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A book of pedestrian economic and political prescriptions
BRIGHTON BEACH: Occasional 'culturally required' purchases, such as a holiday
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GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an accessible - and optimistic - take on our relationship to new technology
JOHN GREEN suggests that a new, biased, and highly readable re-hash of the story of the Cambridge Five be taken with a large pinch of salt
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a timely reminder of the long history of protests and the outdoor spaces in which they takes place
Foundational Economy: The infrastructure of everyday life
by The Collective Foundational Economy
Manchester University Press £11.99
THE opening chapters of this book reminded me of president John F Kennedy’s trenchant and moving attack on the idea that a country’s progress can be judged by GDP figures. The Gross Domestic Product, he said “measures everything... except that which makes life worthwhile.”
Many proposals to re-focus economy theory and policy away from national income accounting have been published. In this case the focus is the “foundations” of an economy – consisting of zones “producing daily essential goods and services which are critical to citizens flourishing.”
There are three main areas: the “material” Foundational Economy (FE) consists of those pipes and networks “which continuously connect households to everyday life including water, electricity, food, transport and telecoms.”
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