and sanctifying their position of power and wealth at the expense of rest of their countrymen.

What’s the problem?

The problem is that medieval Christianity and Church kept the society stagnant, backwards, kept its people suffering and helped a non-working or minimally working elite hoard the society’s resources. They kept those resources from being used for betterment and prosperity of society and instead used those resources for their extravaganza. A waste. Modern religion of Capitalism does the same to modern society.

It keeps majority in poverty, in a state in which they are ever harder-working but are receiving little from the economic value they generate. Then it gives that economic value to those who own the economy, who will just hoard that wealth as personal power instead of actually investing it to better the society as was promised. On top of that the same elite use their control of the economy to subvert politics through election funding and corporate media, to take over government and implement more policies that will remove limits to their power and ownership of the economy. This further worsens the economic inequality, impacting entirety of the society.

In the end you end up with large segments of people – actually the majority – suffering in poverty, overworked, disenfranchised, uneducated, not even able to feed their children, not having any hope of breaking out of their situation through education because they cant even access education, dying if they cannot pay for exorbitant privatized healthcare, losing all trust in the society and hope for the future, feeling the need to put their faith in actual religious extremism, extremist movements, ultra-nationalism and in some cases, anything that will just shake the system even if it would be destructive.

Endless numbers of youth who could receive education to become scientists or researchers who could bring great advancements to society, to cure diseases, to fix problems, instead waste their talent away working underpaid jobs without being able to pay for their education…

Hard working people receive only a small fraction of the actual economic value they generate, with the majority of the value going to non-working majority shareholders as profit, ending up people having to overwork in stressed jobs and leaning on pharmaceuticals to keep themselves going, being able to get nowhere near what their parents’ generation was able to get in terms of life standards and security of future…

Even the small to medium businesses go bankrupt because population at large doesn’t have money to buy products or services. This is amplified by the pressure which large players that control concentrated wealth put on small and medium businesses because large players can easily out-compete them, and this pressure speeds up the devolving cycle of concentration of wealth…

This causes the system to start using actual religion and to propagate religious extremism in order to keep the society passive. This stems from the need of the people seeking a relief from their misery, but it greatly speeds up due to establishment’s efforts to use it to protect the status quo, bastardizing the religions and turning them into a tool and violating the sanctity of those actual religions’ core tenets to exploit them for self gain. This ends up in an increasingly radicalizing and reactionary populace which starts to become dangerous for the modern social fabric…

So much that the eventual result even hurts those who benefit from the system, with a religious or extremist segment rising from among the population and gaining power, and subduing or prosecuting anyone who does not fall in line. Including anyone from among the incumbent rich elite – forcing these people either to give up their beliefs, their lifestyle and obey the new dominant extremist societal worldview, or suffer the consequences…

The damages which a belief-based mechanic of societal control for self-aggrandizement does are varied and innumerable. Societies throughout history either fixed the economic injustice which created these, or they collapsed in a myriad of ways.

So what can be done?

The foremost thing to do is recognizing the above mechanics and behaviors and observing them at work in the society and daily actions of the ordinary people and the elite.

This brings in the necessary awareness to deal with the problem, independent of where the person is within the social strata.

The non-elite

If you are a member of lower segments of the society, you must realize that hard work will not bring prosperity in a system that was designed to work unfairly, and even if it brings some material rewards, the rewards will be much less than the actual hard work done. It is an unjust system – its not even ‘rigged’ in that way, the system is just what it is – unjust.

Instead, you must follow a route of pushing change through all means possible, voting for pro-people politicians and parties which fight against inequality to put them in positions of power in all levels of society ranging from municipal seats to parliaments, congresses to presidency. And if possible, you must also join grassroots people’s movements for effecting that change. Because grassroots movements, just work.

Anything to address the unfair system and change it to a more egalitarian system will make everything phenomenally better. Advocate change, criticize the existing unjust and destructive system. Help others see the unjust system as it is.

Buy from cooperatives, work in a cooperative if you can. Support organizations and groups which seek to address inequality, do your business with them and solve your problems through them. Become the change which the society needs.

If you are a member of higher segments of the society, especially as a member of educated white collar professional segment who works in private enterprises, you must realize that even with better, and in some cases noticeable compensation which you may be receiving, you are still getting only a fraction of the actual economic value you generate. The situation gets much better if you actually have a share in the company you work, like the stock options that are so popular in places like Silicon Valley, but even in that case the people who work in such enterprises are estimated to be receiving only up to 10% of the economic value they generate.

Increasing inequality and the lack of purchasing power of the general public not only hurt the prospects of the company where you currently work, but also they diminish the chances of the startup which you may attempt to start in future.

At the same time increasing inequality creates a rift in between you and your society, alienates them from you and pushes you into becoming a minority within the society you live. Even if different urban or suburban regions separate you from the disenfranchised majority, eventually the cows would come home when the society falls into extremism and seeks targets to persecute.

Therefore both for your own benefit and for the benefit of the society, you must fight against inequality by not falling to the trap of the religion that justifies this outrageous state of affairs.

Similar to other segments: Vote for politicians and parties that fight inequality. Take action and volunteer for groups that seek to bring change. Prefer to work in organizations that have less inequality or in organizations which seek to bring a more egalitarian distribution of generated economic value. In your workplace, use your technical knowledge and if possible and legal, the means of the organization you work for, in order to push for a more just economic system. Try to address and diminish the power of religious advocacy of the establishment in conditioning the masses.

