In this episode, I interview Donnie Maclurcan. Donnie is an Affiliate Professor of Economics at Southern Oregon University and an Executive Director of the Post Growth Institute – an international organization exploring how people, companies and nature can thrive together, within ecological limits. He’s taught at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, in Sydney, and at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, in Bristish Columbia
In this episode, we explore the roots of capitalism, its pros and cons, how money is created, what’s missing in economic models, the problem that arises with too much privatization of wealth, and the clever paradigm shift that Donnie proposes with the Post Growth Institute.
Key takeaways
“Not-for-profit businesses make up 20% of our economy in terms of GDP”
“So many things get ascribed to capitalism that I would say happened outside of the capitalist tenets.”
“I would go so far as to say that we are under some kind of illusion.”
“Capitalism is inevitably going to collapse, and there is no way outside of that, which is why we need to come back to our inner wisdom which is that we need a circular monetary system”
“We are in the process of finishing what we believe to be the world’s first analysis of aggregate global debt, and what our preliminary findings show is that, as we suspected, debt always expands in a capitalist system”
“In a capitalist system, money gets concentrated”
“We have billions of people who want work but the money is getting extracted out through profit from for-profit companies and rent on land, over to a small number of people. What happens when you got a lot of labor, and not a lot of money getting paid out as wages, or coming back as taxes or philanthropy? you get wage deflation. You have asset inflation (stocks, lands, …) and wage deflation: that is why we have growing inequality around the world [..] It’s baked into the capitalist system, no amount of changing economic theory can change this fact that inequality will continue to grow because you cannot do enough programs, and taxation and philanthropy to reduce that financial inequality because if you did, it wouldn’t be a capitalist system anymore.”
“The problem with the environmental movement is that it looks at the environmental piece first [instead of looking at how the financial and economic system work]”
Show notes
- What is the Post-Growth Institute?
- What is capitalism?
- The qualities we falsely attribute to it
- The illusion it creates through debt
- The creation of money
- The effect of wealth inequality on society
- What gets missed out in economic models
- Assets inflation and wages deflation
- Can’t we just change how money is created?
- On privatisation of profit
In this episode, I interview Donnie Maclurcan. Donnie is an Affiliate Professor of Economics at Southern Oregon University and an Executive Director of the Post Growth Institute – an international organization exploring how people, companies and nature can thrive together, within ecological limits. He’s taught at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, in Sydney, and at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, in Bristish Columbia
In this episode, we explore the roots of capitalism, its pros and cons, how money is created, what’s missing in economic models, the problem that arises with too much privatization of wealth, and the clever paradigm shift that Donnie proposes with the Post Growth Institute.
Key takeaways
“Not-for-profit businesses make up 20% of our economy in terms of GDP”
“So many things get ascribed to capitalism that I would say happened outside of the capitalist tenets.”
“I would go so far as to say that we are under some kind of illusion.”
“Capitalism is inevitably going to collapse, and there is no way outside of that, which is why we need to come back to our inner wisdom which is that we need a circular monetary system”
“We are in the process of finishing what we believe to be the world’s first analysis of aggregate global debt, and what our preliminary findings show is that, as we suspected, debt always expands in a capitalist system”
“In a capitalist system, money gets concentrated”
“We have billions of people who want work but the money is getting extracted out through profit from for-profit companies and rent on land, over to a small number of people. What happens when you got a lot of labor, and not a lot of money getting paid out as wages, or coming back as taxes or philanthropy? you get wage deflation. You have asset inflation (stocks, lands, …) and wage deflation: that is why we have growing inequality around the world [..] It’s baked into the capitalist system, no amount of changing economic theory can change this fact that inequality will continue to grow because you cannot do enough programs, and taxation and philanthropy to reduce that financial inequality because if you did, it wouldn’t be a capitalist system anymore.”
“The problem with the environmental movement is that it looks at the environmental piece first [instead of looking at how the financial and economic system work]”
Show notes
- What is the Post-Growth Institute?
- What is capitalism?
- The qualities we falsely attribute to it
- The illusion it creates through debt
- The creation of money
- The effect of wealth inequality on society
- What gets missed out in economic models
- Assets inflation and wages deflation
- Can’t we just change how money is created?
- On privatisation of profit
