I just read a blog post by Douglass Carmichael (who I’ve known through MediaX and NextNow events for a short while, and will spend some time with this weekend) entitled Governance and economy.

The thread of his post struck me smack in the face:

Economy has become so powerful because, in the absence of the political ideas to reform government to deal with the real issues of the world, economy emerges as a way to cope with 6 billion people…

Economy has become a form of governance…

The result is a way of life based on dollars and what dollars can buy, which is not so much meaningful goods but stuff…

The result is that we do not really have a governance of society. We have a governance of the society via economy and a governance of economics through the narrow interests of its major participants…

The well being of the people has been replaced by the well being of the economy, which, to make the rich yet richer, has chosen to eliminate people as a cost to the economic engine.

—Douglass Carmichael [excerpted by Sky from Governance and economy]

For 10 years now I have wondered how we expect to both 1) reduce jobs in the US and 2) maintain a functioning economy. I so much want to see people everywhere in the world achieve a good standard of living, and I know that we in the US need to reduce the way we squander our resources, but I don’t see how we can keep eliminating people from the economic engine and expect to have a sustainable economy, let alone a sustainable world. The gears of economy need to function differently—and I firmly believe that the turmoil we see in economic systems right now signals that we will never return to “normal” but instead will have to wrestle with these kinds of questions, and solve these kinds of problems, in order to stabilize our economic and social systems.

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