Resources for change: new ways to think

swan with its butt sticking out of the water

This week’s resources for change are articles that made my head spin and question core assumptions about how the world works. Maybe one of them will spin you, too.

JP Rangaswami talked about accounting systems and how they connect to new forms of value. If that sounds dry, it’s not. Here’s a quote to get you started, “How we impute and account for value affects everything we do, as individuals, as firms, as economies, as society…”

This article from the Atlantic questions whether American public education is actually failing. Quote: ” If the educational system had broken at some point, a look backward would reveal an end to progress—a point at which the system stopped working. Yet that isn’t at all the picture that emerges. Instead, one can see that across many generations, the schools have slowly and steadily improved.”

And this one takes on the myth of the selfish gene, calling it bad biology and linking that bad biology to the destruction of the global economy. “Since evolution advances by elimination, it is indeed a ruthless process. Yet its products don’t need to be ruthless at all. Many animals survive by being social and sticking together, which implies that they can’t follow the right-of-the-strongest principle to the letter: the strong need the weak.”

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