Fred L Block, Capitalism. The Future of an Illusion. Oakland, Cal: University of California Press 2018 describes capitalism as an illusion: the understanding of capitalism as a closed system, self-regulated and self-propelling, following its own laws and logic...
The conversations’ topic is the overexploitation of the energy that nature provides. The propellor of this overexploitation is our understanding of the economy as driven by growth through value added in a transaction chain with our present monetary price system as the gauge. Quilligan argues for an alternative value system steered by nature’s replenishment and resilience. The price does not have money but energy value in his order. The current price for a liter of petrol driving a combustible engine is valued in money as a currency with a shifting market value. It must have a value in joules of sunlight embodied within the fossil fuel, Quilligan argues. The price must be derived from biophysical calculation. Earth’s carrying capacity is a key term in his reasoning.’
The Value of Energy. Conversations with James QuilliganBS We have come to the third and final blog in our conversation about your article, Who Will Pay Back the Earth? The theme of these talks is The Value of Energy. We have discussed new ways of thinking about...
The Value of Energy. Conversations with James QuilliganBS In Who Will Pay Back the Earth, you refer to an emerging competition between two world currencies, the US dollar and a potential BRICS currency. BRICS nations have declared their ambition to replace the...
The Value of Energy. Conversations with James QuilliganBS James, in your article Who Will Pay Back the Earth, you talk about an “energy quest myth” behind human societies and communities' long pursuit of energy. Early on, humans learned to generate surplus energy...
Mariana Mazzucato’s proposal for a new embedding of capitalism is inspired by the Kennedy administration’s Apollo project for landing a man on the moon. The contrast proposal is an anarcho-capitalist’s Mars project. She departs from the postulation that...
When the environmental and resource exhaustion problems from the beginning of the 1970s could no longer be swept under the carpet, and the Fordist labour productivity ceased to increase, the pie stopped growing. Wages and profits, consumer prices and production...
The 2024 UN Pact for the Future outlines a brave plan for a new world order. Its ideas are not new. The plan echoes the Brandt Commission on the North-South issue in the 1970s and the Carlsson-Ramphal Commission on global governance in the 1990s. Will political...
The future as progress The belief that the future is progress broke through with the French revolution and the enlightenment philosophy that paved its way. Before that, a cyclical time perspective had prevailed since antiquity. Cyclical time had a political...
This essay argues for a new universal meta norm in a time when there is no convincing grand narrative. The point of reference is the UN universal human rights declaration in 1948 and the de-essentialising postcolonial debate around key concepts like hybridity,...
