what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Friday, January 19, 2024

WHY DO SO MANY NEW TITLES WASTE OUR TIME?

“Silent Coup”, “The Big Myth”, “Rentier Capitalism”…are titles of some of the books which have hit us in recent years. People keep churning out books which just repeat what most of us already know!

When is someone going to build on these critiques from the past 50 years and do a proper exploration of “what is to be done” to give us a civilized society? One of the best is “The Capitalism Papers - fatal flaws in an obsolete system” published in 2012 by the famous US activist and journalist Jerry Mander. It has everything

·               the ecological concerns;

·               questioning of the legal basis of the corporation and the inequities and iniquities they cause;

·               recognition that military spending and advertising supports the whole rotten system

·               that democracy is being privatised

·               as is our very consciousness 

Mander draws it all together in a masterful conclusion in some 35 pages starting at page 258 (of the hyperlink given in the title above) which has 4 sub-headings -  

·                Nature Comes First

·                The Primacy of Scale: Not Globalization, Localization

·                Experiments in Corporate Values and Structure.

·                Hybrid Economics . . . 

The only thing it’s light on is an annotated bibliography. It has a 7 page bibliography but would have been useful to have had Mander’s reasons for selecting those particular works (from p296) 

None of the titles with which this post starts have a recommended reading list but all have extensive notes

·       The Big Myth – how American businesses taught us to loathe government and love the market N Oreskes and E Conway 2023

·     Silent Coup – how Corporations overthrew Democracy C Provost and M Kennard 2023

·       Rentier Capitalism – who owns the economy and who pays for it? Brett Christophers 2020

 

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