Green Puritanism or green realism? Frank Furedi on environmentalism

Frank Furedi, sociologist, political guru, and much else besides, writes an occasional column called “Really Bad Ideas” on the Spiked website. In his column, Furedi offers cultural and political criticism on issues as diverse as “The tyranny of science” and “Censorship”. It didn’t take Furedi too long to get around to ripping in to environmentalism, [...]

Has the New Zealand Government unwittingly defined the U.S. Government as a terrorist entity?

I’m not a lawyer, so this may be a naive interpretation, but it seems to me there is a prima facie case that the U.S. government is a terrorist entity under the terms of the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002.

From soothing palliatives and towards ecological literacy: a critique of the triple bottom line

Milne, Markus J (2005) From soothing palliatives and towards ecological literacy: a critique of the triple bottom line. Working Paper. Department of Accountancy and Business Law, University of Otago.
Not too long (21 pages) and not too hard to read for the most part, this paper is well worth a look. It reinforces (by looking at [...]

An ecosocialist critique of sustainable development: maintaining growth through sustainable degradation

Karl Marx’s ideas about economic crises addressed the circumstances of 19th century capitalist development. In his critique, he identified an inherent contradiction in capitalism: a situation in which exploited and underpaid workers are unable to consume everything that is being produced. Marx foresaw that this state of affairs would lead to insufficient profits for business [...]

Demographia Round #2: my faith in journalism is restored (a little)

Prime Minister takes issue with house-cost findings: An international survey that found New Zealand the least affordable country for house buyers was widely attacked yesterday and its findings questioned.
I’ll keep an eye on how this unfolds (Original post here).

Spinning the Housing Affordability Crisis: Don Brash and Demographia try shift the blame, and the New Zealand Herald goes along for the free ride.

Anne Gibson’s unbalanced article: “NZ houses world’s least affordable” in this morning’s New Zealand Herald brings together a couple of themes I’ve been mulling over recently: housing affordability and PR “spin”. The article reports on the release of an international study of housing affordability and associated policy suggestions by Demographia (full report here).

Economists are more selfish

In the early 1980s, a famous piece of research by Gerald Marwell and Ruth Ames (summarised here) suggested that economics graduates were more inclined than others to ‘free-ride’ on public goods by taking the benefits of public goods but failing to contribute to them. Neil Gandal, an economics professor from Tel Aviv University, and his [...]

Green capitalism: road to serfdom, road to participatory economics, or road to nowhere?

Many people in the environmental movement believe that the economy can be successfully ‘greened’. Assuming this ‘greening’ expresses a real desire for substantive change (ie, it’s not just a marketing exercise), some important questions must be asked. For example, just how are greens’ key objectives of sustainability and participatory democracy to be achieved in the [...]

The changing face of eco-politics

In the 1980s, environmental politics developed a set of fundamental assumptions heavily influenced by socialist humanism. This socialist perspective was a radical break with the benign authoritarianism that had dominated eco-political thinking in the previous decade; while there were some Marxist influences to be seen (particularly in ‘eco-socialism’), the dominant socialist influence on the new [...]

Take 2 -Property and Community: the Truth and the Lies of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’.

I’ve not read the original article on “The Tragedy of the Commons” that David refers to in this post , but it sounds very familiar, and David’s post brought back memories.
One version of it was discussed in some of my university economics classes: with the conclusion drawn that property rights gave people incentives to look [...]