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…
Category: Human Scale Economics
Infrastructure must Meet Real Human Needs
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…
Income Inequality puts Everything We Value at Risk
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…
The Future of Finance is Clean
Finance is the projection of existing wealth and capability into future scenarios. For much of human history, in whatever form it has taken, success in the future finance scenario did not have to align with success across the full spectrum of human need and our relationship to natural systems. Financial success could be insulated from…
The Unconsidered Elephant
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…
Uplift Locally to Solve Globally
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…
Playing with Dragons
Why we choose the burden of outdated power structures The modern age opened with the advent of modern science and a deliberative effort to demonstrate truth with examination of evidence.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…
Finance for Deep-Rooted Prosperity is Coming
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 before, what they describe affects everything you live and strive for. Wonky as it sounds, it…
The Emerging Empowerment Economy
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…
The Politics of Exigency
Fierce Urgency & Democracy Rooted in Deep Principle Exigency is an immediate state of pervasive intense demand on our attention. “Exigent circumstances” are considered to be both emergent and critical enough to override one’s normal free will and moral decision-making. Under extreme pressures, the argument goes, one is less able to “live up to” the…
