Recent Posts:
Organizing to Improve Quality of Life
https://youtu.be/4s151fZWD2Y Quality of Life (Video 7 minutes) Our problems with business, government, and the environment should provoke rarely asked questions. For example, should the purpose of a business be to make money, to please customers, or much, much more?...
Learned Dependency – A Religion?
By Mike Hall. Compression advocates a social challenge for humans to seek and learn a lifestyle of “Doing Better With Less”. The concept seems easy to acknowledge given our current observed decline of nature and limited resources. But intelligence (mental and...
Ours to Hack and to Own
Ours to Hack and to Hold: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet, Edited by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider. This book is unusual. First, it’s not to be released officially until August, but poke around and...
Healthcare and the Quality of All Life
https://youtu.be/I4iLmHpM274 Healthcare and the Quality of All Life Human health depends on all human systems, plus nature’s systems. But we seldom think of health care that way. We define it as intervention when things go wrong – as curative care to restore health....
An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back by Elisabeth Rosenthal
An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back by Elisabeth Rosenthal, MD Why does curative care cost so much? Rosenthal explains many of the reasons by muckraking American healthcare in gory detail. Not only an experienced MD,...
Wicked Problems
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNrAKUdkm0Y Doc Hall: Wicked Problems (Video 6 minutes) We will be doing more about wicked problems on this blog. A comment about the video: at the end, Jose the owner of the restaurant said that his wicked problem at the time was...
EDUCE: Education that Learns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_PfZCBeaig Coffee With Doc: EDUCE. Educe: Education that Learns By Jack Ring Whether children or adults, most of us love to learn; we don’t like to be taught – told by an authority. Great “teachers” know this. They guide each...
The Econocracy: The Perils of Leaving Economics to the Experts
The Econocracy: The Perils of Leaving Economics to the Experts by Joe Earle, Cahal Moran, and Zach Ward-Perkins This book attracted interest because it is associated with Rethinking Economics, a gestating global movement of renegade graduate students in economics bent...
A Direction in the Chaos
https://youtu.be/5sehaJiUzVo Coffee With Doc: Stalking Dinner (Video 4 minutes) Whether called “free market,” globalization,” neo-liberalism, or something else, the West’s prevailing business and economic system is sputtering. A totally new social contract will have...
Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason
Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason Mason is an experienced British writer and TV news editor covering economics and public policy. His future vision fuses artificial intelligence, automation, environmental problems, and wonky strategies to cure our...
Re-Balancing Ourselves
https://youtu.be/CsmPrkNB-ts Coffee With Doc: Re-Balancing Ourselves Previous posts referred to a broad swath of environmental degradation undermining our consumptive way of life. Issues are global, but vary by location. Some of us don’t want to accept that this is...
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Harari and Less Medicine, More Health: 7 Assumptions That Drive Too Much Medical Care by Gilbert Welch
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Harari Yuval Noah Harari is a professor of history in The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a secular Jew. That’s important because he spends part of the book on the rift between science and religions, and he’s a...
Can We Make Human Progress?
https://youtu.be/BMGdn6boL_c Even economists are beginning to see that the current economic system is flawed. Most want to fix it, like Jared Bernstein who advocates re-priming growth, but distributing it more equally, which he calls “reconnection.” Arguments about...
Surviving the Future by David Fleming and Shaun Chamberlin, The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly, and From Uneconomic Growth to a Steady State Economy by Herman Daly
Three short reviews of fairly dense books. Surviving the Future by David Fleming and Shaun Chamberlin David Fleming worked on the basis for this book for 30 years. Hardly known in the U.S., in the UK Fleming obtained a PhD in economics, was an environmental activist;...
Compression at the Octane Coffee Shop
https://youtu.be/BSxuWlrdYFE Coffee With Doc: Adopting Compression Thinking (video and blog) Last Saturday, we went to Maria Morgan’s coffee shop. Maria asked about Compression and Compression Thinking. She had not heard of it before. I asked about her coffee shop...
NOW – The Physics of Time by Richard A. Muller
NOW - The Physics of Time by Richard A. Muller Muller is professor of physics at Berkeley, best known recently as a skeptic investigating global warming, reluctantly concluding that the evidence points to it – with reservations, of course. However, his book, Now, is a...
Learning to Escape Eroom’s Law
https://youtu.be/lD4wlGyB2rA One indicator that we need a very different concept of what we call business is Eroom’s Law, a buzzword from the world of pharmaceutical drug development. Erooms’s Law is that the increasing complexity of a system inexorably keeps driving...
A Prescription for Change by Michael Kinch
In this newly released book, Michael Kinch begins with the history of drug development from ancient times up to 2016. He’s qualified. Kinch is a knowledgeable insider in drug development, biotech, and in university research, with experience in both the scientific and...
Frames and Framing
https://youtu.be/wtya01TUDT4 In the sense of psychology and communications, George Lakoff coined the term, “framing.” A framework is a belief, or a set of them, by which people interpret their world. We all have multiple frameworks; they need not be logically...
Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, by Peter Frase
Frase is a writer for Jacobin, a left-wing political magazine that sponsored his book. Left wing polemics being predictable, this book seemed of little interest until spotting a couple of reviews by other authors saying that it was mind opening. Critics complained...