To Investigate

So, all the stuff here needs to be elsewhere. We really need some collab tools. I'll be in DC the Dec17-Dec22 working with MAGFest, so I can learn a little about how they manage workflow. Then we'll rebuild and re-purpose this page.

Some ideas that may be in our wheelhouse:

http://steadystate.org/discover/ - Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy

** I'd be skeptical of this unless it applied the solow growth model to its argument. -C

http://cser.org/ - Center for the Study of Existential Risk

** This is for me the real reason we do this. I think a dressed up doomsday prep-er is palatable to the American public, and given this is an academic organization in the UK there is probably some shared international interest in these ideas. -C

Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin

** Rifkin is one of those new industrial revolution thinkers. They go well together with the singularity types. I'm eager to parse the vision he has, but I am skeptical of the singularity and this idea of an abundant sharing-based economy.

Whats Mine is Yours by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers

** Looks like it was co-written by a marsupial. Rachel wrote an endorsement of Rifkin's book, and I think this is in the same vein as Crowdsourcing, and other books about the crowd/shared-economy phenomenon. I got this one instead of the others because the reviews suggested there wasn't much grandstanding of vision. This is one of the things that Martin Ford does that makes me hate his work, although I very much agree with his vision and desires for the future. -C

Abundance by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

** Peter Diamandis is the real deal. He is an X Prize organizer. Ray Kurzweil, Google's Singularity Cult leader endorsed this book. I am very skeptical of Ray Kurzweil's ideas, and by extension immediately skeptical of anything I will read in this book. I am eager to get around to it though. There are famous stories of bets made between biologists and economists on the potential for society to descend into some malthusian hellscape, and the economists always win in their optimistic view of falling prices and rising standards of living. I am hoping this phenomenon continues, but I bet they will employ this continuing trend as justification for their own optomism. This is not evidence, even remotely, in my estimation. -C

Reclaiming Work by Andre Gorz

** He's one of the only communists these days that people don't all laugh at. His work is short, and I would like to rectify marxism with reality and some point in my life. -C

Hooked by Nir Eyal

** Looks into building habit-forming products. We need people to spend time and money to achieve a common but distant goal. Sounds like its worth a look.

Dr. Russell Barkley

** This is probably going to be controversial on this list. He's a researcher into ADHD, which of course I have particular interests in. The disorder is being redefined as a failure of executive function in the brain, and since what we are trying to do is address shortfalls caused by the short-term behavior of the masses in financial and capital markets it might be worth understanding how some people totally fail to take decisions that reflect their own long term best interests.

Anything by Martin Ford

** Don't read him. I'm sure we'd agree all day long in conversation, but his writing is not academic and hardly goes beyond modern Luddite propaganda.