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John Michael Greer's Blog
November 18, 2009
- Advocates of today's mainstream economics still commonly use the guild economies of the Middle Ages as a convenient whipping boy, following a fashion set in motion by Adam Smith. A glance at the way those older economic systems worked in a world of limited markets and difficult transportation, though, suggests that the failed economic paradigms of the present have no reason to boast. The latest ...
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November 11, 2009
- It's common these days to hear claims that any shortfall in energy due to peak oil will automatically be taken care of by the market. Unfortunately for such rosy-eyed notions, there's good reason to think that in an economy constrained by energy shortages, market forces will drive money away from investments that could make a difference. The latest post from The Archdruid Report.
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November 4, 2009
- Pick a problem, any problem, and dollars will get you doughnuts somebody will pop up insisting that the free market will solve it. There's just one difficulty with this comfortable faith -- free markets are as mythical as hippogriffs. The Archdruid explains, in this latest post from The Archdruid Report.
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October 28, 2009
- These days, if a mainstream economist offers you financial advice, you may well be better off doing the opposite of what he suggests. The reasons for that go deep into the neoclassical synthesis that dominates today's economic thought. Another irritable post from The Archdruid Report.
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October 21, 2009
- Social critics, with some justice, have accused today's industrial democracies of being corrupt and dysfunctional. The problem is that what replaces them need not be an improvement. The latest post from The Archdruid Report.
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October 7, 2009
- What do you have when you put 100 economists on a desert island with $1 million each but no food or water? A good start, some might suggest, but from another perspective you've got an uncomfortably close analogue to the modern world's predicament at the end of the age of cheap oil. The latest post from The Archdruid Report.
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September 30, 2009
- Plenty of people these days think of metaphysics as one of those abstruse subjects that give otherwise unemployable academics something to do with their time. Meanwhile the industrial world hurtles toward disaster along a trajectory defined, in part, by a common metaphysical error. The latest post from The Archdruid Report.
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September 23, 2009
- Ever noticed that whenever the economy is preparing to tank due to the latest delusional speculative binge, the vast majority of economists who make any public comment at all can be heard insisting that nothing is wrong and everyone can get rich? The Archdruid has. Here's the latest irritable post from The Archdruid Report.
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September 16, 2009
- Our collective conversation on the future of industrial society has become an inkblot onto which many of us project our own dissatisfactions with the human condition and fantasies of a better world. The latest curmudgeonly post from The Archdruid Report.
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September 9, 2009
- The recent debate in print between George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth over the prospects of saving industrial civilization from itself n ever quite managed to get out from under some deeply problematic assumptions. The latest post from The Archdruid Report.
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September 2, 2009
- A couple of recent news squibs -- the Chinese government's crackdown on exports of rare earth elements, and the rise of the total paper value of the world's derivative markets to over one quadrillion dollars -- offer a glimpse at the unwelcome future rising up behind the facade of the present. The latest from The Archdruid Report.
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August 26, 2009
- The second law of thermodynamics, better known as the law of entropy, is the gold standard of physics -- the law you can rely on when everything else gets weird. Why, then, is it as welcome as a slug in a salad in the collective conversation about our energy future? The reason is profoundly human -- and profoundly troubling. The latest wry comment from The Archdruid Report.
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August 19, 2009
- The Archdruid returns from vacation with a flurry of unexpected announcements and a glimpse at a future resembling nothing so much as the nineteeth-century past. The latest post from The Archdruid Report.
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July 29, 2009
- A faultline runs through the middle of the modern world's imagination of its own economic life -- the gap between the real world, where entropy rules, and the world of money, where interest keeps on stacking up to infinity. Crossing that gap requires a recognition of one of the least popular phenomena of modern economics. The latest post from The Archdruid Report.
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July 22, 2009
- The economy of goods and services and the economy of money don't play by the same rules. With the help of an imaginary bond and a sadistic thermostat, the Archdruid explains why the resulting mismatch is dragging industrial society down to ruin. The latest post from The Archdruid Report.
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