Reddit reviews Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
We found 2 Reddit comments about Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
This is a great book for you to check out:
http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Economy-Wealth-Communities-Durable/dp/0805076263
It focuses on some of the problems with our current, oil-centered economic model, and how we need to change to a more local, community based system. Particular emphasis is placed on the fall of industrial agriculture, and the emergence of smaller, local farms.
>How do we determine the price
The same way we determine the price for anything -- by summing up the component costs. Sure, it's a distributed computation performed by many actors, but that's still fundamentally what's going on. (to head-off the cost != price debate, I'm including "profit" as a 'cost' here)
I'm of the opinion that markets are great means. Once you determine what a society values, a market is an excellent way to optimize those values. However, where I disagree is when the market is used as an end, when the market itself determines what it values.
Heresy, you say!
Contrary to libertarian thinking, I've come to discover that individuals are actually really quite lousy at figuring out what will make them happy. Of course, they're not helped by (imho borderline fraudulent) advertising, designed to make you think that new storm windows will give you more time to spend with your family.
As a Libertarian, I'm sure you acknowledge, as I once begrudgingly did, that people aren't quite rational actors. But we're close enough, right? It's worst than that though – we're not even close. Too harsh? Ok, so maybe we're rough approximations, but the small cracks where mushy brain stuff corrupts pure utility maximization are levered wide open by psych-savvy propaganda agencies. We may appear rational on a small scale, but if you sit back and look at the aggregate of our actions you see that the Invisible Hand has been replaced with the Subliminal Boot.
I don't expect you to agree with everything I've written, but if you're interested in understanding why I 'left the fold' so to speak, check out the excellent (and certainly not anti-capitalist) documentary The Century of the Self (here on google video). It really drove home the imbalance of power between the big guys and the little ones.
A good read about how this applies to ecology is Deep Economy (amzn).
EDIT: Note that I'm not suggesting that the gov't tell people what to buy. History has shown us that that can get really ugly. If you're way smarter than I, you might be able to translate these discontented ramblings into some action items.