Category: alternative economy
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Inventing Value: Financial value vs social value?
This is the third of four extracts from the introductory chapter of my recent book Inventing Value (Cambridge UP, 2022). “The explosion of financial assets over the last few decades has transformed the world’s leading economies. The finance, insurance and real estate sector now accounts for 21% of US national income – double its level in…
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A history of Bitcoin – told through the five different groups who bought it
Commentators are often dismissive of Bitcoin buyers, writing them off as naive victims of a fraudulent bubble. But if we look more carefully, we can trace the history of Bitcoin through five key narratives. Each has drawn in a different group of buyers and in doing so contributed to its long-term growth in value.
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We need to move on from existing theories of the economy
Neither the traditional economist’s focus on firms in markets nor the Marxist political economist’s focus on exploitation of wage labour by capital is a viable way of understanding the real economy. This posts proposes some steps towards an alternative view.
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Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy: extract from chapter 10
This text, from the closing pages of the book, calls for a different kind of economy: an evolving diverse economy with more space for gift and alternative forms, and much less for the more oppressive forms of capitalism. If they are successful, books like this one form part of a spiral in which political arguments…