A MUST READ article with links to an interactive epidemic calculator and many simple graphics for understanding best actions to meet challenges of an epidemic. What the Next 18 Months Can Look Like, if Leaders Buy Us Time Summary of the article: Strong coronavirus measures today should only last a few weeks, there shouldn’t be […]
Debtors of the World, Unite!
Debt’s ubiquity is a burden, but also an opportunity. Millions of debtors, isolated, are owned by the banks. But if you’re part of a collective that owes $14.15 trillion, you all own the banks. The point of debtors’ unions is not merely debt cancellation or even robust public goods handed to us by state power. It is […]
Saving the Internet—and all the commons it makes possible
This is the Ostrom Memorial Lecture I gave on 9 October of last year for the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. Here is the video. (The intro starts at 8 minutes in, and my part starts just after 11 minutes in.) I usually speak off the cuff, but this time I wrote it out, originally in outline form*, which is germane […]
Perennial philosophy
Aldous Huxley argued that all religions in the world were underpinned by universal beliefs and experiences. Was he right? When I was a teenager, I came across Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy (1945). I was so inspired by its array of mystical jewels that, like a magpie, I stole it from my school’s library. I still have […]
The Weakness of the Furies
Victim anger can be useful to the political struggle, but it can also become excessive and obsessive, deforming the self. We need to address the future, and for that we need an uncertain trust and a radical type of love. Thus did every type of bad practice take root in Greece, fed by these civil […]