Ha, yes, I did take notes and wanted to give a bit of a summary of what the reader would get. Guilty. Yes, I've followed Nate for a while and enjoy the great simplification. He does great work. More people should tune in to him.
Austerity cannot ever work because of basic accounting identities: a deficit in the government sector means that the non-government sector is in surplus and attempting to run a government surplus forces the non-government sector into debt. This is why George Osbourne had to use Quantitive Easing to inject more money into the UK economy after initiating austerity in 2010.
Richard Murphy's blog site has an excellent summary of the nonsense of austerity:
And anyway the problem isn't just capitalism, it's the reliance on exchange logic in general. We need to move to a system of mutual aid and interdependence, grounded in bioregions rather than nation-states.
Excellent!! I bought the book and even my 14 year old grandson is having me read parts to him. The young ones see for themselves this rigged system isn't working.
I just finished reading EFC this morning. What I loved about it was just how well she articulated why capitalism is so rotten. However, I walked away from it feeling like there wasn't nearly enough attention paid to the book's promise - the 'escaping capitalism' part. The last 25 or so pages in the book are all that you're going to get, and there's not much mention (from what I recall) on actions the average person in the Global North can take now to loosen their dependency on the worst of things. If I was reviewing it somewhere, I'd give it four stars.
AND I also deeply appreciated learning about this economist! My undergrad is in economics, and I studied applied economics in graduate school. I dropped out AFTER I'd earned enough credits to graduate in part because I could no longer stomach the discipline [specifically, the complete lack of exploration of any system outside of capitalism, the neoclassical approach, and my disdain with the whole utility-maximization and profit-maximization models.] If I had been the author's student - an unlikelihood, considering we were probably in graduate school at around the same time - I suspect that I would have had a very different experience.
The first part of this reads as though you took notes while reading Escape FC and then just put up the notes without constructing a clear narrative from them, But the latter half is good, and I think you're right that the biggest obstacle to deconstructing capitalism is that most of us have been brainwashed into thinking it's the only way to organize society. So putting together a critique that shows how awful it is with one that focuses on alternatives and (I hope, haven't read the book) a pathway from here to there. And I have a thought for how to make this panel discussion happen-do you follow Nate Hagens and his Great Simplification podcast? He's done over 200 interviews with guests with a wide variety of expertise, and sometimes does a roundtable with two or three prior guests at once. He might be prejudiced in favor of capitalism--in a prior life he was a Wall St. trader--but he's well aware of the unsustainability of the current system.
I look forward to reading the book. But I can't how many times I've picked up similar books, and come away disappointed. If you read such books, you know there is a great convergence in their analyses of what capitalism will doom us all.
But what I keep hoping to find, but haven't so far, is someone who spends most of their book not on knocking on capitalism, but in laying out a strategy of how we might go about setting up a functional parallel economy. There are lots of bits and pieces lying around: cooperatives, commoning, gardening, transition towns, etc.
What I would like to see is a step-by-step strategy, starting, as almost everyone agrees on, at a local level: how do we create the foundational community wealth to build the businesses we need to feed, clothe, and house ourselves as we transition to a steady-state economy? Most of the literature I've read ends up counseling us to do what we can where we are, with an either implicit or explicit assumption that whatever local things we can get do will somehow come together in a coherent way when capitalism finally fails.
If you know of anyone who's writing clearly along these lines, please comment on this post!
I think things are more complex than first appearance.
There are so many tired tropes about the evils of capitalism, and so little actually taking responsibility for it.
I see capitalists and consumers as bound-up in a co-dependency. Take a walk through Costco or Mall•Wart and make a careful list of things that are actually necessary for a decent life. I'd guess less than 1% to 10% qualifies.
Who needs 20 different kinds of granola bars? And don't get me started on "fast fashion". I don't even know what perhaps 10% of the things for sale actually do!
In the drive to "express your individuality through brand name conformity", we have become willing accomplices in the excesses of capitalism.
It's not that I'm defending capitalism! But people who vote with their money are making bad choices that enable and reinforce capitalism, and authors need to point that out.
Agreed. Our culture values overconsumption and consumption as identity. It wasn’t this way for most of human history. It will be again, but may take collapse to get there.
