Tag: Economics and Trade

Around the Web, Books and Resources

Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology

If Herman Daly is the economist for sustainable development, Amory Lovins the physicist and Al Gore the politician, William Ophuls must be the philosopher. Ophuls’ first book on the subject, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1997), placed him among the few scholars of the time (Rifkin and Daly in the United States; Leiss and Paehlke in Canada) who had managed to bridge the gulf between science and politics to insist that modern values and the democratic politics associated with them were on a collision course with ecology. Continue reading Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology

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The Wealth of Nature

The title of John Michael Greer’s The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered contains references to two very different economic works: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. He calls on both books in his attempt to demonstrate that contemporary economics has gone astray. Continue reading The Wealth of Nature

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Development Without Destruction

In his engaging and practical book Development Without Destruction: The UN and Global Resource Management, Nico Schrijver shows how the UN developed into a hub for natural resource management by default, not by design. As this comprehensive contribution to the UN Intellectual History Project series recounts, the Charter of the United Nations does not discuss natural resources and does not enshrine environmental conservation. The apparent ‘default’ status of UN resource management efforts has provided critics of the UN with plenty of ammunition over the years. In this makeshift context, co-ordination failures and public relations slip-ups have occasionally undermined the environmental efforts of an alphabet soup of UN specialized agencies and programs.
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Community Stewardship and Living

The Story of Stuff


Leonard, a self-described “systems thinker,” aims to debunk the entrenched “growth at all costs” model. She does so by discussing the materials economy and its underlying paradigm of economic growth, but opts to not lay the blame with individuals or inspire feelings of guilt. … Readers, however, should not be misled by her bubbly prose: Leonard gets to the heart of serious subjects and exposes the inter-connectedness of today’s consumption, environmental, social and economic crises.
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Community Stewardship and Living

Social Change 2.0

Social Change 2.0
David Gershon
While a few readers may find David Gershon’s approach overly self-promoting – suggested resources all take you to his website’s order page – his experience­ in creating social transformation is authoritative­, and this book is a successful­ marriage of vision and pragmatism. Gershon balances principles and practices­, and highlights his ideas with stories of people­ in action. Social Change 2.0 emphasizes­ you, the reader, as the primary agent of change in the world. Each chapter ends with a useful set of questions that form a “practitioner’s guide” to further thinking. Continue reading Social Change 2.0

Beyond the Bubble: Imagining a New Canadian Economy
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Beyond the Bubble: Imagining a New Canadian Economy

Beyond the Bubble: Imagining a New Canadian Economy
James Laxer, Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2009, 264 pages.

“The neo-liberal system has fallen into pieces and cannot be put together again. Nor should humanity attempt it. It is time to move on to a better future.” These are the last words in James Laxer’s Beyond the Bubble. The rest of the book fills in the details of what amounts to a very interesting read for economists and non-economists alike.

This is a book of many stories. Nominally, it’s about a bubble that popped over the housing market. Laxer could have chosen other bubbles – the dot-com crash, the Great Depression – but they may have offered less rhetorical value today.
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Business and Economics, Community Stewardship and Living

Building Social Business

Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism that Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing Needs
Muhammad Yunus, New York: Public Affairs, 2010, 226 pages.

As one of the recipients of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, Muhammad Yunus has often spoken out on the failure of the capitalist system to perform its duty to provide for the world’s poorest people.

In Building Social Business, Yunus expands on his self-proclaimed world-changing mechanism for social change that he introduced in an earlier book, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism. He fleshes out the idea more fully in this work by not only defining social business clearly and providing examples of how it has been successful already, but … [Click here to read more!] Continue reading Building Social Business

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Deep Economy

For McKibben, there are three fundamental challenges to Western society’s fixation on growth, which taken together deal an absolute knockout blow to Adam Smith’s claim to fame. First, there is the political argument concerning the glaring economic inequalities that are inherent in capitalism’s dark side. Continue reading Deep Economy