The Intellectual History of a Tangled Relationship, with Barnaby Raine — Episode Link:https://musingmind.org/podcasts/barnaby-raine Barnaby Raine joins me on the Musing Mind Podcast to discuss the intellectual history of how capitalism has shaped the ‘self’, our subjective experience of who & what we are, from Marx, to Rousseau, Durkheim, Lukács, Adorno & Horkheimer, Marcuse, Foucault, Fanon, & finally to the present with folks like…

Why We Stubbornly Cling to GDP — Why, despite widespread criticism, do we still cling to GDP as primary metric for economic vitality? In the same 1934 report where Simon Kuznets first introduced the concept of GDP, he cautioned: “Economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known. And no income measurement…

A Policy Proposal — Executive Summary This document proposes a basic income for the U.S. in the form of a negative income tax (NIT). It proposes an income floor for all adults (18+) in the economy of $13,000 per year, indexed to the federal poverty line. This proposal leaves aside the question of how best to…

(Consider the Basic Income) — Basic income could be like injecting a syringe of vitality into our weary veins, from which a rush of economic possibilities would re-color our perception of the world. These days, the only thing that feels so certain as the need for socioeconomic change is the learned sense that nothing will…

Poverty, Inequality, & Post-Scarcity — This is an essay about Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the same way that arguing with your spouse over leaving dishes in the sink is really about the dishes. Sure, the dishes matter. But there are deeper, subliminal forces at play. Those are what really matter. UBI spearheads a resurgent…

Complexity Economics & Ending Poverty — Though we remain mostly unclear as to whether chickens precede eggs, or eggs precede chickens¹, a sentiment is afoot that new ideological paradigms precede radical policies and structural change. From systems theorist Donella Meadows, novelist Marilynne Robinson, to progressive economist Mariana Mazzucato, we find variations on the idea that policies…

Scarcity is often considered a natural, eternal condition. There is not, and cannot be, enough for everybody, wrote Thomas Malthus in 1798: “…the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” Because of resource scarcity, life is not free; we must…

Designing for Emergence — What is the universe, and what might it want? Obviously, I’ve no idea. But we’re mythopoetic creatures, and even the humblest among us cannot help but weave stories about what we are, where we are, and what we might do in response. …

Moving beyond neoliberal individualism towards digitized cultures of interdependence & democratized liberation. Every morning I wake up to the kind of decision that might look small on the surface, but for which that visible surface is just the tip of an enormity that lies beneath. Do I roll out of…