In Conversation

Manda: Hey people. Welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible, and that if we all work together, there is still time for us to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to lead to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility, and this week’s guest is one of those who I genuinely believe holds the keys to that possibility.

Jennifer Brownsburg Engelman is an educator, a regenerative, and I would say renegade Economist. Who is lead at the project for regenerative economics in secondary schools and lead author of the online textbook of the same name. Jennifer has been teaching economics for nearly 30 years, but as you’ll hear, the global financial crash led her to rethink the rules and structures of the system, the entire paradigm that underpins all the ways that we live and work and do business. And now she’s one of the world’s leading thinkers on regenerative economics. How we can focus away from business markets and the structures of neoliberalism to towards ways of being that are grounded in reciprocity, respect and responsibility in the realities of what it is to be a human being in the 21st century. In 2023, Jennifer stopped working as a teacher and is now focused full-time on shifting the paradigm in the education system and beyond moving us away from the toxic mindset of scarcity competition and the rise of oligopolies towards an understanding of our place as integral nodes in the web of life. Her new two year curriculum, which has recently been taken up by the International School in the Hague, is one of the most ambitious I have ever seen. It builds a solid, damning critique of the old paradigm and then offers credible structured roots through to a new one that would allow us all to flourish within a thriving ecosystem. To have not just an economy, but a way of being that is predicated in reciprocity, care sharing, and the kinds of lives we yearn to lead but don’t yet know how. Genuinely, this is evolutionary. And if we can spread these ideas far enough, wide enough, and root them deep enough, I genuinely believe this is one key to the continuation of complex life on Earth. Because yes, we are that close to extinction, and yes, there is still time to veer away from the cliffs edge. So if you do nothing else this week, please share this conversation and the links in the show notes to anyone and everyone you know who cares about shifting the paradigm or even is involved in the education system at any level.

So here we go, for a genuinely transformative conversation, people of the podcast, please do welcome Jennifer Brownsburg, Engelman of regenerative economics for secondary schools and for everybody else.

Jennifer Brownsburg Engelman, welcome to the Accidental Gods Podcast. How are you and where are you on this lovely summer afternoon?

Jennifer: Uh, it’s less lovely here where I am. I’m in Frankfurt, Germany, and we’ve just had some rain, the first real bout of rain that we’ve had for a very long time, so I’m actually quite happy about the, the cloudy cool it and rainy weather. And yeah, I’m fine. Thank you for asking.

Manda: Good, thank you. And yes, rain. I am next talking to Tim Smedley, who wrote a book called The Last Drop, which starts off with all the places around the world where they nearly got to zero day, which in water terms, as you turn on the tap and nothing comes out. So yes, we are also very glad that it’s raining. It’s, it’s interesting times in terms of water and the entire structure. This is going to lead in really well because everything that’s wrong with our water systems is wrong with our water systems because the economic system does not support. Having a proper water infrastructure stupidly because people still see water as a way to make profit. So let me get this right. You are project leader and lead author on regenerative economics for schools, which is such unnecessary and wonderful and amazing thing. And I follow you on LinkedIn and um, totally in awe, first of all, of the fact that this didn’t exist already, and second that you have stepped up and stepped in and are making it happen. So tell us a little bit about how you came to be that and what you’re doing with it.

Jennifer: Yeah, so. So first of all, I’ve been a teacher now for more, for almost 30 years. I want almost more than 30 years, but 30 years. And I spent most of that time teaching economics, uh, mainstream economics. And most of that time was in the International Baccalaureate program. And I was quite happy teaching that course for a long time. Didn’t think much about it. Kids really liked it. We had a nice time. Many of them went on to study economics at university because they liked it so much. But shortly after the financial crisis, I had a year out, my husband and children, and I made a move to New York and then we came back within the same year, which is also an interesting story in itself. Yeah. But, um, I had a little bit of time out and it was kind of in the wake of the financial crisis and. Just having that time away from the classroom and the pressures of getting kids through the syllabus and getting them through the high stakes exam at the end, and having a bit of reflective time in the context of what was happening globally. I came back with a much more critical perspective on what I was teaching, and the thing that struck me at that time was that we were spending maybe seven or eight weeks on what was called theory of the firm. So lots of diagrams about monopolies and oligopolies and perfect competition and cost curves and shading and welfare loss and this kind of thing. Like we’d spent that much time on this material. And in the syllabus, it wasn’t my choice, it was defined in the syllabus how much time would be spent. We spent one day on equity. Whoa. And, um, yeah, it’s just, it’s just funny when you think about it, but I, you know, I came back to teaching, you know, in the wake of the financial crisis when obviously, um, economic inequality like really kind of bubbled up to the surface and was thought, what, what are we doing with this curriculum? It just made no sense. And so that experience really kind of brought me to reading more widely in, in plurals economics. And I then also, you know, became increasingly concerned about sustainability and was doing work on that and, you know, starting to teach other teachers about it. And, um, kind of a, a key paradigm shift for me was actually reading Donut Economics because for me it kind of pulled together so many ideas that I had been kind of fishing around with or like read about. But in this kind of compact, tidy form, the Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century economist was really mind shifting for me to have that pulled together so simply and clearly and in a very entertaining way. And, um, from that point on, I got sort of much more, I don’t know, I guess, uh, active in terms of trying to teach others about these ideas and because of the work, some of that work that I had done initially. And I also volunteered with the Donut Economics group to give some, some feedback on things that they were doing. I got asked in 2022. I got asked by two student organizations in the UK, SOS UK and teach the Future to work on a project that they had developed. And this project is, it’s called Track Changes sometimes you see it also called the curriculum for a Change in Climate. And they have this really great idea that they wanted to bring academics and teachers together to rewrite the entire English national curriculum to include sustainability. So all the curriculum documents for every grade level and every subject to include sustainability and it, the idea behind it. You know, kind of goes back to this, I think it’s Milton Friedman, right? Who’s talking about how, like you have these moments of change and oftentimes the new thing that comes to the fore is the thing that just happens to be lying around, right?  So the idea was to create the thing that would be lying around so that when an opening came to reform the English national curriculum, that these documents would be there and they could pull them out and say, here you go.

Manda: We’ve got it.

Jennifer: And um, and that’s actually what has happened, right? So when the labour government came in, one of the first things that they did was declared that they were going to review the national curriculum. And so, you know, having these documents lying around has been incredibly useful for now the campaigning around getting more sustainability into the curriculum. I was asked to work on economics and unlike other subjects, like, you know, if you’re going to change your English curriculum, then maybe you can make some small tweaks to it to have it include sustainability. But you can’t just sprinkle in a little bit of sustainability into your mainstream course and have it be okay. Right?

Manda: Yeah. Because standard economics is absolutely antithetical to anything that we might call, how we define sustainable.

