How Money Stops Growth

Line up all the economists in the world, it is said, and they'll all point in different directions. And while it's true that economists do view society through the particular lens of their political or sociological ideology, there are some general economics principles that seem widely held in the field.

One is that you can point to economic performance as an indicator of a household's or a company's or even a nation's success. And therefore the need to look after the drivers of this all-important economy - banks and corporations and GDP and all that stuff.

Economic performance is even one of the most important indices when considering happiness and quality of life on those top 10 countries to live in lists that pop up once or twice a year.

But yet, there is something obviously missing in a person who gives attention only to the financial side of things in life, something out of kilter and off balance - even psychotic - in running the world based on what the bean counters have to say.

We'll explore what's wrong with this view today. How Money Stops Growth, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Putting the New Consciousness into Practice

We've been bombarded with images and catch phrases heralding a new era for a number of decades now. From marketed scientific publications like the Aquarian Conspiracy to the blue environmentally pagan humanoids of Avatar to the end of the world apocalypse that Hollywood envisioned as the running out of the Mayan calendar, we've been up to our keisters in pop culture interpretations of the changing consciousness brought by a relentless new age spirituality for almost as long as I've been alive.

And way longer than that in the esoteric literature from Europe.

Some portray this as an inevitable product of the cosmic cycles of consciousness that are moving us dramatically towards the third millennium. Others say it's all the destiny outlined in Revelations in the Bible. Still others that it's all the product of the endless cycles of birth and death being acted out on a global scale.

A lot of room for interpretation and speculation, isn't there? Which is why it's important, here in the middle of the thing, to try to do something and not just speculate.

Putting the New Consciousness into Practice, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Removing the Rose-Colored Glasses - program excerpt

This week on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, we'll take off the rose-colored glasses to look at what we need to do to create the just society everybody in the 99% says they want. A small hint: there'll be some internal soul-searching required. But along the way, a very optimistic view of business and working for ourselves. It's powerful stuff when combined with the science of psycho-socio pathology elaborated at Norberto Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy.

Listen to a program excerpt here.

Working for Ourselves

"Get a job!" was a common insult hurled at the hippies back when I was a kid. I remember a few of them homesteading in the woods off the dirt road to my favorite swimming hole on Vancouver Island. I remember the homegrown vegetable gardens and the hastily assembled log cabins and the pungent odor of their strange cigarettes.

I wouldn't pay much attention if I was alone beyond noticing you could barely see their eyes under all that head and facial hair. But if my father was with me ... well, then I'd hear a few lectures on the long, windy drive back home. The values of work, the satisfaction of a job well done, the "I had to walk 5 miles to school - both ways" speech that all parents at that time seemed to pull out of their back pockets at times like these.

I appreciated my father's point actually ... especially as I got older. But I sympathized with the rebels, too.

But now I'm noticing the same "Get a job!" catchphrase going out from Wall St. to all the OWS occupiers. For sure, work is needed for the liberation of the people. But not the work the 1% is thinking we need.

Working for Ourselves, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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