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https://theconversation.com/dont-look-up-has-a-surprising-amount-to-tell-us-about-economics-much-of-it-useful-174399>
"In the new Netflix sensation
Don’t Look Up, two astronomers, played by
Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo Di Caprio, discover a massive comet heading
towards Earth, and desperately try to warn the US president, played by Meryl
Streep.
Their hope is the government will take action to avert catastrophe while there
is time. Their efforts are subverted by a combination of self-serving political
cynicism, billionaire business interests, a media that sees its job as
respecting those interests and that cynicism, and a population conditioned not
to look up.
It is an obvious metaphor for the threat of climate breakdown, where warnings
and pleadings from climatologists and scientists and from a growing number of
campaigners, ecological economists and others, are being ignored, trivialised
and sometimes even ridiculed by political insiders.
But after 40 years marked by the dominance of neoliberal pro-market economic
policies, the metaphor can be extended to almost any challenge requiring a
serious response, particularly where it involves standing up to vested
interests.
There’s more amiss than vision and courage. Public services no longer have the
capacity they did to respond to problems like long-term climate change and
short-term pandemics.
Their administrative and decision-making capacity has been stripped away, as
has the surge capacity in health systems and in many countries the ability to
react to disruptions to supply chains – all in the name of efficiency, but with
the effect of creating fragility while contributing to inequality and
extremism."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
