Saturday, March 21, 2020

The System Will Not Return to "Normal," and That's Good; We Can Do Better

Essential home lockdown reading.
The pandemic is revealing to all what many of us have known for a long time: the status quo was designed to fail and so its failure was not just predictable but inevitable.
We've propped up a dysfunctional, wasteful and unsustainable system by pouring trillions of dollars in borrowed money down a multitude of ratholes to avoid a reckoning and a re-set. And very predictably, that's the "solution" to the unraveling triggered by the pandemic: borrow more trillions and pour most of it down the same old ratholes.
Here's what we should be talking about: the entire global system desperately needs a re-set. We can do better, and we should do better. That's what I've been writing about for the past 12 years.
To further the discussions we should be having about doing better, I'm cutting 30% off the price of seven of my books: ebooks are now $5, print books are now $10.
Every book has a free summary/sample page where you can find out more about the contents.
What better way to spend the weeks/months of lockdown than reading about the better future we need and deserve? To buy a book, click on the cover below:
The Nearly Free University and The Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education Reconnecting higher education, livelihoods and the real economy
This book outlines ways we can provide a superior college education for 10%-20% of the current (unaffordable) cost.
Our financial-political-social system has been rotten to the core for two decades. It doesn't have to be this way.
The credo of liberation:
"I no longer care if the power centers of our society--the distant, fortified castles of our financial feudal system are changed by my actions, for I am liberated by the act of resistance. I am no longer complicit in perpetuating fraudulent feudalism and the pathology of concentrated power. I no longer covet signifiers of membership in the Upper Caste that serves the plutocracy. I am liberated from self-destructive consumerist-State financialization and the delusion that debt servitude and obedience to sociopathological Elites serve my self-interests."
Written 9 years ago, the precepts of social capital and controlling your capital are even more relevant today.
We desperately need a profound re-set on the way we work, pay for work and prioritize what work gets done.
Our political system and the economy it controls both need to be decentralized and relocalized.
The promise of technology has been harnessed to widen the immense gaps in wealth and power between the super-rich and the rest of us. It doesn't have to be this way: AI and technology could restore some balance to an ecologically endangered world if we change the predatory economic-political power structure.
If you want a dash of escapist fiction, you might like The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher.
To buy a book, click on the cover:
           
           
Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).


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Thank you, Richard M. ($50), for your wondrously generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.
 
Thank you, Kent M. ($50), for your superbly generous contribution to this site -- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership.

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