Work in cooperatives, or in enterprises which have more egalitarian structures. Any company which gives its employees an acceptable share in the ownership of the company and a say in how it is run, is much better. Any company which does even at least a bit of that is a better choice compared to private organizations that are run as private tyrannies.

You as an educated professional, have a lot of impact when you attempt to change the society. Use it to full extent. Without your compliant cooperation, the existing system cannot continue, and with your participation in movements of change, a more egalitarian and futuristic system can rise.

THE ELITE

If you are a member of the current elite, though you are currently the beneficiary of the current system, you must realize that the system is self destructive, and no amount of self-reinforcing pseudo-religious philosophy can change the system’s internal mechanics.

As you can understand by researching the histories of societies which have fallen into extremism after the collapse of societal contract due to rampant inequality and disenfranchisement of the majority, the existing established elite rarely escapes the resulting fallout.

In the wave of rising extremism, the elite must either follow suit and subscribe to the extremist beliefs and practices, or suffer prosecution, even death. This happens the same even if you are an actual subscriber of such beliefs – as the society becomes more extremist, you are expected to follow suit, else you are perceived as non-compliant and eventually end up being targeted and getting persecuted.

There is little chance that your worldview and lifestyle will fit any potential extremist movement which may rise in your society. What’s worse, even if your worldview and lifestyle fit the philosophy of the rising extremist movement at the start, in the long run you would find out that you somehow ended up being viewed as a ‘moderate’ who is not compliant with the creed. You first get reviled by your non-compliance, then you get persecuted if you don’t comply.

Your choices would be either complying by dropping your current beliefs and lifestyle and obeying whatever the mainstream of the increasingly extremist society comes up with, or leaving everything behind and escaping abroad. That is, if you can find any reasonably developed society which escapes the ever-increasing inequality and subsequent social collapse which Capitalism is effecting on all developed countries…

The better choice is taking just a few steps back. Taking just a few steps back by allowing a percentage of the immense wealth that is concentrated in the hands of your minority to be channeled to address the rampant inequality through social programs, social services, investments, through putting concentrated wealth back into the economy by distributing it to majority of people in quantity, through distributing it to people who will spend that money to generate actual economic activity which will end up benefiting the businesses and organizations which you hold a stake in…

You don’t lose anything in the process either – you very well know that after a certain point, that kind of wealth cannot be used, cannot be spent for personal purposes in any meaningful manner, and it can only exist in the form of control of economic organizations through ownership of stocks and investments.

It’s a power scheme. It exists as the relative power which you have compared to other players in the form of wealth. And the relative power of the wealth you have compared to all other players would not tangibly change if every player loses a given percentage of their wealth. Even a large scale distribution of a fraction of that wealth would not upset the cards which the players among your segment hold.

So, choose the better option by taking a few steps back by merely not objecting to the political and social movements which seek to address this unworkable state of affairs, and even by directly supporting them to fix this chasm in the society together.

Conclusion

Leaving the self-reinforcing religious belief that enables and propagates the societal breakdown is in the interest of everyone in the society. There is no logic in insisting in continuing a self-destructive system which is destroying itself in front of your eyes in a predictable manner due to its internal mechanics.

No amount of justification, self-delusion or religious mythology, no amount of belief in the system will change the system’s internal mechanics. Its internal mechanics will continue dragging the system towards its eventual self-destruct, irreverent of the belief which you may put in the system. There are even worse potentials than societal collapse due to our civilization having very powerful weapons of mass destruction at this point in history. Extremism and different forms of societal collapse carry the potential of igniting conflicts which may destroy parts of the world or even human civilization.

Instead of believing in the pseudo-religion of holistic economics, we must believe in ourselves, the people.

We must work together to create a better society by putting our faith in ourselves, by putting our faith in our society, by putting our faith in a better future.

Because we can make such a future happen.

This article has been reprinted from Ozgur Zeren’s blog. You can find the original post here!

Featured image: “All-religions” by uttam sheth is licensed under CC0 1.0 

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A new VICE Special Report: The Future of Work premieres April 19 on HBO.

This video has been reposted from the HBO youtube channel.

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By requiring planners to consider impacts on society and the environment as well as economics, New Zealand is setting a much-needed example for other nations.

“Life is about more than just money.” It’s almost a cliché. But that quote isn’t from a left-wing think tank or a green non-governmental organization. In fact, it comes straight from official documents of the Treasury of New Zealand.

When even famously conservative government economists are saying there’s more to life than dollars and cents, something interesting is going on. And in fact, New Zealand is at the forefront of a radical shift in economic policy. The aim is simple: to make nature and society just as important as gross domestic product (GDP) growth in government thinking.

A Bold New Policy

The administration of Jacinda Ardern, who became prime minister in October 2017, has lost no time establishing rock-solid environmental credentials, with the recent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling just the latest in a long line of climate-smart policy commitments. But the shift to a “well-being budget” for 2019 could be the boldest play yet.

The New Zealand Treasury has been instructed that, when planning policies or modeling future economic scenarios for the country, it can no longer only consider the impact on GDP growth. Instead, it must include social, human and natural considerations in its thinking. For example: Would a trade deal endanger existing jobs? Would a pipeline destroy valuable forest or freshwater? And could deregulation damage cultural cohesion?