Jennifer: So, you know, that was a much bigger job than, you know, other subjects might have encountered. And I knew then I needed help. And so I asked Kate Raworth whether she would help and she agreed. And so she brought in a few more academics and I brought in a few more teachers. And then together we initially rewrote the GCSE economic syllabus. And, later also worked on the A level syllabus and then called it regenerative Economics because that was the spirit in which the new formulation was presented, or that it was constructed and it needs a separate name. Like my preference actually would be just to call it economics. But if you call it economics, then people don’t understand that it’s, you know, a different animal, right? So we created the syllabus first, and that was published in May, 2023. And in the same month I quit my job as a teacher. It was, I had known I was going to do this for a long time. But, I quit my job as a teacher and then started working on trying to bring this syllabus to life with the idea that it wouldn’t just be something that’s, uh, England focused, but that, to try to turn it into a global movement to. Reform the way economics is taught in secondary schools everywhere in the world. So that was kind of the, the start of the project.

Manda: Wow. And I came to it. Yeah. Gosh, there’s so much in there. So I’m quite curious about your trip to New York and back, but that might not be for yet. Let’s, let’s some other time talk to us about, you came back. So Global Financial Crash was 08/09. Donut Economics was published in 2017. Yeah. So there’s a nearly 10 year gap in between, and you’re reading Pluralist Economics. So let’s, there’s always someone for whom this is the first podcast of ours that they’ve listened to. Let’s define a little bit the Chicago School neoliberal economics, and let’s explore what you see as pluralistic economics and the distinction between them. Does that work as a question?

Jennifer: Yeah, we can, we can give that a try. So, um. I mean, maybe it, I think it might be helped to kind of frame this neoliberal or neoclassical approach and neoliberal ideology that’s embedded into our courses by talking a little bit about what economics looks like in secondary, because it’s, yes, it is based on this neoclassical approach and neoliberal ideology. So when I talk to teachers about their courses, and most teachers haven’t had the kind of space and time to step outside their practice and really look at it critically, right? I mean, they’re enmeshed in the day-to-day burden really, of getting kids through the, the syllabus of preparing them to take exams or, or do whatever work they have to do.

Manda: And I think it’s also still the hegemonic narrative. Of most of our world is that this is what economics is and I think it’s worth saying that’s not an accident. Yeah. Quite a lot of people worked very hard to ensure that this was the case. And certainly in the UK and I’m guessing around the world, most of our commentary at did PPE at Oxbridge, which is politics, philosophy, and economics.

Yeah. And they were taught this economics and they believe it to be true. I occasionally get really, really angry with some of the people. Let’s not go into names particularly, but, but political and economic correspondence under editors at places like the BBC splurging this stuff and going, no, no, no. That’s not the way the economy actually works. But they believe it to be true because it’s what they embodied at age 18 and lots and lots of. Psychological studies show that what you take in in your late teens, early twenties becomes the foundation for your world, which is a lot of the problem of what we’ve got now when we have 70 year olds running the world who embodied stuff back in the fifties that they believe to be true. So I think it, it is absolutely worth saying that it was a very deliberate attempt or unsuccessful by people whose who I think understood that this is not actually how the economy works, but wanted it to become a narrative. So let’s have a look at that narrative. Go for it.

Jennifer: Yeah. So basically the way to think about this is that these courses that are taught to kids now explicitly as young as 14, sometimes even younger, but most of the time, the earliest kind of exposure to economics as a discipline is from the age of 14 or 16. What these courses do is they draw a narrow systems boundary around markets and they treat markets, the provisioning institution of markets as though markets. Is the economy that this one institution, this way of organizing is the economy.

Manda: Tell us what a market is?

Jennifer: A market this, uh, exchange between producers and consumers where the, the, um, exchange happens based on, on a price, right? So, this market institution is presented as the economy, uh, and assistance boundaries drawn around it. And what that means is that all non-market activity is either marginalized or completely ignored in these courses. And so what that means in practical terms is the state, uh, also as a provisioning institution, uh, is also in these courses, but it’s marginalized. It’s outside the systems boundary. And we even have, like when you look at the language that we use to talk about the state in these courses, that the state intervenes in the economy. It’s not part of the economy. It intervenes into the economy. And this is generally seen as a bad thing the state imposes regulations, right. This, their taxes are a burden. So there’s all this really loaded language that really just is like a, a flashing warning signal. Like the state is not part of the economy. It’s out here. It’s a alien entity. We want to push it away, right. It has a very marginal, you know, it, it should be creating the rules that allow markets to, you know –

Manda: …to be as liberated. It is all about freedom of the market will solve everything.

Jennifer: Yeah. And, and also the rules that make market activity possible. Right? Markets won’t, they actually can’t exist without states. Because in order to sell something in a market, it needs to be private property. And for private property to be private and it’s sellable, it needs to be legally recognized and protected, right? But anyway, the point is you’ve got this narrow systems boundary. It’s focused on markets. As the economy, the state is marginalized, is imposing, has a limited role. We want, we’re pushing it away in this paradigm. Then when we talk about the other thing that’s marginalized, or another element that’s marginalized is all of society and all of the, you know, all of earth systems, the environment. So we don’t even have a language in these courses to talk about society and nature. I don’t want to, I hate using the word nature.

Manda:  We call it the Web of life on the podcast.

Jennifer: But, um, you, we don’t have a language to discuss it except through the lens of markets. So the only time we talk about this in these mainstream courses is as a market failure. So it’s a failure of markets. It’s not a thing in and of itself. It’s a, it’s a market failure. And, and we also refer to these, uh, social and ecological impacts as externalities. Right? Again, it just tells you we’ve got this narrow systems boundary around markets, states, marginalized societies, marginalized. Or systems are marginalized and then what’s completely ignored. So these things are marginalized. They’re, they’re there but only through the lens of market activity, but households and the common, so these other two provisioning institutions completely ignored. So all of the unpaid household care and domestic work that without which, like nothing would function anywhere, right? We don’t, we only talk about households when, when it’s brought up, we talk about them in their role as consumers of goods from markets or in the, uh, circular flow of income diagram, right? As providers of the, of labour resources like labour and, and capital land. But that, you know, we don’t explore that at all. But I, I found it, it, it is really interesting. I was looking at the Luxembourg curriculum for economics, and it actually says in the curriculum that the main role of households is to consume things from markets. It actually says that, and that’s so shocking.

Manda: But it does explain why we are where we are.

Jennifer: Yeah, it does, because if you, if that’s the way you paint households and then you ignore all the unpaid care and domestic work that actually makes everything else happen and is so important for human wellbeing, then it also explains like in, you know, you have this problem in England, you’ve in the UK you’ve got the austerity measures. It’s just not even recognized that how horrible austerity is for the having functioning households and how important it is to have functioning households for human wellbeing and for the functioning of like whatever it is you want to call the economy, even if you want to define it as market activity, you know, you don’t want to undermine your households

Manda: Because you don’t want to undermine human wellbeing. You don’t want to undermine people’s lives. By defining them only. I think one of the things that. I hadn’t understood until I did the Master’s at Schumacher was the extent to which they define people as rational economic man. And it’s generally man, and it’s, oh, economic is, and it’s that your role is, is to make rational decisions, which are, I will buy whatever I want at the cheapest possible price, and I will offer my labour, which will by definition be priced at the cheapest possible that the business that his employee meat can do, because that’s rational. And that’s how you get Jeff Bezos saying that his employees should be terrified from the moment they wake up because they’re in danger of losing their jobs or being undercut by someone who’s prepared to work cheaper. It’s also how you end up with, I discovered the other day, nurses. Who are working privately. The companies have access through AI to their credit rating, such that they understand that the nurses who have the highest debt will be desperate enough to work for the lowest amount of money. And so therefore they offer them that there’s an inverse ratio. The more debt you have, the less you are likely to be paid because they know you’re willing to do it. And that is the absolute logical outcome of market economics. And it destroys people and it doesn’t care.

