The Elevation of Solidarity Above Charity
Charity has its place. When someone’s in real trouble; when the rent’s past due, or the fridge is empty, or there’s a medical bill hanging over their…
Making Money
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Radical Neighboring: Or, How I Accidentally Joined a Cult of Kindness
Let me just start by saying, I am not what you would call a “neighborly” person. My general policy toward the people living on either side of…
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Toward a Status Economy
We tend to think of economies in terms of money. Monetary systems, markets, prices; these are the structures we’re taught to see. But what if we’ve been…
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Beyond Buzzwords: What Power, Empowerment, and Social Change Reveals About Real Transformation
Power, Empowerment, and Social Change; Edited by Rosemary McGee and Jethro Pettit In the sprawling and often self-congratulatory literature of development studies, “empowerment” has become one of…
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The Art of Stepping Sideways: How to Exit the Rat Race Without Going Off-Grid
Most people think escaping the rat race means buying goats. The fantasy goes something like this: you sell everything, move to the country, get some chickens, and…
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The Case for Up-Skilling in an Economy on the Brink
There’s a quiet unease felt beneath the surface of everyday life; a sense that the ground is shifting under our feet, and that the playbook we once…
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The Forgotten Duty to One Another
Something has slipped, quietly, from our collective memory. Not all at once, but bit by bit; like a thread unraveling from a coat we forgot how to…
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Who Gets to Matter in the Meaning Economy?
By most measures, the future has already arrived. The robots have taken the factories. Algorithms have taken the call centers. And AI is now circling the last…
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Hard Times Are the Incubator of Community
There are truths that can only be revealed through suffering, and among them is this: in hard times, the soul of a people is laid bare. The…
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The Quiet Divide Between High and Low Agency: Why It Matters More Than Ever
By all outward appearances, we live in a society that prizes independence, ambition, and the self-made person. We celebrate entrepreneurs who built something from nothing, we cheer…