All of these are questions that government finance ministries rarely, if ever, concern themselves with. But New Zealand wants to be different.

“We want New Zealand to be the first place in the world where our budget is not presented simply under the umbrella of pure economic measures, and often inadequate ones at that, but one that demonstrates the overall well-being of our country and its people,” Arden said in a January speech.

Getting Back to Nature

This approach has alarmed some traditional economists as radical, unscientific or conceptually confused. But I think it’s eminently sensible.

As recent research by Oxford University economists has shown, all economic prosperity rests on natural foundations. Simply put, without clean air, safe water and a well-functioning environment, there can be no material wealth. And even the business big cheeses at the Davos World Economic Forum now argue that policy-makers’ obsession with GDP has damaged our planet and our societies.

If all government decisions are made on purely financial terms, then ultimately those decisions will benefit finance and capital at the expense of people and nature. Traditional economics has forgotten that our economies should have a purpose: they should deliver greater well-being, increasing prosperity, improved security and comfort, without imperiling the things that make life worth living. If all government decisions are made on purely financial terms, then ultimately those decisions will benefit finance and capital at the expense of people and nature. As New Zealand treasury secretary Gabriel Makhlouf puts it, “The traditional view of economics is more of a caricature than reality.”

Measuring What Matters

Over the past decade, dozens of new sustainability indexes and “beyond GDP” frameworks have emerged.

Some have largely been forgotten; others have attracted some scholarly attention or the support of a well-meaning think tank or policy institute. Only tiny Bhutan, a landlocked Asian nation of less than a million people, has attempted to get beyond GDP at the policy level, with its Gross National Happiness Index. No other country has made a strong, public commitment to incorporating social and natural value in governance — until now.

In New Zealand, GDP will no longer be the sole measure of success for economic policies. In New Zealand, a new generation of leadership has arisen, symbolized by Ardern: wise to the danger our planet is in; alive to the opportunities of a greener, fairer society; and not beholden to the outdated economic doctrines that have led us into this predicament. In New Zealand, GDP will no longer be the sole measure of success for economic policies, because GDP is not, and has never been, the best or only way to measure social development.

In many ways, New Zealand’s new approach is a return to a more honest, more grounded way of practicing economics, more rooted in the real world, as Makhlouf explains. “Economics is about trade-offs,” he says. “Economics is about the fact that there are finite resources to meet unlimited wants and what’s the best way of dealing with that problem. What the Treasury is suggesting now is that we can become a bit more sophisticated than in the past at making those trade-offs.”

It’s a refreshing change of focus from a senior treasury official. I’m looking forward to the day — hopefully soon — when finance ministries around the world are equally candid about something the rest of us have known for a long time: There’s more to life than money.

Ben Martin  @GECoalition  – Green Economy Coalition marketing & communications lead

Header Illustration by Sean Quinn

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We acknowledge the natural, the virtual, and the social environments. Our responsibility is to recognize which resources are abundant, which are sufficient, and adapt accordingly through efficiency.

Technology is simply the means by which we communicate. We use local-first publishing so that each person owns their words and actions. Our solutions are piecemeal upgradeable, replaceable and incrementally improvable. Tending and pruning are not a stranger’s duty, it is through near moderation and free listening that we improve our surroundings. Infrastructure is a voluntary act, multimodal welcoming is how we on-board people via diverse connectivity modes (technological acts of inclusion) as well as with greetings (words of inclusion). No one “signs up” but everyone is invited.

Our community is a web of friendships: relationships defined not by a follow button, but by the flexibility of subjectivity. We cherish the freedom to be independent, but it is this same freedom which encourages – not coerces – us to be interdependent. We know we can at any time fork, but when individually recognizing the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, we tend to develop the collective. We value disagreement when it’s supportive, and see it as generative and bond forming.

Society is not made of homogeneous people, so we must allow pluralism of cultures to flourish. The edges of the social graph must extend to include all people and their diverse values, interactions, and customs. No one of us can build a welcoming place for all groups, because the very concept of welcoming is subjective. Instead, removing ourselves as arbiters of other communities, we must design platforms that are easy to re-design.

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Article reposted from Scuttlebutt

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Before you say no, take a moment to really ask yourself whether it’s the system that’s best suited to build our future society.

Jason Hickel and Martin Kirk: In February, college sophomore Trevor Hill stood up during a televised town hall meeting in New York and posed a simple question to Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. He cited a study by Harvard University showing that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism, and asked whether the Democrats could embrace this fast-changing reality and stake out a clearer contrast to right-wing economics.

Pelosi was visibly taken aback. “I thank you for your question,” she said, “but I’m sorry to say we’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.”

The footage went viral. It was powerful because of the clear contrast it set up. Trevor Hill is no hardened left-winger. He’s just your average o—bright, informed, curious about the world, and eager to imagine a better one. But Pelosi, a figurehead of establishment politics, refused to–or was just unable to–entertain his challenge to the status quo.

Fifty-one percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

It’s not only young voters who feel this way.

