Jamaica in the 1970s: Govt. investments in development (health, education, housing, agriculture). Imagine a well-running hospital, educated personnel, well-equipped, affordable. Debt is now 150% of GDP. State funds are committed to service debt. So imagine the same hospital 40 years later, no maintenance, insufficient(ly) trained staff, expensive medicine/treatment…
Economic stability leads to instability (Hyman Minsky)
Regional currency system
How banks work
There’s a lot of confusion about how banks work and where money comes from. Very few members of the public really understand it. Economics graduates have a slightly better idea, but many university economics courses still teach a model of banking that hasn’t applied to the real world for decades. The worrying thing is that many policy makers and economist still work on this outdated model. In this video course we’ll discover how banks really work, and how money is created.
Measuring quality not quantity (Hazel Henderson)
10 calories of hydrocarbon energy in every calorie of food (Michael Ruppert)
Technological Disobedience in Cuba (Ernesto Oroza)
In 1991, Cuba’s economy began to implode. “The Special Period in the Time of Peace” was the government’s euphemism for what was a culmination of 30 years worth of isolation. It began in the 60s, with engineers leaving Cuba for America. Ernesto Oroza, a designer and artist, studied the innovations created during this period. He found that the general population had created homespun, Frankenstein-like machines for their survival, made from everyday objects. Oroza began to collect these machines, and would later contextualize it as “art” in a movement he dubbed “Technological Disobedience.”
Perspectives on Environment and Development (Various)
Sustainable Systems (Donella Meadows)
Lecture from Donella Meadows on sustainable systems, which integrates ecological and equity concerns. In this talk, she refers to the Daly Laws (see also Sustainability and the scale of the economy (Herman Daly). Here is another one of her lectures: Down to Earth (Donella Meadows). Meadows draws on systems thinking; an approach with historical roots explained in Cybernetics, self-organisation and power (Adam Curtis).
Summary of ‘Development in Bad Waters’
For those who haven’t had a chance to see the full documentary ‘Development in Bad Waters’, we summarised the main points in this 8-minutes short version.