Article Roundup

A Taste For Number Magic - It’s a strange and pernicious notion that has been foisted upon Western society by economists: you and I, they tell us, by giving free rein to greed, selfishness, competitive malice, and megalomania, perform a valuable public service. We can spend our days pitting ourselves against the welfare and livelihood of others, and then trust “the market” to transform our venality into a public good…. Somehow, through a kind of magic, the social value will automatically condense out of the numbers and percolate through society as a healing balm…. How could this grotesque notion — the notion that private vice equals public good — gain such widespread acceptance? (Via P2P Foundation)

The Commons: Year One of the Global Commons Movement - Whatever we do, whatever we produce – we need common pool resources. So, the very question we have to answer is: What do we want to do with them? Do we want to produce commodities and convert everything – our collective knowledge, our genes, solar energy, public arenas and spaces, water, beaches, social care etc. – into commodities? Or do we want to sustain and reproduce them as commons? It’s our choice.

The Onset of Catabolic Collapse - The central idea of catabolic collapse is that human societies pretty consistently tend to produce more stuff than they can afford to maintain. What we are pleased to call "primitive societies" -- that is, societies that are well enough adapted to their environments that they get by comfortably without huge masses of cumbersome and expensive infrastructure -- usually do so in a fairly small way, and very often evolve traditional ways of getting rid of excess goods at regular intervals so that the cost of maintaining it doesn't become a burden. As societies expand and start to depend on complex infrastructure to support the daily activities of their inhabitants, though, it becomes harder and less popular to do this, and so the maintenance needs of the infrastructure and the rest of the society's stuff gradually build up until they reach a level that can't be covered by the resources on hand.