Jennifer: Yeah. It’s about the extraction, extracting the most surplus you can from all of the resources that are around you. I’m actually going to, I will talk about this in a minute because once I sort of talk to you about what’s marginalized and completely ignored in these courses, then I also want to take a closer look at what it means to study markets, if I could just kind of wrap up.

Manda: Yes. Sorry, I interrupted. Go for it.

Jennifer: I’m happy that you brought that up. So, you know, the households are ignored or if they might be mentioned really briefly, but only in the context of markets. Again, we only look at that through this lens of markets and then the comments, uh, as a provisioning institution, right, where you have a resource, a community, and a set of rules, right? It’s not, we use the term common very often in society to mean just a resource, but actually it’s a set of relationships. And so these are ignored. Or if they’re not ignored, we always attach the word tragedy.

Manda: Yes. Talk a little bit about the tragedy of the commons, because that’s this idea that human beings are unable to manage shared resources without over exploiting them.

Jennifer: Right. And it goes back to conceptions of human nature and that we, what rational behaviour is, is to take as much as you possibly can for yourself to maximize the personal utility. So it goes back to narratives about human nature as well, like what you’re talking about. But anyway, the, the comments, if it’s addressed at all, it’s only through this narrative of the tragedy of the commons, but actually along with households, the commons and commoning work that goes on there is extremely important for human wellbeing. It’s happening everywhere around the world, in every community, commoning is happening, but it’s particularly the dominant way of organizing among many indigenous communities. And we don’t talk about it. We don’t recognize it. Kids don’t know how to do it. They don’t know how to engage in commoning. And my position on this is that if you want a healthy, resilient economy, just like a healthy, resilient. Ecosystem. You need to have diversity of ways of organizing different, strong, huge number of networks, right? And relationships. And so having healthy households and healthy amounts of commoning going on, having people know how to manage household householding skills and commenting skills are so incredibly important along with markets and state. And that’s, you know, one of the key shifts that we’ve done is to make sure we include all of those provisioning institutions. But anyway, the, the neoliberal and neoclassical approach and the neoliberal ideology then, you know, puts this systems boundary around markets and, you know, marginalizes it or more. And then when you look at what’s actually taught about markets, you realize that, I mean, from day one. Kids are being taught extremely degenerative understandings of human beings and human relationships, uh, and our relationships with the rest of nature. On day one, most kids learn about the concept of scarcity. That’s a nickname. So scarcity kind of has two key pieces to it, right. It has to do with limited resources. And I think we can all agree that some resources are stock limited, others are flow limited. But these, the fact that there are limits is clear. But the other piece of that, just having limits doesn’t make things scarce. The other piece of that is this assumption that human needs and wants are unlimited. And kids are told this as a fact. No one questions it. Areas like nodding their heads. Yes, it’s true. Human needs and wants are unlimited. And of course this is not true. Human needs are not unlimited and human wants are socially shaped.

Manda: Right. Especially if you define humans as being there in order to consume, you have to, by corollary, have infinite consumption. Or every, everything falls apart.

Jennifer: Yeah. And it’s just it, it’s crazy to me that we start our courses with that and then of course that leads to all kinds of other assumptions. You know, if everything is scarce, then it makes sense for me to try to grab as much as I can, you know?

Manda: Yeah. It becomes a zero sum game. I win and therefore somebody else loses and that’s how things should be. And God ordained in a way. If you get to the American kind of current system, that’s the way that it’s made and it’s Right.

Jennifer: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, the sort of competitiveness built into the idea and that, and defining rationality. You mentioned this earlier, right? This homo economic, this idea of rational behaviour as being behaviour that says you should maximize your own personal utility or that firms should maximize their profits. And that’s rational. I mean, like how twisted is it to define that as being rational and it’s completely ignoring the complexity of human behaviour. Yeah, of course. People are selfish sometimes, right? But we wouldn’t have actually developed societies.

Manda: No, no. We wouldn’t have survived 300,000 years if we were not actually really, really good at sharing. And I think you said kids don’t understand how to common, as I understand it, when you, you take two and three year olds, sharing is a natural thing. The not sharing is something that we then have domesticated kids into because we need them to behave like this. We need ourselves to behave like this, to prop up what is basically a really toxic trauma-based system that, that in the UK definitely goes back, you know, Rome brought in this concept of scarcity and, and PIAs commodification of land, labour, and capital. And it isn’t how we evolved to be. And somehow we have to constrain our minds to believe in scarcity and get our whole amygdala limbic system in that kind of constant terror of if there’s not enough, we will fall over. And I really noticed during the pandemic- There was a while where providing homes for homeless people was necessary to stop the spread. And we discovered we could do that actually quite well. Yeah. But the neoliberal system needs there to be very visible, homeless people, to keep everyone else afraid. And so it wasn’t sustained.

Jennifer: Well, and it’s also, you know, the scarcity, you’ve got to imagine like what the scarcity does and scarcity is created in these systems, right? And something that we have in, in the book that we’ve written is, um, we talk a lot about. When we have the section on markets, we talk about power relationships because at the end of the day, this creation of the scarcity puts more power in the hands of the producers and sellers, the owners of the things that are sold. If it’s scarce, then demand is more in elastic. For these, if people need it and they have to compete to get it, then it puts pricing power in the hands of the people who have the resources. So scarcity is, is something that’s deliberately created in these systems and I think it’s, it’s really important to understand these power dynamics. I mean, economics courses. They do talk about power, but they tend to talk about it in a very limited section of the course. Only like when we’re talking about monopolies and oligopolies. And then, you know, it’s contained in this, you know, couple of, you know, section of the textbook.

Manda: Right. And are monopolies and oligopolies seen are, is there a value attached to those as in they’re good or they’re bad? Or is it just these exist in the world because, hey, this is a, another natural phenomenon, which of course it isn’t.

Jennifer: Um, they’re, they’re not seen in a positive light for sure. But then again, you know, generally speaking in these courses, you know, the kind of state intervention that might be, that might constrain this power is also not looked at.

Manda: Right, right. Okay.

Jennifer: You know, and I think, you know, we have to, we also have to understand that, you know, this whole idea of competition being good because it, you know, reduces these power dynamics for the producer. In theory, you know, people who champion free market economies and competition generally, actually, they don’t really like competition because the competition constrains their profits. I think it’s, Peter Thiel has a video. Have you seen this video?

Manda: No. I, but I’m imagining it’s not fun talking.

Jennifer: I can’t remember. You’re talking to a group of students, I think it might have been part of a Y Combinator series where he says, you know, competition is for losers. You know, what you really want to do is you want to go in there and, you know, create, get your monopoly and hold onto it with all your might. That’s, that’s the whole point, like when you have a startup about scaling really fast so that you can actually push out the competition and get that monopoly and get that power and pricing and then you can maximize

Manda: your profits, which, and we are watching the end result of that. Yeah. Happening in front of us. Okay.

