The Trump tax cut had two primary purposes: 1) political: to make Trump seem like he is “pro-business”, and 2) economic: to give free help to already overvalued stock portfolios, to delay the collapse of the current bubble. The single most salient fact about the Trump tax cut was largely ignored by those who passed … Continue reading Clipped Wings: Trump Tax Cuts Slow New Income to Main Street
Today, we honor the day American independence was declared, and the fact that our independent republic still stands 243 years later. We pride ourselves on being a democratic society, where the value of human freedom and dignity carries more weight than the whims of those who wield power. There are many reasons we must remain … Continue reading Environmental Security is Freedom
To catalyze economy-wide climate-smart finance everyone needs access to actionable resilience-building insight. Two days before the Paris Agreement was adopted by 195 nations, in December 2015, the Citizens’ Climate Engagement Network put forward the ACCESS standard for tracking implementation. Designed to be flexible, adaptive, and universal — and dynamic enough to fit any national climate … Continue reading Resilience Intelligence: ACCESS to the Future
The United States requires major infrastructure investment. Economic recovery will be unsustainable without a major new commitment to build for a highly mobile innovation-driven middle class renewal. The nation’s engineers have outlined in great detail the trillions of dollars required to update, upgrade, and catch up on serious maintenance deficits. One of the worst economy-wide … Continue reading Infrastructure must Meet Real Human Needs
The world’s wealthiest 42 individuals now hold as much wealth as the poorest 3.7 billion. This corrosive market failure is driving a perversion of the whole economic landscape, where capital feeds capital, without necessarily providing what makes healthy societies, which should be the basis for market success. With extreme wealth abstracted at this level from … Continue reading Income Inequality puts Everything We Value at Risk
The elephant in the room is everything we do not count. When investors say a speculative opportunity is a “sure thing”, most people know to treat their certainty with suspicion. Some prefer to focus on the emotional satisfaction of having come in contact with a “sure thing” windfall opportunity, but it’s easy to see the … Continue reading The Unconsidered Elephant
How to build active value for everyone, everywhere. In this unique historical moment, it seems worth asking: What does the conventional way of measuring the economic landscape of value exchange leave out, and can we remedy that marginalization without disrupting the institutions we depend on? Put another way: How many living future values are excluded … Continue reading Uplift Locally to Solve Globally
Why we choose the burden of outdated power structures
The modern age opened with the advent of modern science and a deliberative effort to demonstrate truth with examination of evidence. Modern democratic processes emerged from this break with feudal history. Today, we are living in post-modern times—the period after modern breakthroughs became the general foundation on which new discoveries were then made.
Philosophers, architects, literary theorists, painters and politicians, will all define post-modern in different ways, but what we can say is that we have emerged from modernity into a time when legitimacy is not inherited or seized, but rather developed through decentralized processes of discussion, coordination, and responsible accountable governance. Today’s most recognized monarchies own their legitimacy only because they support and sustain democratic political systems that carry out the acts of government in parallel to their position as historically founded national leaders.
We’re entering a new age for the Earth’s climate and for the way we conceive of finance “Macrocritical resilience” may be the most mystifying two-word phrase you need to know. Though you may never have heard these two words together before, what they describe affects everything you live and strive for. Wonky as it sounds, … Continue reading Finance for Deep-Rooted Prosperity is Coming
All the building we have to do…
For many years, the engineers of the United States have warned that infrastructure urgently needs trillions of dollars in routine maintenance, and trillions more in updates and upgrades. Infrastructure is the shared framework on which we build a thriving economy. Businesses of all sizes are able to compete for market value, in part because the quality of transport, electrification, and communications infrastructure is of world-leading quality.
The Poet Economist 