Join 📚Jof’S Book Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Jophin's read, .
“It’s time to put aside the search for economic laws demonstrating that growing national output will eventually deliver ecological health. Economics, it turns out, is not a matter of discovering laws: it is essentially a question of design. And the reason why even the world’s richest countries are still making us all feel the burn is because the last two hundred years of industrial activity have been based upon a linear industrial system whose design is inherently degenerative. The essence of that industrial system is the cradle-to-grave manufacturing supply chain of take, make, use, lose: extract Earth’s minerals, metals, biomass and fossil fuels; manufacture them into products; sell those on to consumers who – probably sooner rather than later – will throw them ‘away’. When drawn in its simplest form, it looks something like an industrial caterpillar, ingesting food at one end, chewing it through, and excreting the waste out of the other end. This”
Doughnut Economics
Kate Raworth
Flexibility also means a redistribution of risks away from the state and the economy towards the individual. The jobs on offer become short-term and easily terminable (i.e. ‘renewable’). And finally, flexibility means: ‘Cheer up, your skills and knowledge are obsolete, and no one can say what you must learn in order to be needed in the future.’
The Brave New World of Work
Ulrich Beck
The third, picking up the Foucauldian theme of the tie
between power and knowledge, is the claim, in Haugaard’s words, that people interpret their social world as ‘part of the natural order of things’ and thus accept a ‘social ontology’ that specifies what is ‘real’ and ‘essential’ and that is a ‘tacit interpretative horizon of social actors’ that ‘creates conditions of possibility for social action’ and thereby marks what, in his view, distinguishes the fourth dimension from the third
(Haugaard and Pettit 2017: 28). Here indeed is a topic of the greatest present-day relevance, not least in relation to the continuing, unfinished and important task of denaturalizing race and gender.
Power: A Radical View
Steven Lukes
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