Jennifer: So anyway, that’s a, I’d like a little, all right. A little stroll through some of, and the thing is, is that all the, all the models that kids are taught, like I hear sometimes from teachers, well, you know, we do talk about, you know, we’re talking about economic growth. It’s another element of this. Because economic growth is seen, um, in these courses as, you know, a positive thing. It’s a core economic goal and it’s

Manda: essential. You’re in a growth economy. It has to grow to maintain the economy.

Jennifer: Yeah. And they, you know, I hear from teachers and sometimes, oh, well, in our course we do have, you know, a section where we get to criticize economic growth. And I’d say, okay, that’s all fine. Again, you’ve got a couple bullet points of why growth could be problematic, but then every model, every diagram that kids have to use, the aggregate demand, aggregate supply diagrams, or whatever the assumption of that. And when kids then, you know, use those diagrams and their responses on exams is that growth is good.

Manda: Yeah. And that it not only has to happen, but it, it can happen infinitely. I am re remembering Kate saying she went back to Cambridge and one of her superstar lecturers who was now very old, was there at some formal occasion, and she went up to and said, so what this thing about infinite growth, can infinite growth happen? And this guy said, well, it has to. And that’s actually not an answer. That’s, that then becomes a limbic belief system because clearly infinite growth is not a thing unless, you know, the only time as, as Kate has often said is where infinite growth happens is with a cancer. And in the end it kills its host, which is what we are doing very effectively. So this is what’s been taught up till now and. Uh, and what really clearly gets to me is that nobody questions the assumptions underlying. Hmm. Because they are so embedded in our culture. That scarcity is a thing, that competition is both necessary and useful, except when you want to get a monopoly, when you want to, you know. Competition is for, is good until you are at the top and you win. Competition is for losers, and you have that very small number of people right at the top of a steep sided pyramid who have no competition and are very happy with that fact and are sucking all the value up to the top and destroying the bottom layers. And all of this is taken as this is the way the world is. And then you come along and go, actually, no it’s not. So there’s a number of ways into this, and one thing I think we could do is look at the book that you have and explain what it is and how it is, and then go through it. Does that sound like a useful way to explore how we might otherwise look at the world? One thing I really want to do is get to a point where if we were to structure a different economy that would work with the biophysical realities with us, connected to the web of life, what would it look like?. Can we get to that through your book?

Jennifer: Sure. Yes.

Manda: Go. All right. Tell us about the book then.

Jennifer: Yeah, I mean, maybe before I dive into the book, which will then also help you understand the kind of counterpoints to what I’ve just described as the kind of current state of economics education, I think it’s useful to back up a little bit and so that I can explain the kind of three main pieces of the work that we’re doing on this regenerative economics project. Because it’s not just a book. There’s other work around it. So. I mentioned when I described how this project got started, that we had created a syllabus, right? So that’s just a short document. It’s like five pages, right? It’s not, it’s not much. Right? So the question is like, how do you take this five pages of ideas and then use that, you know, as kind of a launchpad to changing the way economics is taught everywhere in secondary schools. So what I decided to do is to take that syllabus and start writing a book. And the reason that I’ve chosen to do this piece of work with that is twofold. Number one is for, so first of all, I have experienced writing textbooks. I was a senior examiner for a long time in the International Baccalaureate for Economics. I’ve written several textbooks already, so it’s something I know how to do. And the idea behind it, there’s kind of like two big reasons why having a book is so important. One is that there are teachers around the world who want to be teaching these ideas and they don’t have any materials that they can use, right? Uh, aimed at this age group, right? So. One goal of it is to give them some materials that they can use and also that they can educate themselves around. It’s important that it’s not just, you know, sometimes I might see other organizations putting out, you know, a lesson plan on something or, you know, a lesson plan on the circular economy or a lesson plan on something else, but it’s not enough. It’s not a context, it’s not a, it’s not a kind of comprehensive picture that sort of gives you that thing that you can replace your paradigm with. Because this is a whole philosophy.

Manda: It’s not just, here’s a circular economy that we’re going to plug into the old market economy. This is a, let’s take that paradigm, put it to one side and create a new paradigm.

Jennifer: So, you know, it’s partly for the teacher. So they also learn, but also that they have some materials that are written for the age group. And the audience for the work is kids. It’s from age 14 to 19, although many adults are using it. And I get contacts from university lectures all the time too, and different primary school teachers who want to take things and adapt. So it’s like the book for everyone. Yay. So it is providing material for those groups, and I’m working. With teachers and students around the world now to help them figure out how to seed their mandated courses with this material or build new courses. So for example, the just last week we announced that the International School of the Hague is we were going to drop their economics course in MYP four and five, that’s sort of age 14 to 16. They’re going to drop their economics course and they’re going to replace it with regenerative economics, which is huge. Yes, but, and they’ve gone farther, they’re going farther than any other school so far. Usually what’s happening is people are picking up little pieces and they’re seeding their courses, doing what they can when they, when they can.

Manda: Can I ask a quick question? Is this because the young people need to pass certain exams in order to get into university. If the International School Hague, it seems to be quite brave, they’re going to go, no, we’re doing regenerative economics and presumably we believe our students will then be absolutely still able to go off and enter whatever university courses they wanted. Because we still have a mindset that five years from now, that’s what people will be doing. Personally, I think that’s unlikely, but…

Jennifer: Yeah, the thing is this age range is actually pretty important to understand how it fits into the whole systemic barriers to this. So right: They’re doing it age four, 14 to 16. So that is before the final two years of school when they do their international baccalaureate diploma, which is the thing that gets them into the university. So they’re just changing. They’re changing the kind of. Pre final two years course if they had, so it’s not going to have an impact then. I mean, it will get them to question a lot more, I think what they’re taking in the final two years, which is still wrapped up in these, um, neoclassical approaches in neoliberal ideologies, but there’s, there’s not, there’s not a, a huge risk. Like university risk for this school. In doing this, right, we’re also trying to shift the International Baccalaureate final two years, which I’ll talk to you about in just a sec.

Manda: I think it is also worth saying that the Chicago school, the neoliberal school, Milton Friedman and Co very deliberately moved into universities and made their ideology the only acceptable ideology so that you had to believe it to get the courses, to get the degrees, to get where you wanted to go. It, it was quite clever. And on doing that is going to take an amount of time because there are people very entrenched who, who want that to remain the belief system.

Jennifer: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I can highly recommend a causal loop diagram that was done by Katie Shields. I don’t know if you know Katie, she’s worked on this Tipping Points podcast about the Limits to Growth report. I don’t know if you know this like a three part podcast that came out a couple years ago. She’s doing a lot of work around also regenerative economics in Vienna. But she did an, she’s done a series of articles in Medium where, um, in the final fourth article that she wrote, she has an absolutely amazing. Calls a loop diagram showing all the reinforcing feedback loops that are holding this paradigm in place, and so what you’re talking about in terms of the way university works, the way tenure works, the way publishing works in all the big academic journals, et cetera, that gets all in there and it’s just, it’s amazing.

Manda: We’ll try and find links to that and put them in the show notes for people.