Ha, yes, I did take notes and wanted to give a bit of a summary of what the reader would get. Guilty. Yes, I've followed Nate for a while and enjoy the great simplification. He does great work. More people should tune in to him.
Austerity cannot ever work because of basic accounting identities: a deficit in the government sector means that the non-government sector is in surplus and attempting to run a government surplus forces the non-government sector into debt. This is why George Osbourne had to use Quantitive Easing to inject more money into the UK economy after initiating austerity in 2010.
Richard Murphy's blog site has an excellent summary of the nonsense of austerity:
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/glossary/#austerity
And anyway the problem isn't just capitalism, it's the reliance on exchange logic in general. We need to move to a system of mutual aid and interdependence, grounded in bioregions rather than nation-states.
Sounds about right to me. Thanks for reading and keep spreading the word.
Excellent!! I bought the book and even my 14 year old grandson is having me read parts to him. The young ones see for themselves this rigged system isn't working.
I just finished reading EFC this morning. What I loved about it was just how well she articulated why capitalism is so rotten. However, I walked away from it feeling like there wasn't nearly enough attention paid to the book's promise - the 'escaping capitalism' part. The last 25 or so pages in the book are all that you're going to get, and there's not much mention (from what I recall) on actions the average person in the Global North can take now to loosen their dependency on the worst of things. If I was reviewing it somewhere, I'd give it four stars.
AND I also deeply appreciated learning about this economist! My undergrad is in economics, and I studied applied economics in graduate school. I dropped out AFTER I'd earned enough credits to graduate in part because I could no longer stomach the discipline [specifically, the complete lack of exploration of any system outside of capitalism, the neoclassical approach, and my disdain with the whole utility-maximization and profit-maximization models.] If I had been the author's student - an unlikelihood, considering we were probably in graduate school at around the same time - I suspect that I would have had a very different experience.
The first part of this reads as though you took notes while reading Escape FC and then just put up the notes without constructing a clear narrative from them, But the latter half is good, and I think you're right that the biggest obstacle to deconstructing capitalism is that most of us have been brainwashed into thinking it's the only way to organize society. So putting together a critique that shows how awful it is with one that focuses on alternatives and (I hope, haven't read the book) a pathway from here to there. And I have a thought for how to make this panel discussion happen-do you follow Nate Hagens and his Great Simplification podcast? He's done over 200 interviews with guests with a wide variety of expertise, and sometimes does a roundtable with two or three prior guests at once. He might be prejudiced in favor of capitalism--in a prior life he was a Wall St. trader--but he's well aware of the unsustainability of the current system.
I look forward to reading the book. But I can't how many times I've picked up similar books, and come away disappointed. If you read such books, you know there is a great convergence in their analyses of what capitalism will doom us all.
But what I keep hoping to find, but haven't so far, is someone who spends most of their book not on knocking on capitalism, but in laying out a strategy of how we might go about setting up a functional parallel economy. There are lots of bits and pieces lying around: cooperatives, commoning, gardening, transition towns, etc.
What I would like to see is a step-by-step strategy, starting, as almost everyone agrees on, at a local level: how do we create the foundational community wealth to build the businesses we need to feed, clothe, and house ourselves as we transition to a steady-state economy? Most of the literature I've read ends up counseling us to do what we can where we are, with an either implicit or explicit assumption that whatever local things we can get do will somehow come together in a coherent way when capitalism finally fails.
If you know of anyone who's writing clearly along these lines, please comment on this post!
https://substack.com/@earthregenerator?utm_source=global-search
I think things are more complex than first appearance.
There are so many tired tropes about the evils of capitalism, and so little actually taking responsibility for it.
I see capitalists and consumers as bound-up in a co-dependency. Take a walk through Costco or Mall•Wart and make a careful list of things that are actually necessary for a decent life. I'd guess less than 1% to 10% qualifies.
Who needs 20 different kinds of granola bars? And don't get me started on "fast fashion". I don't even know what perhaps 10% of the things for sale actually do!
In the drive to "express your individuality through brand name conformity", we have become willing accomplices in the excesses of capitalism.
It's not that I'm defending capitalism! But people who vote with their money are making bad choices that enable and reinforce capitalism, and authors need to point that out.
Agreed. Our culture values overconsumption and consumption as identity. It wasn’t this way for most of human history. It will be again, but may take collapse to get there.