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The Illusion of Free Markets

  True market freedom cannot coexist with vast disparities in wealth and power Wealth creation is an incredibly loaded term. Extraction is one of its hidden truths. A rich man negotiating with a poor man always gets the better part of the deal—he is not creating that value; the power disparity is what creates the value. Power disparity is further increased by increases in wealth. What is the value of power to me or you? In itself absolutely nothing but the ability to extract wealth from those who have no power. Producing goods and services and thereby value for society is only part of the economic equation. The other part is the psychology of power, and it is the most wealthy who play those games of power above all else. They impoverish everyone by extracting power and wealth that is ours. True free markets are structured so that power cannot be leveraged and they benefit everyone taking part in them. The classical economic assumption of voluntary exchange presumes equality between...
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Stars Aligning: The Natural Emergence of a Relocalised Society

For most of human history, you knew where your bread came from. You knew the baker's name, the farmer who grew the grain, the miller who ground it into flour. Economic life was woven into the fabric of community, visible and tangible in a way that made sense. Then came two centuries of relentless centralisation. Today, electricity flows from coal plants hundreds of miles distant, owned by shareholders you'll never meet. Your food travels fifteen hundred miles from soil to table. The land beneath your feet enriches absentee landlords while your community withers. We've built an economy of strangers, extraction, and distance. But something fundamental is shifting. Three seemingly unrelated forces are converging—distributed renewable energy, land value taxation, and artificial intelligence. Together with principles of community governance discovered by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, they form the architecture of a different future. A future that undoes centuries of centralisati...
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Negotiating Authoritarianism: The Achilles Heel of Power and Control

  On October 19, 1994, something remarkable happened in a gymnasium at the University of Manitoba. Two groups of university students played a sophisticated simulation called the Global Change Game, where they controlled the fate of the world for the next forty years. On the first night, 67 students who scored low on measures of authoritarianism cooperated internationally, demilitarized their regions, and managed to feed and provide healthcare for 8.7 billion people—though 400 million died from starvation and disease in the poorest regions. The next night, 68 students who scored high on authoritarianism played the same game. Within hours, they had triggered a nuclear holocaust that killed 7.4 billion people. Given a second chance, they started another war that killed 400 million more. By the end of their simulation, they had caused 9.5 billion deaths through war, starvation, and disease. Their world ended divided into armed camps threatening mutual destruction. This wasn't a differe...
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