A YouGov poll in 2015 found that 64% of Britons believe that capitalism is unfair, that it makes inequality worse. Even in the U.S., it’s as high as 55%. In Germany, a solid 77% are skeptical of capitalism. Meanwhile, a full three-quarters of people in major capitalist economies believe that big businesses are basically corrupt.Why do people feel this way? Probably not because they deny the abundant material benefits of modern life that many are able to enjoy. Or because they want to travel back in time and live in the U.S.S.R. It’s because they realize—either consciously or at some gut level—that there’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital, and do it more and more each year, regardless of the costs to human well-being and to the environment we depend on.

Because let’s be clear: That’s what capitalism is, at its root. That is the sum total of the plan. We can see this embodied in the imperative to grow GDP, everywhere, year on year, at a compound rate, even though we know that GDP growth, on its own, does nothing to reduce poverty or to make people happier or healthier. Global GDP has grown 630% since 1980, and in that same time, by some measures, inequality, poverty, and hunger have all risen.

Gains are seen as the natural property of the investor class. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

We also see this plan in the idea that corporations have a fiduciary duty to grow their stock value for the sake of shareholder returns, which prevents even well-meaning CEO’s from voluntarily doing anything good—like increasing wages or reducing pollution—that might compromise their bottom line. Just look at the recent case involving American Airlines. Earlier this year, CEO Doug Parker tried to raise his employees salaries to correct for “years of incredibly difficult times” suffered by his employees, only to be slapped down by Wall Street. The day he announced the raise, the company’s shares fell 5.8%. This is not a case of an industry on the brink, fighting for survival, and needing to make hard decisions. On the contrary, airlines have been raking in profits. But the gains are seen as the natural property of the investor class. This is why JP Morgan criticized the wage increase as a “wealth transfer of nearly $1 billion” to workers. How dare they?What becomes clear here is that ours is a system that is programmed to subordinate life to the imperative of profit.

There’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

For a startling example of this, consider the horrifying idea to breed brainless chickens and grow them in huge vertical farms, Matrix-style, attached to tubes and electrodes and stacked one on top of the other, all for the sake of extracting profit out of their bodies as efficiently as possible. Or take the Grenfell Tower disaster in London, where dozens of people were incinerated because the building company chose to use flammable panels in order to save a paltry £5,000 (around $6,500). Over and over again, profit trumps life.It all proceeds from the same deep logic. It’s the same logic that sold lives for profit in the Atlantic slave trade, it’s the logic that gives us sweatshops and oil spills, and it’s the logic that is right now pushing us headlong toward ecological collapse and climate change.

Millennials can see that capitalism isn’t working for the majority of humanity, and they’re ready to invent something better. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

Once we realize this, we can start connecting the dots between our different struggles. There are people in the U.S. fighting against the Keystone pipeline. There are people in Britain fighting against the privatization of the National Health Service. There are people in India fighting against corporate land grabs. There are people in Brazil fighting against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. There are people in China fighting against poverty wages. These are all noble and important movements in their own right. But by focusing on all these symptoms we risk missing the underlying cause. And the cause is capitalism. It’s time to name the thing.What’s so exciting about our present moment is that people are starting to do exactly that. And they are hungry for something different. For some, this means socialism. That YouGov poll showed that Americans under the age of 30 tend to have a more favorable view of socialism than they do of capitalism, which is surprising given the sheer scale of the propaganda out there designed to convince people that socialism is evil. But millennials aren’t bogged down by these dusty old binaries. For them the matter is simple: They can see that capitalism isn’t working for the majority of humanity, and they’re ready to invent something better.

What might a better world look like? There are a million ideas out there. We can start by changing how we understand and measure progress. As Robert Kennedy famously said, GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play . . . it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

We can change that. People want health care and education to be social goods, not market commodities, so we can choose to put public goods back in public hands. People want the fruits of production and the yields of our generous planet to benefit everyone, rather than being siphoned up by the super-rich, so we can change tax laws and introduce potentially transformative measures like a universal basic income. People want to live in balance with the environment on which we all depend for our survival; so we can adopt regenerative agricultural solutions and even choose, as Ecuador did in 2008, to recognize in law, at the level of the nation’s constitution, that nature has “the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles.”

Measures like these could dethrone capitalism’s prime directive and replace it with a more balanced logic, that recognizes the many factors required for a healthy and thriving civilization. If done systematically enough, they could consign one-dimensional capitalism to the dustbin of history.

None of this is actually radical. Our leaders will tell us that these ideas are not feasible, but what is not feasible is the assumption that we can carry on with the status quo. If we keep pounding on the wedge of inequality and chewing through our living planet, the whole thing is going to implode. The choice is stark, and it seems people are waking up to it in large numbers: Either we evolve into a future beyond capitalism, or we won’t have a future at all.

Dr. Jason Hickel is an anthropologist at the London School of Economics who works on international development and global political economy, with an ethnographic focus on southern Africa.  He writes for the Guardian and Al Jazeera English. His most recent book, The Divide: A Brief History of Global Inequality and Its Solutions, is available now.

Martin Kirk is cofounder and director of strategy for The Rules, a global collective of writers, thinkers, and activists dedicated to challenging the root causes of global poverty and inequality. His work focuses on bringing insights from the cognitive and complexity sciences to bear on issues of public understanding of complex global challenges.