Jennifer: That would be great. But anyway, this, this works. So we’ve got this book and we’re working with teachers and students. So these are two key pieces, but the big prize, and the thing that I’m really going for is the institutional change. So what we’re trying to do is change the national and international mandated curricula that teachers have to follow. And in that sense, working at the secondary school level is somewhat more promising than working at the tertiary level in universities because many countries have a national curriculum, it’s mandated, teachers have to teach it. There’s a high stakes exam at the end. Um, so can change the content of that national curriculum or the international curriculum. If you’re talking about the International Baccalaureate, for example, then like overnight, everybody has to move in that direction, right? And so it’s a very high leverage opportunity and. What’s really exciting right now is that there are a number of countries reviewing their curricula right now. So the Netherlands is reviewing economics at the moment this year. England is reviewing its entire national curriculum. The Francis Review is going on. It’s still unclear whether economics is going to somehow get a revision or not.

Manda: They’re following a very near liberal path, the labour government. So it would be quite surprising if they decided to ditch it at school. It would be very nice. But it would require, they’re not to be joined up thinking at the top, which I think there isn’t a lot to joined up thinking, so that would be good. And actually Scotland’s completely different.

Jennifer: And in, they’re just, uh, launching a review of their national curriculum as well.

Manda: Oh, wouldn’t it be interesting if Scotland and England were different? I, I’m looking at the, if voting were to happen tomorrow, England and Wales would be reformed. Scotland would be SNP, and at that point I thinks wall becomes a new boundary and. Then we would be running an actual. Controlled experiment of, we have a socialist nation and we have the Far East Trumpist nation and, and let’s see what happens. I think there’d be tanks on the streets of Edinburgh quite fast, but who knows. Anyway, yes.

Jennifer: Yeah, the International Baccalaureate is also reviewing its economics curriculum right now, and so I kind of came to this realization last summer when I had, I was on vacation and it was like a light bulb popped up. I was like, in this year, late 2024 and into 2025 is actually, it’s like a mini super cycle of curriculum reform going on. And I do think if, if we can shift these four institutions in a good direction, that this could set off global social tipping points in secondary education around the world. Yes. So, yeah, that’s my dream. And so I’m working on, you know, I’ve got relationships in these countries and in the IB and we’re working on trying to present the arguments and the academic literature and also this book, which provides the new visioning, right? It helps people break free of the paradigm because it’s hard to let go of the current way you teach economics unless you have some news idea about what the replacement might be, right?

Manda: Yeah. Okay. So tell us about the book, because I think it’s so exciting, not only the content, but the way that you’re doing it. So tell us a bit about that. And I will definitely put a link in the shownotes.

Jennifer: Yeah. So the book, it’s a massive piece of work. It’s enough material, it’s probably more than enough material for two, a two year long course. So it’s, um, you know, it’s not just a few lesson plans or something like that. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a proper textbook and it has, the structure of it is, it’s structured on the embedded economy model that comes out of done economics, but is also based on Carl Palone’s work. So the idea is that, uh, we’ve got an introduction to the work, which kind of lay, lays out the foundation of what degenerative economies are, whatever generative economy is. There’s also the one section 1.2, so rate at the start of the book is about ecology in the economy. So rate upfront, actually, students have to learn basic ecology in this course because you cannot, I think you cannot be an economist properly, or certainly not a regenerative economist unless you understand at least the basics about how nature works.

Manda: Yeah. And I’m looking at this as we speak and you’ve got human nature relationships and you’ve got a lot of energy basics and impact of fossil fuel, energy pulse, which feels like it’s probably, there’s quite a lot of Nate Hagen’s concepts of, of that wrapped into this 100%.

Jennifer: Yeah. That I, he, I learned a lot from his podcasts actually. And then, you know, bio geochemical cycles are in there, which, you know, if you’re not familiar with this, like sounds really scary, but it’s, you know, it’s art. We focus mainly on the carbon and motorcycle. It’s not, you know, hugely intimidating. It’s basic biophysics

Manda: That will link to what they’re learn. They must be learning about these in biology and physics and chemistry.

Jennifer: Well they do, they, I mean, certainly to some degree, but you know, in terms of putting it in a sort of fully ecological perspective, I think a lot of kids miss that in their education. I mean, I don’t know what it looks like everywhere, but you know, I know in the schools where I’ve been teaching a lot of times. Ecology isn’t, some itself is not something that’s given a lot of time, uh, in school, unfortunately. But, but this course anyway, puts it front.

Manda: Yeah. And then you go into society and economy and values and human nature and human needs and yeah. Provisioning systems and, and care in the economy. I love it.

Jennifer: Yeah, we’re going to add more to that actually, because the farther I go the more I learn as well. So I want to add some more sections, hopefully the summer on like narratives and the importance of narratives, reciprocity. I would like to actually have a whole um, section on reciprocity because it’s so complex and, and interesting.

Manda: Have you read The Dawn of Everything?

Jennifer: I have not read that, no.

Manda: That, that will open up whole new doors. It’s very big, but very worth it. And so I think it’s worth saying this is online, it’s Creative Commons, and, and it’s, you’ve opened for people to add to it and, and alter it a bit.

Jennifer: Well, you can’t alter it themselves online.

Manda: Okay.

Jennifer: Yeah. So it’s in a website and I’m posting things in the website, but people can feedback for example. So I get feedback periodically if people find mistakes or, um, they have a recommendation or you know, sometimes they just say like, wow, I love it, which is often really nice. And, but, uh, so there’s a feedback button. So when, you know, there I am kind of incorporating feedback in this process, but when I say that people can use it and adapt it, it’s also the case that you can take material. I don’t know if you wanted to create slides with it or you wanted to do, you know, you can adapt it, take what’s there and adapt it yourself

Manda: For your classroom, however you want. And you’re doing this outside of market economy because it’s there in Creative Commons. You are living what you’re talking about. I think that’s really important.

Jennifer: Yeah. And it’s also, it’s not only outside the market economy, but it’s also outside the state. It’s actually this really interesting place because also when you have state curriculum, it’s, it is a huge, the way it’s developed is hugely problematic because what happens usually is that a state will come up with a syllabus or then like an exam board will develop specifications and then books get written. But oftentimes as the books get written, you realize that things that are in the syllabus or the specifications don’t quite make sense. But then you can’t change it because it, you’re stuck with whatever has been there.

Manda: Right. And so a whole generation of young people is locked into something that  is basically a confabulation of somebody’s late night hysteria, as far as I can tell.

Jennifer: Yeah, and you wouldn’t believe actually how chaotic these curriculum development processes are. On paper, they look like there’s like a process and it’s all very neat and there’s like consultation or whatever, but people are messy. People are so messy and there’s power, relationships and, you know, influencing and a lot of times it just happens to be like, who’s in the room? You know, like whether people who are of a mind to reform things actually have the time to be there and the or are allowed to be there, or are allowed to be there. So, yeah, it’s a, it’s a kind of messy, messy process. Anyway, going back to the books.

Manda: Yes. Let’s look at the sections in the book. So there’s the introduction, which, which opens up a whole new paradigm of how we are and who we are, which I think is just, that would be a two year course if we’d really wanted it to be.

Jennifer: Yeah. And then the next four subtopics after that actually address these four provisioning institutions that I spoke about earlier. So we started with households. So topic two is households. We did that deliberately because households are such a huge.

