One image sums up my time in the Omo Valley: the remote area in south-west Ethiopia where tribal cultures still flourish. I’m attending a wedding in a village several miles down a dusty path, barely usable by vehicles. The woman in front of me has the braided, red-dyed hair typical for women of the Hammar […]
Archive | Economics
RSS feed for this sectionHow Modern Economics Erodes Social Resilience
In systems design, a key way to create resilience is via duplication or even redundancy: for any crucial component, there is a counterpart which can hum into action if the main one fails. This principle is important in sustainability too: organic farms have several kinds of crops, and livestock, which mean that if one fails, […]
Don’t Even Think About It: why our brains are wired to ignore climate change by George Marshall
Don’t Even Think About It: why our brains are wired to ignore climate change. This book is an eloquent explanation of the issue in the title: well-researched, and refreshingly written. It is serious, but not a depressing lecture: the book is entertaining and engaging, partly through its use of stories and interviews as a way […]
Book Review: Freefall by Joseph Stiglitz
Book Review: Freefall by Joseph Stiglitz The flaky mortgage lending was aimed at exploiting the lower classes – he would say, deliberately. This is a clear and level-headed book on the causes of the American financial crash and the botched solutions to it.
Book review: Cancel The Apocalypse
Cancel The Apocalypse: book by Andrew Simms Useful, informative and sometimes annoying…