a Presentation placing Economics in context

New Economy, New Wealth This post breaks with the usual pattern here. Instead of a stand-alone essay, this link. Instead of vaporous ruminations, a direct series of statements. Instead of private musings, someone else’s charts and graphs. Two main reasons for this: motive and opportunity. I’ve been focusing on my new project, Boats for Difficult

Investing in Trust

Investment is generally taken to mean following a strategy that allows us to siphon off value. A way of taking value from a living system and turning it into a quantity of abstract financial counters that we can then hold so as to use these at will to gain advantage. We strip a living web

An Illusory Economy

We are caught between beliefs that are untenable and hard limits that will not go away. Let’s look at what falls under the name economy. It is a mental construct that has been accepted as the rational way to organize how we interact to meet our physical needs within what is now described as a

I only exist in so far as I intrude into your view…*

To you I only exist in so far as I intrude into your world-view. As an acquaintance, someone you barely know – we do not share much of a history – I’m; someone who does not appear particularly physically threatening; my existence – in your eyes – is a fleeting and transient phenomenon; my hold

Intelligence

Tossing the Die One thing coming into view is that intelligence is not…. I began to write in earnest when I discovered – not that what I had to say was hard to say – but that I needed to work at…. For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the

It’s Religion

In a recent post John Michael Greer has continued to bring to light how a religious impulse underlies the current governmental crises. Not as the superficial coverage narrates a battle between conservatives and progressives, but how all these contending forces share in the overall religion of Progress. Reason with a capital R, as much as Fundamentalism,

Cost/Benefit

Central to the way we function in the world is the idea of cost/benefit. We turn this measure on everything. There was a story my uncle Lionel used to tell. He was a dapper European Bourgeois of the mid-twentieth century. He had all the accoutrements: A position, he was a “Head of Department” in the

Drowning in Search of Security

There is a persistent delusion behind the fevered activities of the state. As our predicament deepens it acts as an accelerant as it focuses the attentions of the most powerful among us to act in increasingly destructive ways. Simply stated it is the expectation that exceptionalism can be maintained in any meaningful way as we

Further Notes on the Meaning of Wealth

We all act as though what we mean by wealth is obvious and lacking in ambiguity. Wealth is enough money to wield power so as to conserve one’s ability to keep a lot of money. Hmmm… That’s probably not what you had in mind. Has wealth always been the same thing? Is it going through

Education as Over-Reach, the Fallacy of Accuracy

ow does this affect education? It ripples throughout the entire project. The bottom-line is that we run away from analysis based on sound judgement and prudent wariness and towards amassing ever more elaborate constructs – not so as to be able to make a better decision, but in the wish that doing so will find us a way to game reality and “Get What We Want.”

Reciprocity & Regard

…regard is where our ability to chose beats against the limits to our existence.

The Mainstream’s Misunderstanding, Part 2

The “crises,” the “disasters,” the “mistakes,” and “unforeseeable” consequences that inundate our lives today are not any of those things. They are not the system perverted or de-railed, they are the system expressing itself exactly as such a system would and does and will express itself.