We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, June 26, 2014

What Piketty forgot

Click here to access article by Noel Ortega from Foreign Policy in Focus.

 Ortega explains not only what Piketty forgot, but provides a good summary of his thesis in Piketty's important tome entitled Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Exactingly empirical and deeply multidisciplinary, [Capital in the Twenty-First Century] is an extremely important contribution to the study of economics and inequality over the last few centuries. But because it fails to address the real limits on growth—namely our ecological crisis—it can’t be a roadmap for the next.
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