Meme Wars
The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
From the editor and magazine that started and named the Occupy Wall Street movement, Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics is an articulation of what could be the next steps in rethinking and remaking our world that challenges and debunks many of the assumptions of neoclassical economics and brings to light a more ecological model. Meme Wars aims to accelerate the shift into this new paradigm that takes into account psychonomics, bionomics, and other aspects of our physical and mental environment that are often left out in discussions of economics.
Like Adbusters, the book will be image heavy and full-color throughout. Lasn calls it "a textbook for the future" that provides the building blocks, in texts and visuals, for a new way of looking at and changing our world. Through an examination of alternative economies, Lasn hopes to spur students to become "barefoot economists" and to see that a humanization of economics is possible. Meme Wars will include contributions from Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Samuelson, George Akerlof, Lourdes Benería, Julie Matthaei, Manfred Max-Neef, David Orrell, Paul Gilding, Mathis Wackernagel and the father of ecological economics Herman Daly, among others.
Based on ideas that were presented in a special issue of Adbusters entitled "Thought Control in Economics: Beyond the Growth Paradigm / An Activist Toolkit," Meme Wars will help move forward the Occupy Wall Street movement.
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This self-consciously stylized anticapitalist textbook offers a tour through alternative economics targeted toward college students and those encountering anarchist or radical politics for the first time. Lasn is both the founder of Adbusters Magazine and the mind behind the Occupy Movement, which has earned his culture-jamming ethos an extended moment in the sun. This latest text marries these two cultural phenomena, driven equally by the glitzy subversion of '90s culture jamming and the broad-ranging ideological concerns of Occupy protestors, environmental and social justice concerns prime among them. The book is rich with enlightening interviews with mainstream and radical economists as well as tours through historic economic development and paradigm-shifting concepts. However, the reliance on a '90s style of faux-ads and fraught, frenetic imagery familiar to anyone who has browsed an old Adbusters feels dated, while the constant attempts to subvert the textbook genre come across more often as cheesy than radical. For those committed to the read, the core content of the book, including contributions by Herman Daly and Margaret Atwood, still manages to convince and inspire, even while the stylized design borders on a patronizing tone that risks turning off the very audience it addresses. Color illus.