Manda: It’s what people are, I mean, households is a weird word actually for, for being a human. And having relationships and all the things that really matter to us.

Jennifer: Yeah. And all the care, the, um, such amount of care work that happens and the kind of primary and direct care and indirect care that happens on a daily basis. All of it, unpaid and unrecognized in the economy. But, um, yeah, so we start with households and, you know, that has its own topic and then we have markets, um, and it’s, it’s treated quite differently. We don’t use supply and demand diagrams, for example. Instead we use, uh, causal loops and feedback. Causal loop diagrams are diagrams that have, you know, parts and you have errors that then show the influence of one part on another part. And, and they either show direct relationships po what are called positive relationships, where like an increase in one thing causes an increase in the other thing. Or, uh, an indirect relationship where an increase in one thing causes a decrease in the other thing.

Manda: You’ve got these causal loop diagrams. So you’re teaching systems thinking in, in relation to markets.

Jennifer: Correct. And there’s actually, we have this whole separate section on systems thinking in the book. So that is taught there. That’s also something new that, you know, you wouldn’t normally, you don’t get actually in schools very often at all.

Manda: And then you and you, within markets, you have a look at capitalism, power and inequality, but then you look at regenerative business and donut design. Tell us a little bit about that.

Jennifer: Yeah, so. Throughout each of these sections. So with these four provisioning institutions, the household, the markets commons in the state, so we address each one of them. And they’re given kind of equal, you know, airtime if you will. I mean, some of them are a little bit longer than the others, but we’ve given them equal weight to show the importance of, of, you know, seeing them as sort of partners. And you know, they have different roles in the economy and all are important. But within each of these institutions, we’ve tried to kind of illustrate and explain what these things are. What is the household? The household is the system, the commons assist system, the state is the system, markets as a system, et cetera. But we’ve also spent time talking about kind of what’s gone wrong. With this system, uh, and often related to power relationships and the power relationships in society. But then also we’ve had a look at like, what could we be doing better? Right? So what would it mean to move towards, you know, supporting households, better supporting commoning regenerative business activity in markets, you know, more regenerative state, uh, activity as well.

Manda: Very briefly, what does a regenerative business look like?

Jennifer: Yeah, so a regenerative business is one that is, I would say, not acting in that model of homo economic is that we’ve talked about, right? Not working to extract as much value from every other stakeholder in society, but is instead generous and is working to support both social and ecological systems to regenerate them to support life.

Manda: Do you have examples of actual regenerative businesses that exist currently within predatory capitalism?

Jennifer: Yeah, I think it’s difficult to kind of highlight one that you might like really want to call, you know, totally regenerative, but I can say is that the Donot Economics Action lab is, you know, like working hard at, uh, trying to kind of define what enterprise design would look like for regenerative.

Businesses, they distinguish between regenerative and distributive. But the distributive being more on the social side and regenerative being more on the ecological side. But I conflate the two together because we’re talking about strengthening social and ecological systems, regenerating them. But they have lot, lots of case studies of businesses that are trying to go in this direction. So we have in the book, uh, there’s a whole subtopic about the donut design for business, which is also very helpful for teachers of business studies courses, which are usually separate from economics courses. And that looks into the purpose of business networks, ownership, finance, and governance, as kind of five areas for business design to strengthen, uh, social and ecological systems. And a lot of it has to do with sharing value rather than trying to squeeze it from every relationship that you have as a business.

Manda: Brilliant. Okay. Yeah. So, so we, we look at markets and then we look at the comments. Let’s, let’s talk a little bit, tell us; We had talked a little bit about the tragedy of the commons, which mm-hmm. Which is a, a phrase that started way back in the 18 hundreds. And its principle was that people don’t know how to share and that if you have a limited resource, I remember doing this with Jacob Russ at Schumacher and the, we did, we played a game and the game was the, you’re all different nations around an ocean and the ocean has a certain number of fish in and the fish will regenerate at a certain rate and it starts at this level. And you know, the regeneration rate, how can you maximize your, taking your fish? And I was in a group where we did a little bit of arithmetic and worked out, if we took no, no fish at all for the first two fishing runs and everybody took no fish at all, the fish would come back to a hundred percent and then we could sustainably fish. And apparently we did more rounds than Jacob has ever done at any point, because our group went, no, no fish. No fish. And there was a point where I thought, no, everyone else is fishing. And I went, no, no fish for a third time. And, and so we did, we got through to I think five cycles. But everybody else was just taking maximum number of fish.

And that is the tragedy of the commons. It’s if you treat the external world and the, the web of life and your fellow humans as competition, you will destroy your common resource, which is what’s happening to our oceans and our air, and our soil as we speak. Whereas if you look at it as. This is, we care about everybody including the Web of life. Then you don’t treat it like that. And, and we have to say that Eleanor Ostrom was the first woman to get the Nobel equivalent of the economics prize for her work on commenting being, no, this is a social structure. And actually when people are allowed to manage a commons in a way that is not predatory and doesn’t have capitalism imposed on it, then we manage very well indeed. And there are a certain number of rules and they work very well. And everybody knows what the rules are. And there are sanctions if you break the rules, but you’re not excluded necessarily if you break the rules. You are explained that you’ve broken them and you’re given a chance to come back and, and tell us how you teach Commoning.

Jennifer: Absolutely. I mean, this dynamic that you mentioned about the tragedy of the commons, um, you know, we’re not claiming that this dynamic doesn’t exist. Yeah, it does, but it’s a mischaracterization to call it the tragedy of the commons. What it is, is, you know, the tragedy of sort of open access managed resources, right, the kind of free for all, um, which is not what we’re talking about, right? Commoning has been the dominant way of organizing human activity to meet human needs. For most of human history, right. Um, market-based activity, market exchange is much younger than that. Capitalism is much younger still. The common section I think is extremely important because it raises awareness of this way of organizing that people aren’t even aware of. I mean, it is happening in communities around the world, but we don’t see it as economic activity in the same way that we don’t see householding as economic activity. It’s sort of invisible. Yeah. And therefore not supported. And deliberately so. Because you know, what we have, what we see with capitalism is that with capitalism is extremely important to privatise as much property as possible. Enclosure is critical. Because that’s how you can then capture assets that then you can make profit on. You can then increase your power vis-a-vis others and extract as much value as possible from every county, right?

Manda: Yes. Take all the people off the land, send them to Canada, and then you can put sheep in fields that you own.

Jennifer: The way, you know, I, I had mentioned earlier, but you know, the use of the word commons generally when it comes up in mainstream media, if and when it ever comes up, is most often used to refer to just a resource. Yeah. We talk about the global commons, we talk about the atmosphere as a commons or, uh, the oceans as a commons. But the way we teach it in this course is that it’s a set of relationships, not just a resource.

Manda: Wonderful.

Jennifer: A resource, a set of, you know, the people who are in relationship with one another and the resource itself, and then the rules that they co-create together to manage the resource. And when all three of those are working together, then it’s perfectly. Human beings are perfectly able to collaborate, to manage shared resources and do so in a way that’s, that’s equitable, right? So yeah. So we teach, we teach this as a, as a relationship, not just as a resource. And that the work that for this section was actually done in collaboration with David Bollier, who I think you know. So he, um, he was our, for each of the sections we work with, uh, an academic expert, because, you know, I, I need help with this. Yeah. Anyway, so he was the expert for the common section. And yeah, he’s just a lovely

Manda: He’s amazing. And his podcast, Frontiers of Commoning is one of my absolute must listen podcasts.

