Creating Alternative Futures
It is an honor to follow in E.F. Schumacher’s footsteps to write the foreword for the reprint of Creating Alternative Futures. Just imagine, Creating Alternative Futures came out in 1978! How could Hazel Henderson have known all she knew then? Her analysis is so current! We are further down the road to the “end of economics’’ than we were in 1978, so she is no longer such a lone voice, but her words are as powerful and eloquent as ever. One reason she saw so much so soon is that she was, by her own account, self-schooled. She apprenticed herself to reality, learning experientially in the middle of the action arena when others were sitting in classrooms.
Mediocracy and Their Attention Economics
Watching the recent White House Correspondents dinner in Washington reminded me of a chapter in my Building a Win-Win World (1996, now an e-book), where I identified the rise of “mediocracies” and their “attention economies” as part of humanity’s Information Age. These political/economic trends emerged in full view, partly as a result of Russian disinformation and “fake news”, in the US 2016 election. Media in all forms now dominate over political parties, finance, corporations, academia, science, government agencies and civic organizations. Attention is their valuable resource as competition moves to capturing eyeballs.