A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Economy

  • Asking the right questions

    “Eco-economist” Herman Daly tries to inject some clarity into the debate on climate change. Even if some of the details are up in the air, he says, the trajectory is clear and we need to ask if this is the direction we want to be going in. It seems to me that a lot of Read more

  • Christians and markets

    Here’s a smart article by Kathryn D. Blanchard, a professor of Religious Studies at Alma College. She argues that Christians, especially the Christian intelligensia, need to get beyond abstractions about “the market” and “capitalism” and look at the ways in which particular markets can serve or impede human flourishing. She makes some points that ought Read more

  • “Green consumerism” vs. consuming less

    A couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran a story on the new “green consumerism.” Today George Monbiot writes that it’s not good enough to “buy green”; we have to buy less. His contention is that “green” consumption is at this point a supplement to rather than a replacement of conventional consumption and Read more

  • The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society 3: The Christian revolution

    (See previous posts here and here.) In chapter 8 Jardine discusses what he calls the cosmological and anthropological revolution wrought by Christianity and why it holds the key to facing the dilemma of the technological society. That dilemma, recall, is that we human beings have found ourselves with the capacity to radically alter our environment Read more

  • Localism versus/and nationalism?

    I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t at least a little bit sympathetically disposed to Bill Kauffman’s paean to neo-secessionists in Vermont, but I’m not so sure that ultra-localism is the solution to the problems that the secessionists identify. For one thing, to the extent that they deplore the effects of the global marketplace, Read more

  • Peak oil and the end of liberalism

    Patrick Deneen writes that modern liberalism – “the philosophy premised upon a belief in individual autonomy, one that rejected the centrality of culture and tradition, that eschewed the goal or aim of cultivation toward the good established by dint of (human) nature itself, that regarded all groups and communities as arbitrarily formed and therefore alterable Read more

  • Globalization from above

    This interesting piece by NYU economist William Easterly calls bs on the “Ideology of Development” – the notion that all nations can become “developed” by instituting reforms orchestrated by elite technicians and experts from the IMF-World Bank-UN axis. Easterly points out that 1) the countries that have most closely followed the advice of the experts Read more

  • The Humane Society vs. the farm bill

    The Humane Society is opposing section 123 of the proposed 2007 Farm Bill which is supposed to be voted on by the House very soon. The section says that: Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no State or locality shall make any law prohibiting the use in commerce of an article that the Secretary of Read more

  • Economics for community

    As I mentioned previously, Daly and Cobb’s central concern is that the abstractions of economics leave out aspects of reality that are crucial to understanding the world and shaping the economy in a way that nourishes community and is sustainable in the long run. Following A.N. Whitehead, they refer to the phenomenon of treating an Read more

  • Economics as if people (and other living things) mattered

    I’m in Indianapolis visiting family, and one of the things I like to do whenever I’m here is make a trip to Half Price Books. Yesterday I picked up a copy of For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future by World Bank economist Herman Daly and process Read more