Jennifer: It’s just great. He’s, um, and so generous and his work is also all in the comments, right? Because he gets it. Yeah. It makes it really easy. It made it really easy actually, to create this section because so much of his work was available. You know, open and freely. And he was also very generous with his Information Commons. So, um, yeah, we have some basics on the comments. Um, we have, there’s a, a subtopic on spheres of commenting. So, you know, looking at different areas where common is happening. We’ve got a section on threats to the comments, um, and then a f final section, a final subtopic on, um, ways to support commoning.

Manda: Okay. I do want to look at the state because you’ve got households, markets, commons, and the state, and we’re looking at America at the moment and they’re building their, the existing government is building on Curtis Jarvin who had rage, which was retire all government employees, which was his part of his blueprint, which they seem to be following to the letter because he had embodied and internalized this concept that government is evil and it restricts markets. And markets are wonderful and should be allowed to be completely free in spite of the fact that means no regulation. I noticed the other day that they’ve stopped the Clean Air Act and I think, oh, that’s terrible. But the provisions of the Clean Air Act allowed no more than seven toxic substances to be released into the air by any given company. It’s like, actually that’s not clean air. I’m sorry. And now you’ve taken it away and they can release as many as they want, but, and, and that’s not good. But seven is not good either. But anyway, that’s gone. And they have DOGE instead, which is the Department of Government Efficiency, but it’s the same thing. It’s basically their aim is to make sure that there is no governance anymore because governance restricts markets. So in your section on the state, how do you define the state and what does it, what would its role be in a regenerative economy?

Jennifer: Yeah, this was the hardest section to write. So in other sections we had, we would start off with the, you know, the household as a system and the functions of households. And then often we would look at the relationships between households and commons and households in the state and households and markets, right? So there’s like so much in this book about relationships, right? Uh, between these institutions, which is critical for systems, systems thinking in the state. Uh, it took me a kind of a long time to. Get my head around how to structure the material because the functions of the state are the relationships. Also with the other provisioning institutions, they kind of, they blur together in a way that’s not necessarily the case with the other ones. So it was really tricky actually to figure out how to, how to put that together.

Manda: Also, the state is a different thing. Yeah. In different places. Different in Russia and China and the US and Europe and South America and Africa states, uh, in much as neoliberal capitalism would like to create a notion of a state as a thing. It’s a very politically mediated entity.

Jennifer: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s really tricky to deal with actually in the, and also changing under your feet all the time. 100%. I mean, all these institutions are changing in the relationships. That’s true. But I mean the, the state is, it was really interesting to be writing this right now, actually, given what’s happening in the United States. And it did, the current events did have an impact on how this turned out because we just recently published this actually. In fact, I’m still working on 5.4. I’m hoping to get it online today, actually later. Um, but the, the way we approached it, so first of all, we did talk about the state as the system, and we have outlined the functions of the state, but we also spent some time talking about the origins power and legitimacy of the state, because this is something actually that’s never addressed in economics courses. Like, you know, you might talk about the state and you’re pushing it away in this, you know, sort of neoliberal framework, but kids don’t actually know what the state is. And so, uh, spending some time talking about, you know, ideas about where the state came from and the power of it, and this idea of legitimacy, why people obey the state or don’t obey the state. These things are, are also in the course. And then, and we also talked about, there’s a, a little section in there about balancing state and non-state power. So, you know, recognizing that the state as an institution has an enormous power over people or can have enormous power over people. And you know, the different ways in which countervailing power can then work to limit the power of the state. Or when the state, you know, teams up with businesses, large businesses or whatever, what kind of countervailing powers might be there. So this is all in there. And this is not typical economics material, right, but I think quite important. And then we had also in the first, uh, subtopic a section on neoliberalism, so state narratives focusing on neoliberalism, so making that clear to kids what that is. And then, another section just after it on The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato,  so yes, we kind of set them up with this material in the first section. And then we moved very rapidly then into the second section on a second subtopic on threats to state. So what is undermining the state? And this builds on the section about neoliberalism. And explains, it kind of digs deeper into the various ways in which these neoliberal narratives and strategies or policies undermine the critical state fun, the way we need states to function in a healthy economy. There’s uh, budget limits and austerity policies. So that’s the first one. There’s state capture

Manda: And corrupt state capture and corruption. Yeah. Yes. And planet boundary overshoot. I love it.

Jennifer: Yeah. And, globalization and limits to state sovereignty and, um, and planetary boundaries overshoot. So there are five sections that really take that kind of neoliberal piece and then really tease it out. And that section was so interesting to write right now because there. What is happening in the United States is this manifestation of all the things that you see in that section. And we did a, we did a LinkedIn post actually with teachers where we said, look, if you’re feeling frustrated in your courses, because there’s just nothing there to help you explain what’s going on. Here we are. So that was great.

Manda: Yeah. You’re going to be banned in the US before long, aren’t you? Which would be a good thing. Wow.

Jennifer: And yeah. And then the third section is about the kind of traditional economic indicators that kids are taught. So growth, uh, inflation, unemployment, but then new ways of thinking about things. So there’s a section on Degrowth and the whole Green growth degrowth debate. There’s a section I’m really proud about, which is the structural lock-ins to growth, which is something that’s not, I think, very clear to people. That was something that I was able to pull from the Donut Economics Action Lab University materials that they just, uh, released recently. So that was great. Tell us a little bit about that, because I don’t really understand what that is. Yeah, so these are just like the, the systems traps that keep you, that keep growth a thing, right? As a, as a goal. The, the reasons, right? It’s so difficult to break away from it. So, you know, things like, you know, in terms of social factors or political factors, the fact that if we were to stop growing, you know, one of the reasons why we continue to grow is because it’s easier to try to grow than it is for politicians to then have these discussions about distribution, right? If we stop growing than we have to sort of get serious about how the pie is distributed, yes. Try to keep growing. Then as long as, if we can grow the incomes of people at the bottom even a little bit, then it kind of keeps them pacified. And even if people at the top are getting much, much more, right? So you kind of can postpone that discussion.

Manda: But also it seems to me, I, I’m quite locked into modern monetary theory and the, the government spend money into existence and banks will lend money into existence, and at the moment, government spending is going down because austerity measures. Therefore, in order to keep. The economy just to, just to keep the flow going. Banks are lending more and banks charge interest. And if people don’t pay their interest, the entire economy will followers. You have to grow the economy. The, the banks have to lend more in order for people to be able to pay back their interest more in order to be able to take out more loans. Therefore, the banks have to, the whole thing has to keep growing or the pile of cards will fall over. And as I understand it, we’re at a private debt as in personal people, debt to government debt ratio that is way over the one that created the 08/09 crash. We’re right out across the canyon. We are Wiley Coyote sprinting on nothing. And at some point someone’s going to go, you know what, there’s, there’s no ground here and the whole thing is going to fall over.

