The economic activity of our society is destroying the viability of life on earth and enabling a minute minority to accumulate vast wealth and power while much of the population struggles with poverty or insecurity. We have an inhumane economic system which is rooted in ideas propagated either by those who stand to gain from the system or by well-meaning people who have been persuaded that the current system represents centuries of evolutionary progress.  There is nothing inevitable about the way a society chooses to organize its economy. This website explores the assumptions behind mainstream economic theory both as it is taught in academia and as it is practiced in government and business. It is rooted in the conviction that economic theory, like political theory, is a branch of moral philosophy rather than a science like physics or chemistry. It refuses to throw common sense out the window, but it examines beliefs accepted as common sense to see what they really mean.

Mainstream economics conflates the creation of surplus goods through technology with the accrual of “profits” to individuals or corporations. It fails to see that money should not be a commodity with a price determined by supply and demand and that the only thing achieved by financial markets is the concentration of money and power in the hands of a few along with an unending series of “crises” that destroy lives. It justifies all this with a simplistic model of human interaction and the pretense of being a science based on mathematical models. The root of the problem is how we conceive money and the ideas we have about how money is channeled into productivity. Exploring the way we think about money and finance is one way to free our minds from the prison cell of dogma to which we have consigned ourselves so that we can reform our economy before it is too late.

Our economic system is an expression of our culture. It is not divinely mandated or the product of inevitable evolution. It is a matter of human choice. The moral arc of history does not bend towards justice unless we are pulling in the right direction with all our might.