Originally published at Fast Company

Lead Photo by Ignotus the Mage

The post Are You Ready To Accept That Capitalism Is the Real Problem? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By Brian Hayden:

Feasts helped to transform egalitarian hunters and gatherers into the kinds of societies that laid the foundations for early states and even industrial empires. They created hierarchies and inequalities, the advantaged and the disadvantaged. Feasts might well have been the catalyst for the agricultural revolution, some 10,000 years ago. But just how did feasts bring about such dramatic transformations in cultures? In the ethnographic research that my students and I conducted among traditional tribal and chiefdom societies, feasts turned out to be very different kinds of events than your average turkey and cranberry Thanksgiving.

The most lavish traditional feast that I participated in during my research was a Torajan funeral feast in Sulawesi, Indonesia. It took more than five years to amass the assets and resources required. During this time, the deceased man was not buried but stayed wrapped up in a cocoon of fabrics in the corner of his house where he eventually dried out, and was still considered part of the family until he was buried. A small army of workers and organisers was formed to build an enclosed courtyard of temporary verandas around the house of the deceased, replete with sleeping and eating quarters, even kitchens. Invitations were sent to far-flung kin and allied families. Hundreds of guests attended.

When the time came for the funeral ceremonies, groups of allied lineages entered the courtyard in formal processions dressed in their finest, all bringing baskets of rice and other gifts as demonstrations of their support. Over the following three days, dozens of water buffaloes and pigs were sacrificed in the centre of the funeral area. The slaughtered animals were destined for huge feasts of meat and rice and palm wine – feasts that could last for weeks.

Each contribution, especially of animals, was duly recorded because all such contributions were seen as debts that had to be repaid by the kin or allies of the surviving family. The person who contributed the most to the funeral inherited the valuable rice paddies of the deceased upon which wealth and power were ultimately based. Political power, then, was partly based upon debts incurred through feasts.

Feasts tend to be competitive because the underlying motive for feasting is to secure advantageous relationships via debts (for marriage, defence or economic endeavours). This competitiveness pressures organisers to produce or acquire enormous amounts of foods, especially meat, starches and alcohol. In fact, given the competition based on gifts (that is, debts) of food and prestige items, there could never be enough food since someone was always trying to produce more in order to out-compete his rivals. It is these competitive feasting pressures that, I argue, resulted in the domestication of plants and animals.

Feasts are often very expensive events, sometimes requiring up to 10 years of work and saving. Those who are paying for them expect to obtain some benefit from all their efforts and expenditures. And this is the important part about traditional feasts: those who are invited, and who often receive gifts, are considered obligated to reciprocate the invitation and gifts within a reasonable amount of time. By accepting invitations to feasts, individuals enter into relationships of alliance with the host. Each of them supports the other in political or social conflicts as well as in economic matters. Such support is critical because social and political conflicts are rife in tribal villages, with many accusations of infidelity, theft, sorcery, inheritance irregularities, unpaid bills, ritual transgressions and crop damage from other people’s domestic animals. In order to defend oneself from such accusations and threats of punishment, individuals need strong allies within the community. Feasts are a way to get them.

Moreover, in times of famine, it is essential to have a network of support in order to borrow food. Famine can occur for many reasons: adults might be unable to work the fields due to accident or illness, crops might fail as a result of flooding or drought or plague. Feasting is the way that people created and maintained reliable social support networks – and they are effective in this because of the reciprocal debts they entailed. Once embroiled in the debt system, it is almost impossible to extricate oneself, and failing to reciprocate feasts and gifts often meant murder and warfare.

The networks and debts that feasting systems created gave great political power to certain individuals. This is how traditional feasting created the first economically based (ie, surplus-based) hierarchies. Ambitious individuals profited from the feasting system by involving others in reciprocal debts. The use of feasts in this fashion is, of course, tied to the ability of hosts to produce food surpluses, and then to convert these surpluses into advantages. This kind of energy-conversion adaptation probably emerged only in the Upper Paleolithic of Europe among the more complex hunter/gatherers, around 30,000 years ago. Feasting became common elsewhere only about 15,000 years ago during the Mesolithic or Epipaleolithic.

In the Near East, where wheat, lentils, goats and cattle were first domesticated, feasting and socioeconomic inequalities appeared in the Natufian culture (12,500-14,500 years ago), just before any domesticates appeared during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (12,500-10,000 years ago). Similar sequences occurred in the Far East with rice and pigs, and in the New World. Even today, it is remarkable that domestic animals in the tribal villages are almost never used for normal meals: they are universally reserved for sacrifice and consumption at feasts. Such a strong ethnographic pattern seems to imply that this was the original purpose for keeping and domesticating animals. Hill-tribe villages in Southeast Asia explicitly view the raising of domestic animals as similar to putting money in the bank. People use surpluses to raise animals that will profit them in the future through feasting benefits.

The reliance on feasting to convert surpluses into power continued after the domestication of plants and animals into the Neolithic, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Feasting was also integral to the early Sumerian city states as well as to Classical Roman elite culture and politics. It virtually ran the Incan Empire in South America. Far different from the gustatory and social entertainment of modern feasting, traditional feasts were entertainment with ulterior motives and binding debts that have produced the kind of surplus-based industrial society with all its inequalities that much of the world lives in today. Where would we be without feasts? I believe we would still be hunters and gatherers.

