According to all the advice on how to win friends and influence people, I should start this essay by explaining how the following words will change your life forever. But, in reality, there is only a simple message at the heart of this essay. It is that the really important question we need to answer is ‘How do things work and happen?’, and not ‘Why is it so?’ Understanding how is the key to the wellbeing of our planet. It provides us with the deep knowledge that allows us to make informed decisions.

Forty years after his death in Paris on June 25, 1984, many of Michel Foucault’s once radical ideas now seem self-evident. Even critics like Noam Chomsky, who derided Foucault’s moral theories as “incoherent”, find themselves in a world wallpapered with Foucauldian terms like “discourse”, “power-knowledge”, “biopower”, and “governmentality”. Today, who could thrive without knowing how to “control the narrative”, call out a “social construct” or navigate “power dynamics”?

Joseph Stiglitz, 81, was Chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors between 1995 and 1997, then Chief Economist at the World Bank from 1997 to 2000. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. He still teaches at Columbia University and is the author of numerous books. He is a notable critic of corporate profligacy, inequality and neoliberal globalisation. When he has a new book published, it’s worth taking a look at it... When his latest book came out, I bought a copy at once. It’s called The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society. 

In the developed world, it is often observed that we are living in an era of ‘late-stage capitalism’. To get a clear picture of what that might mean, it is useful to examine the measures we use to understand economic trends. The customary assumption is that economic statistics furnish a complete picture of what is happening – industrially, financially and with a country’s standard of living. The metrics are treated as scientific absolutes, the equivalent of unchanging measures in physics. That is wrong.

I want to share some observations about the video and the impact of wind and solar farms on the environment that was implied in that video (RSA Daily, 30 May 2024). The video has been produced by an environmental activist organisation in Far North Queensland called Rainforest Reserves, which is vehemently opposed to the Chalumbin and Kalan wind farms, as well as several others. Unfortunately, they let themselves down with loose use of language.