Tag: economics

The Great Rehash, Part One: The Best and the Brightest

John Michael Greer305 Comments

July seems to be a good time for explosions, and not just in Fourth of July fireworks displays in the US.  Already this month, a bomb blew up a controversial monument in rural Georgia, while on the other side of the world in Sri Lanka an angry mob stormed the presidential palace and drove the…

The Twilight of Empire

John Michael Greer484 Comments

The third of the topics I’ve discussed at length in my blogs over the last sixteen years, the decline and fall of America’s global empire, is especially timely just now.  I noted in a post last year, while discussing the debacle of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, that the remaining scraps of America’s global hegemony…

Running On Empty

John Michael Greer389 Comments

Well, we definitely seem to have passed a threshold of sorts. For most of the sixteen years since I started blogging, one of the things I had to point out constantly to my readers was the slow pace of historical change.  Whenever I posted an essay on the twilight of industrial society, I could count…

Slack! An Irreverent Proposal

John Michael Greer324 Comments

For quite some time now, utterances from the elite classes of the industrial world have had a sidelong relationship at best to the reality that most of us inhabit.  Recent weeks have seen the surreal quality of official pronouncements slam into overdrive, however. I first noted some time ago that the most difficult job in…

Reimagining Political Economy

John Michael Greer316 Comments

Over the last couple of months I’ve discussed the way that contemporary industrial societies struggle under the weight of a disastrous failure of imagination. That’s among the most potent and disturbing political facts of our time.  Even though the existing order of society has proven to be a miserable failure in terms of every human…

The Revolt of the Imagination, Part Three: Co-Creating the Future

John Michael Greer352 Comments

As I write these words, the Russo-Ukrainian war has raged for a week.  To a great many people, crises like these make the theme of my recent posts here—the potential of the human imagination—seem wholly irrelevant.  That’s a common mistake, but it’s still a mistake. To begin with, let’s please remember that wars and the…

A Season for Giving

John Michael Greer229 Comments

As I write these words, Christmas is a little more than a month away. Normally I don’t look forward to that December day with any noteworthy enthusiasm. Granted, it’s nice to know that the auditory drool that  spatters down from loudspeakers every December is almost done for another year. It also means that my wife…

That Untraversed Land

John Michael Greer380 Comments

It’s been just over a month since I started talking about how the predictions set out in 1972 by The Limits to Growth were coming true in our time. Since then the situation has become steadily worse. As I write this, rolling blackouts are leaving millions of people in China to huddle in the dark…

The Negative-Sum Economy

John Michael Greer355 Comments

There are tides and seasons in the comments I field for posts here on my blog, certain questions that get asked at regular intervals, certain saliva-flecked tirades I can count on getting whenever  certain things appear in my writings or happen in the world.  One of the more frequent of the questions is how to…

A Prayer for Nonbelievers

John Michael Greer505 Comments

I was ten years old when The Limits to Growth first saw print.  I have a dim memory of seeing a  newspaper article or two about it, but I had other things on my mind in 1972—my parents got divorced that year, and an already difficult childhood promptly got much worse—and several years passed before…