Ezra Klein‘s and Derek Thompson‘s Abundance tackles how those who believe that the world can be better have to achieve more. It isn’t good enough to be just against things, i.e., stopping things getting worse. To make the world better, you need to be for positive progress. What you want also needs to be deliverable on a…
Category: Public Policy
Recognizing Trade-offs Is Critical To Progress
Progress isn’t always without costs. It is great when it is, but sometimes it won’t be. You can’t be paralyzed by the presence of a downside when you see a much bigger upside. One of the major public policy books of 2025 has been Ezra Klein‘s and Derek Thompson‘s Abundance. This argues that liberals need to embrace…
Unexpected Friends to Innovation
Businesspeople like to complain about things, a lot. To be fair they are people, and that is something we people like to do. As such, it is always interesting to see when things that may seem like complaints to some turn out to be boons to innovation. What then are a few unexpected friends to…
Can Political Advocacy Be Profitable?
You often see people saying things such as ‘can’t they just stick to business?’ You even see claims that business will be more successful if they just cut out the politics. But is this correct? Can political advocacy be profitable? Corporate Political Advocacy And Negativity Bias Corporate Political Advocacy (CPA) is when a firm takes…
Limits And Self-Limits
Giorgos Kallis, a proponent of Degrowth has a paper on limits. He links this to the work of Malthus (see here). Indeed, to my mind, one way to see Kallis’ work is an attempt to distance ecologists from Malthus. I don’t blame him for that aim. Kallis also investigates the nature of limits. He rejects…
Time Prices Are Useful But Not Everything
Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley have a book, Superabundance. This discusses how prosperity has increased and what this means for pessimistic views of the world. The book is published by the Cato Institute. This is a right-wing think tank in the US, although the institute did not endorse Donald Trump’s view of the US in…
Environmental Strategy And Competitive Advantage
Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston’s Green To Gold is a detailed look at the link between environmental strategy and competitive advantage. It is an ambitious book, seeking to reframe green issues as a way for businesses to drive success. This contrasts with green choices being things that are done out of a sense of duty….
Are We Making Any Progress On Sustainability?
I recently discussed Christopher Marquis’s HBR article “In Defense of Degrowth”, see here. As seems to happen in work from a degrowth perspective, Marquis’ article spent some time implying that we aren’t making any progress on sustainability. It was pretty depressing stuff. The idea seems to be that to motivate radical change we need to…
An Ineffective Defense Of Degrowth
One of the most interesting divides in the sustainability field is around degrowth. The idea of degrowth is hard for many business people to embrace. I must confess, as you will see, I find that the logic of the degrowth people often eludes me. As such, I was interested to see what Christopher Marquis had…
Are Only Stupid People Positive?
Andrew McAfee has a positive view of where we are going as humans. This he outlines in his 2020 book, More from Less. It is worth emphasizing that the positive tone isn’t because McAfee doesn’t see the problems in the world. Indeed, he finishes with a list of seven issues he thinks should be prioritized…
