Sublime

One person who was willing to risk political suicide was the visionary systems thinker Donella Meadows – one of the lead authors of the 1972 Limits to Growth report – and she didn’t mince her words. ‘Growth is one of the stupidest purposes ever invented by any culture,’ she declared in the late 1990s; ‘we’ve got to have an enough.’ In response to

those policies targeted at universal primary education have had tremendous progressive consequences over the long term, while others had less impact.

Corporations collectively make investment decisions that cause business-cycle downturns. Poor people have more babies than they can support. Why? Because of what World Bank economist Herman Daly calls the “invisible foot” or what Nobel Prize–winning economist Herbert Simon calls bounded rationality.

of larger society. So that’s a very old battle in human history between the self-serving stories of an elite and the stories that can actually help serve a broader society. Part of what we’ve seen in our economics is that elites previously used to appeal to gods, to how our ancestors did it, to the natural order, etc., to make credible their

The people around us influence how we perceive the global society. In other words, we use our own social milieu to make inferences about how people we don’t know live their lives. But this may backfire when we live in homogeneous social environments and rarely meet people living in different circumstances. English psychologist Rael Dawtry and his

Mr. L. Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based bipedal life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn’t know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial

He was twenty-eight when the master died; and this tragic end of a quiet life left its mark on every phase of the pupil’s thought. It filled him with such a scorn of democracy, such a hatred of the mob, as even his aristocratic lineage and breeding had hardly engendered in him; it led him to a Catonic resolve that democracy must be destroyed, to be

Social Darwinists proposed that all humans began by facing a fair struggle over scarce resources: money, jobs, esteem. Some gained the upper hand in this contest, not because of improper advantages or luck but because they were intrinsically better than those they outpaced. The rich were not better from a moral point of view. They were,