“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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Measuring monetary flows: I-O matrices National economic models have usually more sectors than the economic growth models discussed so far. Such sectoral disaggregation is based on a table or matrix of the intersectoral flows, or intermediate deliveries, between economic sectors: the input-output (I-O) table. They offer a bridge between the empirical data on monetary transactions [...]
Reading the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were agreed upon by the United Nations in 2015 in the document Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (sustainabledevelopment.un.org), I am struck by the high level of aspiration not to say idealism. The Goals do indeed demand a transformation and, besides focused technological innovations, crucial [...]
‘When you understand that the take-it-or-leave-it prices now being offered [by wholesalers] mean that you’ll pay more to produce crops than you’ll get back in proceeds, you’re left with the choice of either becoming a slave to this impossible system or find a niche to begin other activities.’ This statement is from a French farmer, [...]