Investing in Human Connection

Dear Ms. David:

Your story is profound and amazing. I am a former student of Dr. Nagler’s. Dr. Nagler teaches a lot about Einstein’s thought in relation to Non-Violence. Do you know that Einstein also once said, “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest?”

Funny but true! I get so sad when I see peace-loving students like yourself burdened with debt. I want you to know that you can be financially free. I took many of the principles I learned from Michael and Easwaran and invested in this goal using non-violence and a spirit of charity and detachment to the fruits of my labor and achieved financial freedom.

Hang in there and believe in yourself. You can be free of the debt you mention. I will pray for you in this area of your life.

Your debt is nothing when compared to your capacity to give and be creative.

Hi. I started trading as self-employed in 1989. I was amazed to see that my income for last year had actually gone down. To £4.4k, (for tax purposes). Two maxims got me through my M.A.: Gandhi’s “He who strives will not perish” and St Teresa’s “Patience achieves the goal”. I still owe £5k. The joke is that now the price of an undergrraduate degree here in the UK is £9k per year. And you can’t teach without a PhD. As a “contribution” to the course I hope to write something on Eric Reinart, the Norwegian Economist who has a radical critique of Ricardo and is totally against the Free Trade of the Washington Concensus, and Ernesto Laclau’s criticism of Hegel in his attempt to understand “antagonism”. It’s nearly Saturday. I’m going to the seaside tomorrow.

There is a conversation to be had about credit and viable sustainability. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with Richard Duncan’s book “The New Depression”. He says our system has about 15 years maximum. Our credit system is fine so ling as it is constantly expanding. He says we should change the character of debt away from personal borrowing to public borrowing and invest trillions into key development areas. We saw yesterday, the European interest rate cut to .05%. Here in Britain it was .5. That provides the opportunity for massive investments to be made. My concern, and point of engagement with this course’s discussion is around sustainablility. It would seem to be desirable to develop and protect industrial and service sector development. This, says Eric Reinart is the way to develop agriculture by keeping real wages high and not diminishing, to ride the wave of technology and the spikes of productivity. I served for several years here on Britain’s All Party Parliamentary Committee for Agriculture. My wife’s father is a smallholder in Kenya. The Parliamentary concern was to feed the planet. To develop agriculture. I have become convinced of Reinart’s argument. People need money in order to buy things. One coherent reason for 2008 is that the Chinese workers were not paid enough to buy anything. Trouble is, Duncan says, even if the Chinese wage is increased to $10 per day, there are 2 million Indians willing to work for $5. Let me fill in the form to claim childcare from my wife, Faith’s, college. Good Morning America!

Thanks to Kimberlyn for heartfelt comment on NV. I am in because am active in Peace Action Maine, in effort to bring the consciousness of NV to light in the world, particularly in relation to conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq.

I have been an activist and, off and on unknowing nonviolent person since the age of 15; about 51 years ago. That means a lot of starts and stops, detours, backtracking, mistakes and outright wrongheadedness. I have realized that I (possibly everyone?) need to take this piece and that piece and cobble them together with other pieces and my pieces to build something that works for me. Seems it’s that way for most everything. I need to manage my inner lives with my outer lives to attain the ability to effectively and comfortably live. For me nonviolence doesn’t seem ‘natural’. I come from a background of many levels and kinds of violence. Nonviolence is very much a conscious and deliberate choice.I did not like where I ‘lived’ and looked for a new ‘address’. I started this stumbling journey to a new ‘address’ and repeatedly came back to the one of violence, sometimes by choice and sometimes seemingly by accident. But for every 9 steps backward I was able to take 10 forward. I will share my beginnings and journey with those interested. I’m still on that journey, along with many others. I have come to a point where, although not finished (by a long shot) I can see a lot of progress. I’ve come to, not only love myself, but even like myself – a vary tremendous and significant journey in itself. That tells a very little bit of who and what I am so you have a basis to place context to my statements and comments.

Developing the inner and outer nonviolent person (differentiated from the peaceful person) is the way I must work on my becoming. I’m wondering if this simultaneous method is the way you need to work or do work.

I’ve known of the concept of Jubilee for decades and thought ‘nice concept, too bad nobody seems to practice it’.I have also practiced something I heard about long ago, ‘when someone wants to borrow, make it a gift’ to a degree. I rarely told the ‘borrower’ it was a gift, I just forgot about it, if they paid it back, good, if not, also good. I began to feel taken advantage of, so I started keeping track of some of it. Then I began making a fairly good wage and the amounts borrowed began getting bigger. Then I inherited more and the borrowing went into the tens of thousands. I started noticing the people who ‘owed’ me began to avoid me and those I ran into seemed to feel uncomfortable. I thought about this for over a year, not liking what was happening to relationships with people I cared about. Finally I declared Jubilee. I contacted those who ‘owed’ me money and told them they owed me nothing, that their ‘debt’ was wiped clean and they owed me nothing. Each one was puzzled, some questioned me and I explained they and their friendship was more important to me than the money. Again, each thanked me, some said little else, some insisted they owed me and those I told ‘that’s up to you, as far as I’m concerned you owe me nothing.’ Then an amazing thing happened, not that they gave me what they felt they ‘owed’ me, although some did, not that the relationships improved, although many did, but that in releasing them, whether they felt indebted or not, I was released too. I didn’t even realize that I was bound, but I was. I still give people what I can when they are in need, again I don’t tally it. But now, I’m not bound by it. Wonderful, isn’t it?

http://www.othercanon.org/documenting/index.html

A main purpose of The Other Canon is to develop a Theory of Uneven Development, and with it the tools and policies needed for poor nations and regions to achieve decent living conditions through their own economic activities, rather than as welfare recipients. An important tool for building such a theory is the History of Economic Policy, documenting the policies used by presently rich countries as they went from poverty to wealth. The History of Economic Policy is a discipline that differs significantly from the history of economic thought. A main reason for this difference lies in the large discrepancies between theoretical economics and the policies that have actually been carried out, both historically and presently. To exemplify: we seek to document the actual policies carried out in England rather than what Adam Smith recommended England to do.

The greater part of the most influential economics books in history, and their authors, are not mentioned in today’s textbooks in the history of economic thought. In fact, these textbooks tend to focus as if economics originated in physiocracy, a tradition that was very short-lived in terms of actual policy influence. The anti-physiocrats, who established the policies that made Europe into a wealthy continent during the decades and centuries to follow, are hardly ever mentioned.

The Kress Collection at Harvard University contains the world’s most famous collection of economics books. Its former curator, Kenneth Carpenter, has worked for decades collecting data on the translations of economics books, thus documenting how ideas moved across Europe. The sheer volume of translations is indicated by the fact that only from and into Swedish there were more than 200 translations of economics books before 1850. Kenneth Carpenter has put this material at the disposal of The Other Canon Foundation to be published on the web. He will himself assist in the editing. Carpenter’s legendary ‘The Economic Bestsellers Before 1850’ – out of print for decades already – documents the editions and translations of the 40 economics books that reached the highest number of editions.