By Brian Hayden

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

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Algorithmic Social Contract = Social contract between humans and governance algorithms

Originally published by Iyad Rahwan at Medium:

“What happens when an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system does not serve a narrow, well-defined function, but a broad function with wide societal implications? Consider an AI algorithm that controls billions a self-driving cars; or a set of news filtering algorithms that influence the political beliefs and preferences of billions of citizens; or algorithms that mediate the allocation of resources and labor in an entire economy. What is the ‘Human in the Loop‘ (HITL) equivalent of these governance algorithms? This is where we make the qualitative shift from HITL to Society in the Loop (SITL).

While HITL AI is about embedding the judgment of individual humans or groups in the optimization of narrowly defined AI systems, SITL is about embedding the judgment of society, as a whole, in the algorithmic governance of societal outcomes. In other words, SITL is more akin to the interaction between a government and a governed citizenry. Modern government is the outcome of an implicit agreement — or social contract — between the ruled and their rulers, aimed at fulfilling the general will of citizens. Similarly, SITL can be conceived as an attempt to embed the general will into an algorithmic social contract.

In human-based government, citizens use various channels — e.g. democratic voting, opinion polls, civil society institutions, social media — to articulate their expectations to the government. Meanwhile, the government, through its bureaucracy and various branches undertakes the function of governing, and is ultimately evaluated by the citizenry. Modern societies are (in theory) SITL human-based governance machines. And some of those machines are better programmed than others.

Similarly, as more and more governance functions get encoded into AI algorithms, we need to create channels between human values and governance algorithms.

The Algorithmic Social Contract: To implement SITL, we need to know what types of behaviors people expect from AI, and to enable policy-makers and the public to articulate these expectations (goals, ethics, norms, social contract) to machines. To close the loop, we also need new metrics and methods to evaluate AI behavior against quantifiable human values. In other words: We need to build new tools to enable society to program, debug, and monitor the algorithmic social contract between humans and governance algorithms.

Implementing SITL control in governance algorithms poses a number of difficulties. First, some of these algorithms generate what economists refer to as negative externalities — costs incurred by third parties not involved in the decision. For example, if autonomous vehicle algorithms over-prioritize the safety of passengers — who own them or pay to use them — they may disproportionately increase the risk borne by pedestrians. Quantifying these kinds of externalities is not always straightforward, especially when they occur as a consequence of long, indirect causal chains.

Another difficulty with implementing SITL is that governing algorithms often implement implicit tradeoffs. Human expert-based governance already implements tradeoffs. For example, reducing the speed limit on a road reduces the utility of drivers who want to get home quickly, while increasing the overall safety of drivers and pedestrians. It is possible to completely eliminate accidents — by reducing the speed limit to zero and banning cars — but this would also eliminate the utility of driving, and regulators attempt to strike a balance that society is comfortable with through a constant learning process. Citizens need means to articulate their expectations to governance algorithms, as they do with human regulators.

Why are we not there yet? There has been a flurry of thoughtful treaties on the social and legal challenges posed by the opaque algorithms that permeate and govern our lives. The most prominent of those include Frank Pasquale’s The Black Box Society, and Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble. While these writings help illuminate many of the challenges, they often fall short on solutions. This is because we still lack mechanisms for articulating societal expectations (e.g. ethics, norms, legal principles) in ways that machines can understand. We also lack a comprehensive set of mechanisms for scrutinizing the behavior of governing algorithms against precise expectations. This gap is illustrated in the figure below. Putting the society in the loop requires us to bridge the gap between the humanities and computing.”

Photo by Michael Cordedda

Photo by Syntopia

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Here’s an amazing fact: It’s 2016 and humanity is collectively moving toward a future that nobody wants. We are literally going somewhere that will hurt every single one of us.

Mass extinctions are terrible things. Impoverished societies create the conditions for radical extremism and violence. Depleting top soils create food insecurity and mass starvation. Debt-bloated economies become unstable and easily collapse. Extreme shifts in climate cause millions to become refugees. These kinds of things — all of which are becoming more likely with each passing day on our present course — are bad for business, harmful for parents raising their children, damaging to the psyches of people rich and poor, and downright devastating to non-human life.

Billionaires don’t fare well in a world where starving billions could storm the barricades to get food and shelter. Sick people create conditions for the spread of disease. You see what I’m painting here? It is all connected and the global crisis is arising because we have yet to realize this deep truth about the world we live in.

Then WHY IS IT that humanity is going in this very direction right now? Simply put, it is because the “powers that be” are disconnected so profoundly from reality that they have no idea what they are doing.

Elected officials in high office? These days they are bought and sold by the highest bidders. They only care about staying in power.

Corporate CEO’s at multinational companies? All they care about is playing financial incest on each others’ boards, enriching each other with golden parachutes and year-end bonuses.

Everyday people? They are just going about their lives, doing what their cultures tell them will lead to a good life. They just want to live and be free.

And yet, here we are. In late May of 2016 there are more greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere each year than ever before. The human population continues to grow at an exponential pace. And we are literally consuming the trees, rivers, and grassland meadows of the Earth.

What if it didn’t have to be this way?

The future isn’t written yet. We still have time to change it, but only if we know what we want.

Now imagine what kind of future most people do want. We would like to be healthy and happy, have time to pursue our passions, become skilled at doing things we love, and — of course — give abundance to our children who will inhabit the earth after we are long dead and gone.

It’s so simple in so many ways. Human beings enjoy leisure and human contact. We find pleasure in being seen and loved by others we care about. It is in our nature to be social, to make music and art, to make love and seek pleasure. Nowhere in our genetic code are we wired for destruction of all-things-sacred in the world.

