An economy that knows your name

I’m lucky enough to call Western Massachusetts home. One of the reasons I cherish living here is that I live in a region that still believes community is something we build together.

The purpose of economic life is to sustain people and places, not to sacrifice them to the gains of a few.

Most of us were handed an economy we didn’t design and weren’t asked about. We were taught to navigate it — find work, manage money, build security — but not to question its premises. The premises were presented as facts: people are primarily self-interested; competition drives progress; growth is the measure of health. Yet these are not facts. They are choices. And choices, as it turns out, can be changed.

Economies built on mutuality can reshape the rules of the system itself.

When I was young, the “economy” showed up at the end of the evening news, right next to the weather—“Today the Dow closed…”. It never occurred to me that the economy belonged to all of us—or that my choices had any bearing on how it worked. But then in the early 70s I started to experiment with new ways of exchanging goods and services. We bought our vegetables from a food co-op, we organized a buying group to save money on groceries, we started a business that we passed on to its workers at cost. But how these small steps actually changed the capital E Economy remained a mystery.

The bill comes due: biophysical limits are becoming more obvious to more people

Nate Hagens is a systems thinker and educator focused on the “human predicament” at the intersection of energy, economy, ecology, and human behavior. He’s been tracking how our financial stories and growth expectations have drifted away from the physical realities of energy, materials, and a finite biosphere. In this article he notes that the trends he has been warning about are no longer hypothetical; they are cohering into what he calls a “biophysical phase shift” in the global system.

How can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange?

This week my friend and colleague Beth Tener wondered aloud how a country as wealthy as ours can leave so many people without the stability and opportunity our prosperity should make possible. She pointed us to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s reimagining of how we exchange value.

Making secondhand shopping feel stylish and enjoyable

Eskilstuna, a city of about 65,000 people in central Sweden, is a university town and an industrial center. The wider municipality has just over 107,000 residents.

Endless growth is destroying the planet. We know how to stop it.

"In July 1979, shortly after installing a set of solar panels over the West Wing, Jimmy Carter did something peculiar for a peacetime president."

How money can help to disrupt some of the deep, systemic inequities in this country, instead of continuing to feed them.

"In my own Native American belief system, we are all relatives. We are also all infected with what I call the 'colonizer virus' — which urges us to divide, control, and exploit. Nowhere is the virus more symptomatic than in how we deal with wealth."

Why can't everyone have well-funded schools, reliable infrastructure, wages that keep workers out of poverty, or a comprehensive public health system equipped to handle pandemics?

"Over a two-decade career in the white-collar think tank world, I’ve continually wondered: Why can’t we have nice things?

Why did Spotify and Skype start in Sweden? Because Swedish homes had government-supported broadband.

As Klarna's billionaire founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski prepares to stage one of the biggest-ever European fintech company listings, a feast of capitalism, he credits an unlikely backer for his runaway success: the Swedish welfare state.

We don't need to sacrifice prosperity, but to redefine it.

Many scientists, politicians, and commentators have disparaged degrowth as unrealistic, and asserted that there simply isn’t enough political will to pursue it. We must act on climate now, they say, and we must act within the parameters of our current economic system. There is no time for a revolution.

Where restorative justice and economic development meet

‍The Historic Clayborn Temple served as the home base for Memphis sanitation workers organizing and striking against unsafe and inhumane working conditions faced by Black garbage collectors in 1968.