Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel and colleagues estimated that the earth might be able to sustain only 2 billion people by the end of the fossil fuel era. There are about 7.5 billion humans on the planet right now. It seems counterintuitive that there is nearly 4 times the sustainable population now living on the […]
When I was teaching, I used to joke with students that my classes were particularly demanding because I wanted to be sure they would succeed in the real world so that they could pay for my Social Security checks. Economists are supposed to believe that self interest is the dominant human motivator. I was only […]
Economists become famous by winning the Nobel Prize (technically the Swedish National Bank’s Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) or becoming public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith or Paul Krugman. But economists do not have to be famous to be important. Significant contributions come in many guises. The most important economist you […]
I recently suggested that one solution to the crisis of our age is a shift in economic paradigms to one called Sustainable De-growth. To understand fully the implications of de-growth, we need to see where the phenomenon of growth comes from. A new book by Swiss economic historian Matthias Schmelzer provides deep insights into the […]
By the middle of the 20th Century the world had endured two world wars and a global economic depression unprecedented since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. With the defeat of various forms of Fascism in World War II, Soviet and Chinese forms of Communism vied with Democratic Market Capitalism to dominate the social and […]