And it is in this gap — between that which currently is and that which could possibly be — that I find deep hope for the future of humanity. My friends have written about the singular ideology that currently dictates core logics of the global economy. They describe how we are taught to believe in the rugged individual, a human island in the vast sea of self-reliant possibilities.

Yet no man (or woman) is an island. Each of us is born precariously fragile from a mother’s womb. We would quickly die in those first few years if caregivers were not ever-present to feed us, wipe away our excrement, and protect us from harm. Human beings are deeply social creatures. We arise from the natural world and are profoundly immersed in webs of dependency from the first drawn breathe to the last wavering exhale.

The sciences of human nature tell us much more than this. Not only are we social beings, we are also deeply moral in nature. A sure-fire way to piss us off is to be unfair, dominate or oppress us, or take more than your share. Which begs the question: Why is it that wealth and power inequality are the norm today? The answer can be found in the annals of research on hunter-gatherer societies. Our ancestors — once upon a time in the distant past — were strong males who ruled by physical domination (just as silverback gorillas do today).

But there came a time, several million years ago, when hunting technology combined with a good eye and agile shoulders. Some of our ancestors got together and ganged up on the dominator males. Throw rocks from multiple angles in an ambush attack and even the largest silverback can be taken down. Herein lies the great secret of democracies the world over. We use our ability to form collectives (and act as teams) to out-compete the lone bullies who would otherwise take more than their share.

Of course, a key difference between those ancestral times and today is that societies were much smaller then. Everyone knew everyone else. If someone was abusive or prone to cheating, word would get around quick. All of this changed with the advent of complex societies some 8,000 years ago. Empires were born around the settlements of agriculture. Strong men could organize wannabe strong men to form elite cabals and wreak havoc on the newly forming masses. They ganged up on the rest of us and have been dominating the game ever since.

Fast forward to today and you’ll see how our amazing ability to learn from each other and build upon what came before (called “cumulative” culture by the experts) made it possible for empire-builders to refine their craft. They invented things like corporations, accounting and bookkeeping, and the government control of property rights granted to those with existing wealth. This is what we call capitalism today.

For more on how capitalism actually works, see here…

And so it became possible to weave systems of dominance, wealth extraction and hoarding. Those who sought to have the most were able to invest in media institutions, marketing and advertising and make the greedy aspiration of the super-rich a run-of-the-mill aspiration for everyday working folk.

This is how it came to pass that we collectively began to serve power structures in the present that create the conditions for that future world no one wants. If we are to change course, we will need to understand how we got here. It will be necessary for us to pull back the veil and see how systems of wealth hoarding hide in our minds. We will have to understand how the stories that organize our lives are broken and begin to replace them with better alternatives.

And all of this is about healing. Capitalism is dying (can you feel it?) and it is our collective choice whether we die with it.

Now is the time to consciously introspect about what kind of future you want. If no one wants the one we are creating now, it might just be a good idea to start seeking common ground, explore shared intentions, and discover ways forward that the majority of us can agree on. We can cooperate together around these themes and overtake the would-be dominators at the helm today. Change the rules of politics and economies to serve all of humanity and life on Earth.

That will require a credible knowledge of human nature. And it will take some serious visionary thinking about how to get from here to there. I am up for the challenge!

How about you?

Onward, fellow humans.

Cross-posted from the Rules.org

The post Who is creating the future nobody wants? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Civilization is not just about saving labor but also about “wasting” labor to make art, to make beautiful things, to “waste” time playing, like sports.”

Very interesting argument about the new type of civilizational progress made possible through universal networking, and why it does not show up in productivity statistics.

Excerpted from Kevin Kelly:

“(Robert) Gordon is focused, as most economists, on GDP which measures the amount of “labor saving” that has been accomplished. The more labor you save while making or serving something, the more productive you are. In the calculus of traditional economics productivity equals wealth. Gordon rightly points out that so far the internet has not saved a lot of labor. As I argue in my robot piece in Wired, Better Than Human (not my title), I think the real wealth in the future does not come from saving labor but in creating new kinds of things to do. In this sense long-term wealth depends on making new labor.

Civilization is not just about saving labor but also about “wasting” labor to make art, to make beautiful things, to “waste” time playing, like sports. Nobody ever suggested that Picasso should spend fewer hours painting per picture in order to boost his wealth or improve the economy. The value he added to the economy could not be optimized for productivity. It’s hard to shoehorn some of the most important things we do in life into the category of “being productive.” Generally any task that can be measured by the metrics of productivity — output per hour — is a task we want automation to do. In short, productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring. None of these fare well under the scrutiny of productivity. That is why science and art are so hard to fund. But they are also the foundation of long-term growth. Yet our notions of jobs, of work, of the economy don’t include a lot of space for wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.

Long-term growth of that type that Robert Gordon studies is really weird if you think about it. As he notes, there wasn’t much of it in the world before 1750, before technological progress. Now several centuries later we have a thousand times as much wealth as before. Where does this extra good stuff come from? It is not moved from somewhere else, or borrowed. It is self-created. There’s a system which manufactures this wealth “out of nothing.” Much like life itself. There are certainly necessary conditions and ingredients, but it seems once you have those in place, the economy (the system) will self-generate this wealth.

