DEGROWTH: LIBERATION FROM GROWTHISM and RETHINKING ECONOMIES | Jason Hickel | thetaxcast.com

…So the bottom line becomes basically we should seek to organise the economy around meeting human needs rather than around servicing elite consumption and capital accumulation. And that requires a pretty dramatic shift from sort of the status quo of our economic system…

… we have to bring in concepts from like the literature on rationing, like a rationing framework is maybe more powerful here and more just, you know, first ensure that everyone has access to what they need, and then tax additional unnecessary consumption..

How To Understand A Human Being | Sustainable Human

“We believe that all human behavior is a (conscious or subconscious) attempt to meet a need or a reaction to a need not being met. And that if you want to understand and change human behavior, you have to first understand our common needs.” – Chris and Dawn Agnos

Good and Bad Capitalism: Re-thinking Value, Human Needs, and the Aims of Economic Activity | Giorgio Baruchello (2009)

The world is experiencing a twofold crisis. On the one hand, the global, virtualised economy is collapsing and, in its fall, it is bringing down significant sections of the real economy. On the other hand, the environmental collapse of the planet is also marching on, and there is no clear sign that this may stop soon, for the most commonly discussed paths for economic recovery seem to rely upon further spoliation of the Earth’s life support systems. In this book chapter, the reader is to encounter an account of this twofold crisis in light of the deeper axiological grounds that are causing it. To this end, the present author refers extensively to the theory of value developed by Canadian scholar John McMurtry, according to whom: “[F]inancial crises always follow from money-value delinked from real value, which has many names but no understanding of the principle at its deepest levels.”

A Life-Grounded Manifesto

In our capitalist politico-economic system, the prime directive enshrined in law is to maximize profit for the shareholders, and NOT to optimize the benefits for all stakeholders, inclusive of workers, customers, communities and our planet. These entities are treated as externalities so as to privatize the gains and eco-socialize the losses.

In this system, workers are seen as a cost (a disutility) and if the capitalists can automate what workers do, and thus bring the cost of “labour” to zero, they would do so readily so as to maximize profit gains. Also having a bumper stock of unemployed people keeps the price of labour low (according to market supply-demand principles), hence the manufacturing of poverty and economic refugees, which can be stopped in a heartbeat if there is the local and global political will to end “wars of life-destabilizations” within and without.