I've been racking my brain lately over "The Economy." The current failure looks a lot to me like the failure of an outlook and value system, rather than something simply broken down and in need of tinkering and repair. I wonder how an ethic could be created to support an economy based on improving the overall quality of life for people, rather than simply producing more and more stuff, much of it crap.

I've also been thinking about the connection between economy and ecology, to the point where I've been toying with coining new words like economology, ecojomy and ecogeny, to bring together the sense that ecology and economy share a common root, eco, which originally meant house or household in Greek. In our currect evolutionary state, we realize that our house is the earth -- our economy is globalized, but our ecology has lagged behind. We've got to put our house in order.

I came across an article by Robert Costanza this morning that covers some of these points:

The intro says, "[W]e need to move beyond 'growth at all costs' and reorganise the economy based on the quality of life rather than quantity of consumption."

Here's the full story.

Posted by Josh Wachtel @ 8:38 AM