Sustainable development and the financial system
“If… the ‘services’ of a landlord or hedge fund manager are treated as productive, they magically become part of GDP.” (Mazzucato 2018:97). SDG10 and the Financial System One of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is number 10: Reduce inequality within and between countries. Like many other SDGs, it is ambitious and ambiguous. Is there an ‘optimal’ inequality, as many economists [...]
The idea of ‘waste’
What is waste? A friend once took me to the urban waste treatment plant in Kolkata and I had the strange experience of looking into the stomach and intestines of a huge organism. Across an enormous field, human beings were processing from the right to the left the urban garbage stream in a kind of digestive process. It looked more organized [...]
Chinese Worldviews
In the book Sustainability Science, I have argued that the location of sustainability is in the center of worldview space, where the balance is found between individual and collective and between material and immaterial (§6.3). The notion of two opposite forces in dynamic equilibrium provides an ingenious description of what is called worldview dynamics in this book. The idea of [...]
Decision Making in Politics
Can you please stop telling me 'all people are different'? A textbook on sustainable development should address public decision making and politics. Politics can be described as the area in society where issues transcending mere individual needs and activities are debated and decided and where disagreement is legitimate. It has its own rules and rites. Miklos Persanyi, former Environment Minister [...]
[Modelling] Economic Growth
The important problem of steady state would not be production but distribution. You can no longer avoid the problem of relative distribution by resorting to growth. (Herman Daly, personal communication) What is the essence of the neoclassical growth model? What is the role of technology? And what is needed to make macro-economic (growth) theory relevant in the 21st century? The [...]
Materials Transition
Conceptual framework The gradual change from mining ores to mining in-use-stocks can be considered a materials transition. The ratios between metal in the lithosphere, in in-use stocks and in end-of-lifetime stocks are indicators of the degree to which human use of the metal is progressing from virgin ore only to recycled material only. It can be simulated for past use [...]