The Wealth of Nature

1. The Wealth of Nature Economics as if Survival Mattered John Michael Greer Miyeko Inafuku Ecological Economics Spring 2012

2. A Guide for the Perplexed • Adam Smith – same year as Declaration of Independence & beginning of British Industrialism • Rise of economics not accompanied by improvement in societies’ abilities to manage economic affairs • Ernst Friedrich Schumacher: • Distinction between primary and secondary goods • Central role of E among primary goods • Cost/worker of establishing/maintaining a workplace • Look at basic assumptions/metaphysics of economics • We must “revision” the way we deal with production/distribution of goods/services

3. The Failure of Economics • The illusion of invincibility • The failure of markets • Harnessing hippogriffs • The market as commons • E’s rules • Lies and statistics • Economic superstitions • Undead money

4. The Failure of Economics • “…a world that has nearly seven billion people on it and a dwindling supply of fossil fuels can do without the assumption that putting people out of work and replacing them with machines powered by fossil fuels is the way to prosperity.”

5. The 3 Economies • The power of paradigms • Primary and secondary goods • Exchange value and nature’s wealth • The anti-ecology of money • The finance trap • Before money

6. The Metaphysics of Money • The metastasis of money • The flight into abstraction • The twilight of money • The money bubble • The end of investment

7. The Price of Energy • E follows its bliss • A crisis of concentration • Barbarism and good brandy • Working with diffuse energy • The economics of entropy

8. The Appropriate Tools • The end of the Information Age • The economics of contraction • The twilight of the machine • Toward appropriate technologies • Becoming a Third World Country • The twilight of the American Empire • Survival isn’t cost effective

9. The Appropriate Tools • “It should be obvious that whether or not a given technology continues to exist in a time of faltering abundance depends on three economic factors:” • Are the things done by the tech. necessities or luxuries? • If they are necessities, just how necessary are they? • Can the same things, or at least the necessary portion of them, be done by another tech. at a lower cost in scarce resources? • How do the benefits gained by keeping the tech. supplied with the scarce resources it needs measure up to benefits gained by putting those same resources to other uses?

10. The Road Ahead • Remembering what worked • Defending the commons • Taxing the right things • Housebreaking the corporations • A crisis of complexity • Back to the future • A future of victory gardens • After retirement

11. Small is Beautiful • Age of abundance is over • Monasteries • “Mvmts away from an obsession with material wealth are in fact very common in civilizations that have passed the Hubbert peak of their own core resource base…In a contracting economy, it becomes easier to notice that the less you need, the less vulnerable you are to the ups and downs of fortune, and the more you can get done of whatever it is that you want to do.”

12. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/