I knew about Bhutan and its philosophy of Gross National Happiness (GNH), and while I am reading the book “Prosperity without Growth” by Tim Jackson (which echoes similar sentiments about GDP), I came across this video…
Environment & Growth
Today on TimesNow debate Mr. Rahul Bajaj & Mr. Mohandas Pai were blaming the government for not allowing coal mining in the forest areas. One of them objected to Mr. Jairam Ramesh not allowing coal mining to take place in the forest areas. They were talking about “striking a balance” and “inaction”.
Sorry dear Industrialists, protecting forests is not inaction & allowing coal mines to destroy forests is not action. Sure we need power but we need clean power that doesn’t destroy our forests, pollute our environment or displace millions of people.
Whenever the industrialists want to grab land or encroach already shrinking forests, they talk about “impediments to growth” & so called “striking a balance”.
By the way, what does striking a balance mean? Where do we strike a balance if we only want to grow all the time, endlessly?
Who stands for forests? Who stands for wildlife? And what growth are we talking about? Growth like an outburst of Ebola that consumes everything destroying itself at the end?
Foolish or smart we must protect the Forests.
"Never has one generation spent so much of its children’s wealth in such a short period of time with so little to show for it as in the Bush years."
— Tom Friedman (in New York Times)
…But when it came to prosecuting Pfizer for its fraudulent marketing, the pharmaceutical giant had a trump card: Just as the giant banks on Wall Street were deemed too big to fail, Pfizer was considered too big to nail.
"…mildly secular, imperfectly democratic, and with a messy economic focus that is neither capitalistic nor socialistic. It is from the messiness of Indian ideas that the world could stumble into a new world order after a few decades because the world is done with ‘isms’. There is no capitalism worth hanging on to , and communism is anyway discredited. The world is searching for a new type of pragmatism that is driven by reality. Which is where India comes in."
— R Jagannathan (DNA, Bangalore 18-03-2010)
The Pull Model
A pump pushing sewage at you is a good metaphor for what’s wrong with the marketplace we’ve constructed in the late 20th century. Doc has built the VRM project as a means of exploring better ways of building markets for the 21st century. Something I hadn’t considered until I was going through David Siegel’s book Pull is that “pull” is the right metaphor for this new marketplace and it’s precisely why Doc’s metaphor of a sewage pump rings so true. David’s book is about the Semantic Web and the use of data standards to enable you to “pull” the information, services, and products to you. An example from the book that really hit home for me is this: in 2010 if you order a package from Amazon, you have to give an address where it will be delivered. Wouldn’t it be better if instead, you just gave Amazon an identifier and then the package would find you at the place you wanted it to go–even if that’s the hotel you’re currently staying at? In essence, you pull the package to you with online data. This isn’t a pipe dream, but a perfectly reasonable way to think about how the world ought to work–and one that’s doable now from a technical standpoint. Doc uses different language to describe this same idea when he talks demand leading supply. The pump is all about supply leading demand. The key idea that both Doc and David would agree on here is that “If demand leads supply…, customers need to be the points of integration for their own data.”
Has the worst subsided? A case for why capitalism is still the world’s most productive economic engine
