Transformation from Wall Street to Wellbeing

This book has two main objectives. The first is to make the case for social change through exploring post disciplinary and post materialist frameworks to address greed, zero sum competition for resources, the commodification of the powerless and the environment. Secondly, it develops a reframed approach to measuring wellbeing – not productivity – as a sign of economic success. Thus the book considers the challenge posed by Stiglitz (2010) to the Australian Productivity Commission, namely to foster an understanding that the wellbeing of humanity is dependent on the global commons.

Transformation from Wall Street to Wellbeing also examines whether a  change  in the architecture of democracy and governance could balance individual and collective needs more effectively through participation, guided by the axiom that people ought to be encouraged to  be free and diverse;  but only to the extent that freedom and diversity does not undermine the rights of others. What does this mean for constructing and re-constructing the way in which we live? This volume makes a case for cosmopolitan approaches that scale up local engagement and that enable monitory democracy from below. Instead of Big Brother controlling the people who are unable to think critically, people are encouraged to monitor the use of resources locally. The process of monitoring needs to be supported by means of the principle of subsidiarity and buttressed by international law spanning post national regions. It discusses participatory action research to prefigure a means to hold the market to account – to ensure that the use of resources that are necessary for the common good are accessible and equitable.

This is the companion book to Systemic Ethics and Non-Anthropocentric Stewardship: Implications for Transdisciplinarity and Cosmopolitan Politics, also by the author. The two volumes comprise a series of essays that can be read separately and in any order or aschapters on a common theme, namely, “How should we live?”