Allen White

‘Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice’, a new book by Raj Patel and Rupa Marya, is a tour of the human body that reveals the links between our biology and political and economic injustices such as racism, poverty and colonialism.

Transnational corporations, the engines of global capitalism, have become the target of efforts to create an economic system both socially just and environmentally sustainable. The unprecedented power and impact of these leviathans on society and ecology raises critical questions: What is corporate purpose? To whom should corporations be held accountable? And how, in fact, can that be accomplished?

In my book, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist, I try to reframe economics through the power of images. The diagrams that we draw profoundly shape our thinking. If we’re going to thrive in the twenty-first century, and if economists are going to be helpful in doing so, we need to rename and redraw the economy.

My forthcoming book, entitled Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present, asks the following questions: Could the world be non-capitalist or post-capitalist? Could we see humanism in action? What would it look like? What would socialist corporations look like? How would they function? How would democracy function?

Cosmopolitanism rests on the notion that there are many ways of leading a decent human life. Societies can put together different arrangements for leading a good life provided they respect basic human rights and entitle people to construct families, towns, cities, nations, and larger communities like the European Union or the African Union.

“Come, friends, let us sit down together. Not in a lecture hall, not in a laboratory, not in a political forum. Here on the banks of the Kentucky River, let us sit down together and see what went on here. What’s going on here now? Why is it the way it is now? What do we want?”