We Could Be Witnessing the Death of the Fossil Fuel Industry—Will It Take the Rest of the Economy Down With It?

In just two decades, the total value of the energy being produced via fossil fuel extraction has plummeted by more than half. Now $3 trillion of debt is at risk.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.alternet.org

Another brilliant must-read analysis by Nafeez Ahmed of the financial collapse of the global oil industry and how it will bring down the capitalist economy.

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Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.theguardian.com

Brilliant must-read analysis of neo-liberalism and why the left’s neo-Keynesianism is not the answer

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Despair Fatigue

Politicians, journalists, lobbyists, CEOs, and corporate bureaucrats rarely talk to anyone except each other. They constitute a distinct intellectual universe. Within this universe, economic policies are designed primarily for political marketability; economic science exists largely to provide impressive diagrams and equations to sell them with. Phrases designed in think tanks and focus groups (“free markets,” “wealth creators,” “personal responsibility,” “shared sacrifice”) are repeated like incantations until it all seems like such unthinking common sense that no one even asks what the resulting picture has to do with social reality. True, the bubble logic can be maintained only by a certain studied ignorance of how the economy really works.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: thebaffler.com

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Hoog tijd voor Plan B. Hoe de Europese Unie en de euro nog te redden zijn

De ‘nieuwe’ derde optie die bestaat voor Europa, is kort samen te vatten: eenheid in verscheidenheid. In een tijd waarin goederen en diensten steeds meer op maat kunnen worden gemaakt, past geen Europese Unie die pluriformiteit en diversiteit tussen lidstaten als een probleem ziet, en begrotingsbeleid en fiscaal beleid steeds meer wil uniformeren en centraliseren.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.rtlz.nl

One of the best analyses I have read in years about the existential crisis of the European union. Less centralisation, more integration through a new way of working together.

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What Cuba Reveals About the Gig Economy

it is naïve to think that we can extract the merits of the sharing economy without investing in the infrastructure and social welfare state that undergirds that economy.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: uk.pcmag.com

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How Establishments Fall — Leadership in the Age of Rage

‘intelligentsias manufacture unrealities in eras of decline because their position at the top of the heap depends on doing so. If they are to validate decline as real, then they undermine the very order in which they are at the top. Who knows what might happen then? People might begin to blame them for having been agents of decline in the first place. Thus, their first and greatest incentive is to push the myth that there is no decline. Whatever the intelligentsia in an age of decline does, it cannot validate, prove, even often discuss, the possibility of decline as real, actual, happening, true.’

Sourced through Scoop.it from: medium.com

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Satyajit Das: Age of Stagnation or Something Worse?

The world is entering a period of stagnation, the new mediocre. The end of growth and fragile, volatile economic conditions are now the sometimes silent background to all social and political debates. For individuals, this is about the destruction of human hopes and dreams.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.nakedcapitalism.com

Brilliant extract of the latest book of former banker Satyajit Das; The Age of Stagnation.

‘Authorities have been increasingly forced to resort to untested policies including QE forever and negative interest rates. It was an attempt to buy time, to let economies achieve a self-sustaining recovery, as they had done before. Unfortunately the policies have not succeeded. The expensively purchased time has been wasted. The necessary changes have not been made.’

 

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Monetizing Nature: Taking Precaution on a Slippery Slope

In embracing the monetary valuation of nature as a strategy for mobilizing support for environmental conservation, environmentalists are resigning themselves to a political status quo that can only comprehend value in terms of money and markets. By viewing ecosystems and their services through a pecuniary lens, monetization profoundly changes our relationship with nature, and, if taken to the point of commodification, can subject the fragility of nature’s balance to the destructive logic and volatility of markets.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.greattransition.org

Very good article on the dangers of putting a price on ecoservices.

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Digitally disrupted GDP

Digital technologies are having dramatic impacts on consumers, businesses, and markets. These developments have reignited the debate over the definition and measurement of common economic statistics such as GDP. This column examines the measurement challenges posed by digital innovation on the economic landscape. It shows how existing approaches are unable to capture certain elements of the consumer surplus created by digital innovation. It further demonstrates how they can misrepresent market-level shifts, leading to false assessments of production and growth.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.voxeu.org

Interesting article on how the digitalisation of our economy impacts GDP measurement and leads to wrong policies.

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Europe’s immigration bind: how to act morally while heeding the will of its people

Liberal immigration policies can be enforced only by winning public support, not in spite of public opposition. Winning such support is not a chimera, there is no iron law that the public must be irrevocably hostile to immigration. Large sections of the public have become hostile because they have come to associate immigration with unacceptable change. That is why, paradoxically, the immigration debate cannot be won simply by debating immigration, nor the migration crisis solved merely by enacting migration policies. Anxieties about immigration are an expression of a wider sense of political voicelessness and disengagement. Until that underlying political problem is tackled, the arrival of migrants on Europe’s shores will continue to be seen as a crisis.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.theguardian.com

Without any doubt, one of the best articles recently written on the refugee crisis in Europe.

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