A number of economists have wrestled with the origins of this self-generating wealth. Paul Romer and Brian Arthur both separately point to the recombining and re-mixing of existing ideas as the way economic growth occurs. This view focuses on knowledge as the prime motor in a self-renewing circle of increasing returns. Unlike say energy or matter, the more knowledge you spend, the more knowledge you earn, and the more breeds more in a never-ending virtuous spiral.

What is important is that this self-increasing cycle makes things that are new. New goods, new services, new dreams, new ambitions, even new needs. When things are new they are often not easy to measure, not easy to detect, nor easy to optimize. The 1st Industrial Revolution that introduced steam and railways also introduced new ideas about ownership, identity, privacy, and literacy. These ideas were not “productive” at first, but over time as they seeped into law, and culture, and became embedded into other existing technologies, they helped work to become more productive. For example ideas of ownership and capital became refined and unleashed new arrangements for funding large-scale projects in more efficient ways. In some cases these indirect ideas may have more long-term affect on growth than the immediate inventions of the time.

Likewise the grand shift our society is undergoing now, moving to a highly networked world in the third phase of industrialization, is producing many innovations that 1) are hard to perceive, 2) not really about optimizing labor, and 3) therefore hard to quantify in terms of productivity.

One has the sense that if we wait a while, the new things will trickled down and find places in the machinery of commerce where they can eventually boost the efficiency of work.

But it seems to me that there is second-order tilt in this shift to a networked world that says the real wealth in the long-term, or perhaps that should be the new wealth, will not be found merely in greater productivity, but in greater degrees of playing, creating, and exploring. We don’t have good metrics for new possibilities, for things that have never been seen before, because by definition, their boundaries, distinctions, and units are unknown. How does one measure “authenticity” or “hyperreality” or “stickiness”?

Productivity is the main accomplishment, and metric, of the two previous Industrial Revolutions. Productivity won’t go away; over the long term it will take fewer hours of human work to produce more of the goods and services those economies produce. Our system will do this primarily because most of this work will be done by bots.

The main accomplishment of this 3rd Industrialization, the networking of our brains, other brains and other things, is to add something onto the substrate of productivity. Call it consumptity, or generativity. By whatever name we settle on, this frontier expands the creative aspect of the whole system, increasing innovations, expanding possibilities, encouraging the inefficiencies of experiment and exploring, absorbing more of the qualities of play. We don’t have good measurements of these yet. Cynics will regard this as new age naiveté, or unadorned utopianism, or a blindness to the “realities” of real life of greedy corporations, or bad bosses, or the inevitable suffering of real work. It’s not.

The are two senses of growth: scale, that is, more, bigger, faster; and evolution. The linear progression of steam power, railways, electrification, and now computers and the internet is a type of the former; just more of the same, but only better. Therefore the productivity growth curve should continue up in a continuous linear fashion.

I suggest the growth of this 3rd regime is more like evolutionary growth, rather than developmental growth. The apparent stagnation we see in productivity, in real wages, in debt relief, is because we don’t reckon, and don’t perceive, the new directions of growth. It is not more of the same, but different.”

The post From a labor saving civilization to a labor creating civilization appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Reposted from our friends at The Extraenviromentalist.

Today’s textbook notions of business were developed during an unprecedented global economic expansion – a cultural condition that faces diminishing returns in today’s world. Can we build enterprises for a post-growth future that thrive among challenges of the next century? By reversing the process that privatizes profits, would unsustainable trends and drivers of inequality be subverted? Can a modern media and journalism industry flourish within a not-for-profit framework?

In Extraenvironmentalist #89 we first speak with Donnie Maclurcan of the Post Growth Institute about their organization’s upcoming book, How On Earth: Flourishing in a Not-for-Profit World by 2050. Donnie explains ways that organizing business activities under the framework of not-for-profit enterprises can make meaningful change in the face of a seemingly intractable situation wrought by immense private wealth accumulation and slowing global growth.

In the second half of the show, we talk to Chris Nelder, host of the Energy Transition Show – the first regular podcast on the forthcoming XE Audio Network! We ask Chris about the ongoing contraction in US shale oil production during 2015 and the deteriorating financial condition of the industry in the face of a global deflationary undertow. The conversation is Episode #0 of the Energy Transition Show, which launches with Episode #1 beginning September 23.

//Segments on Soundcloud

Bonus Segment

// Links and News Items

The Energy Transition Show – launching September 23rd

As We Lay Dying –
Stephen Jenkinson On How We Deny Our Mortality

// Books

How On Earth: Flourishing in a Not-for-Profit World by 2050 by Donnie Maclurcan and Jennifer Hilton

// Music (in order of appearance)

Lazy Knuckles – Polyglot via Soundcloud
Eric Clapton – Change the World (Mac DeMarco Cover) via IndieShuffle
Freddie Frank – This Old Rig (1961)
Cavaliers of Fun – Wiki via Tracasseur
Tube & Berger – Disarray Feat. J.U.D.G.E

// Production Credits and Notes

Our editor Kevin via Sustainable Guidance Youtube Channel

Episode #89 was supported by donations from the following generous listeners:

Stephanie in North Carolina
Wally in North Carolina
Stephen from Australia

The post Podcast of the Day: How on Earth with Donnie Maclurcan appeared first on P2P Foundation.