11 February 2020

Humanity’s Sweet Spot ~ Sustainable + Social

MIT colleague Anna Waldman-Brown spotlit this provocative infographic in one of her "Academic frustrations of the day", a plot of...
"...the extent to which a country is meeting its people’s essential needs while at the same time ensuring that its use of Earth’s resources remains within its share of the planet’s biophysical boundaries."
This is on Kate Raworth's page and is named (terribly) "doughnut economics". But I like the graphic... The quadrants represent alternative thematas to "developed" vs "developing" and stand for:
A. Countries that are barely crossing any planetary boundaries, but are falling very far short on meeting people’s needs
B. Many middle-income, ‘emerging’ economies are both falling short on social needs while already crossing biophysical boundaries.
C. Today’s high-income countries cannot be called developed, given that their resource consumption is greatly overshooting Earth’s boundaries and, in the process, undermining prospects for all other countries.
D. No country is yet in sweet-spot cluster D (for Doughnut!) – so how many years until some are there, and which will make it there first?

American Evolution ~ Rails, Roads & US Cities!

The FT shares this compelling piece Mapping how railroads built America mashing up the evolution of US railroads over time with the growth in physical expansion and population of American cities...
"A new look at antique US railroad maps reveals how cities grew over the past 200 years. The FT's Alan Smith and Steven Bernard trace how cities, people and the economy spread from coast to coast"

01 February 2020

Inclusive Economies ~ Spring 2020 @ MIT D-Lab

Together with colleagues Kate Mytty and Libby McDonald, I'm co-teaching the Inclusive Economies seminar at MIT this Spring 2020 every Wed morning starting Feb 5th from 9:30-11:30a in N51-310, the D-Lab classroom area!
We explore how innovations and market mechanisms can benefit humanity by rallying impact investments, engaging participants cooperatively, boosting equity and resilience, and broadening prosperity. We look at market mechanisms for maximizing participation, choice, and growth; impact investing approaches which are socially responsible and include metrics that matter; cooperative and mutual ownership structures for shared gains; equitable citizen participation in basic and natural resource wealth; and the role of new technologies and methods towards boosting affordability, accessibility, and overall inclusive prosperity.