Jennifer: Yeah. So that’s one of the financial systems traps that, that we mentioned in the book as well. So there’s a number of them, um, both financial and sort of sociopolitical elements. So that’s something that, you know, I think most people aren’t aware of. Like it’s not in economics textbooks, you might criticize economics growth, but there’s no kind of discussion about like why it is we continue to hold onto this. So that’s quite good. And then we look also at price stability and unemployment, but also some new views on that. And then look at wellbeing indicators and also living in the donuts. So looking at all these sort of city and regional movements now to kind of use the donut economics model to kind of reshape.

Manda: And then you look at earth for all system dynamics in the state and that, I mean, just that section, everybody should be reading. I think everyone should read all of this textbook because this is how we, I get so many emails from people going, I want to be different, but I have to pay the rent, stroke, mortgage, and buy food. And, and we, how do I step out of the trap and, and this is what you’re looking at. We’re way over time but just so very briefly, I think we should come back from another podcast and look at the rest. I’m really interested, and you probably don’t know this yet, but if you have young people. Who go through all of this they learn systems thinking. They learn and they presumably take in, they’re going to start embodying the contradictions. And if the rest of their curriculum is not also teaching systems thinking and causal loops and the assumptions underlying either their heads are going to break or they’re going to go to their other educators and go, this foundation is wrong. And I’m wondering how the international school at the Hague and anyone else who’s taking this on board, are they beginning also to then bring systems thinking into the rest of their curriculum? Or are they waiting for this fault line to emerge?

Jennifer: So, you know, the good thing about the International Baccalaureate is that systems has been a key concept for a long time. It is embedded in many of the courses. I mean, I would say a lot of times it’s covered really superficially. Like students kind of have a broad idea of what a systems is or how to define it, but they, they don’t necessarily go deeper into systems thinking and, you know, learn about. Different strategies for like making systems visible or you know, leverage points or systems traps or things like this. But it’s at least there. So it’s not as Okay a contradiction in that school as it might be in some other places. I think systems thinking is becoming much more widespread. So, you know, my hope is that, you know, we’re just sort of capturing and maybe doing something a little bit more deeply on a trend that’s emerging anyway. So what this looks like in terms of what happens with the kids and then what the kids demand afterwards? I don’t know yet. Let’s see. But I do know that kids are pretty excited about the opportunity because also, I mean, I have to say, if, you know, it’s a project that just feels a little bit rebellious, right? It’s, um, you know, yeah, it’s critical of systems. It’s giving kids the tools they need to be critical of what’s going on in the world.

Manda: It’s a movement and not just a course, right?. This is exactly why actually the us once they get to know this, the current administration in the US will have to ban this, or it is the foundations of a movement. I want the movement to happen. So I think we, yeah, we spread this genuinely, everybody listening needs to read this. Really internalize it and then share it because it’s a blueprint for why the current system isn’t working. It’s really a blueprint for why the trauma culture doesn’t work. I’m really interested in, when you look at things, you went back 12,000 years to the origin of the state, which is also the origin of our split from initiation culture to trauma culture and the beginning of hierarchy and dominance and the dark triad, getting to the top, and that’s what we have to undo, and you’ve got models for undoing it. It’s amazing and brilliant and wonderful. So, so yeah, I think this is the beginnings of a movement.

Jennifer: Yeah, it’s um, it, it feels like it anyway, I think there’s a lot of momentum behind it and coming still, I feel really cautiously optimistic that we’re going to be able to get some change. We’ll see. I mean, we’ll know pretty soon actually, because these, these systems, these national and international systems are working on revising economics right now, so. If we can get that shift, like if it’s going to come, it’s going to come, you know, soon.

Manda: Very fast. And what will be interesting is if the pushback is openly what, because what’s happening in the US is that predatory capitalism has taken off any semblance of velvet gloves and masks. And is just, yep, we’re going to own you all and we’re going to destroy anyone who stands in our way. This is fascism and we are open about it now, and are other places in the world are the neoliberals going to openly say, you know, yes, we see what you’re doing and we’re not going to let you because, because we need to own everything. Or are they going to pretend still to be fluffy, in which case they have to take this on board? So, so that’s going to be a very interesting set of power dynamics, isn’t it? Yeah. Because some of the people who are in the power dynamics genuinely believe that what they’re doing is right and, and you can’t keep believing that once you’ve read this, I think.

Jennifer: Yeah, I think so too. But I also, you know, I think given what’s happening in the United States right now, you know, the fact that the gloves and the mask are all off also is like creating a moment is creating a window also for this work in a way that might not have been possible a couple years ago. Because the people are just much more aware of what’s going on than they might have been at that time. And so yeah, it feels like the timing, the timing is, yeah..

Manda: It’s opening the question and you are also going, okay, and here are some answers that aren’t. It’s not total revolution. It’s not completely break the system and start from ground zero as far as I can tell. It’s not the Phoenix arising from the ashes. It’s, here’s how we build forward to something that actually works using as a baseline. What we’ve already got, I think, is that a fair, which is less frightening than those of us going, okay, we need total systemic change. Just put everything away and start again.

Jennifer: Well, I mean this does address systemic change, but what I like about the course and the kind of structure that we’ve created around it, you know, with these, this introduction and then these four provisioning institutions, we also address money and finance that’s coming up next. Where we’re probably going with this and then, uh, international exchanges. But like, somebody, a, a mainstream economics teacher who looks at that outline thinks, ah, okay.

Manda: It’s still within a frame that they understand.

Jennifer: I can do this. It’s the adjacent possible. Yeah. For, for the teachers. Even though so much of what’s you like once you dig down into it is quite different, but you know, it’s still, it’s not so radical that you can’t get your head around it.

Manda: Yeah. Right. I think that’s a good place to leave it you’re an hour ahead of me. Thank you. I would really like to continue this conversation because it feels to me that this is the keys to the kingdom in a way, and that it gives people a way to understand the problems of now and roots forward to being different in a, in a way that’s logical. If, if 14 and 15 year olds can take this on board, then 50 and 60 and 70 year olds can too. And I think a lot of the people who are currently on the hamster wheel are looking for routes off. They just don’t know what they are. So thank you. Are there, is there anything, I will put as many links as I can to everything that you’re doing – Is there any other way that you want people to connect with you?

Jennifer: I guess what I really appreciate the most at the moment is lots of bridging. So people who are able to connect me with others who are interested or if they’re interested themselves. Right? I mean, we’re, we are spreading this work around in schools. We’re trying to build social proof that’s needed, you know, not just the visioning, but also people on the ground at the grassroots level so that these institutions know that, you know, this is a direction that they need to go with their courses. So yeah, just all the connecting and bridging.

Manda: So anyone with young people in school, take this to your schools if you possibly can. Get it, get as many, get a ground swell of the whole education system going, we need this. Brilliant

Jennifer: Thank you for the invitation.

Manda: Thank you, Jennifer. This has been, this has been so inspiring, genuinely, and coming on the back of India and Kate talking at Sheffield. It feels like this is opening so many doors. So thank you for all that you’re doing and all that you are. Thank you. We’ll talk again sometime.

That’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Jennifer for all that she is and does. Genuinely, that textbook is essential reading for all of us. It’s clear, it’s concise. It lays out a really beautiful critique of why the death cult of predatory capitalism cannot continue to work. And it offers ways forward from where we are. This is Thrutopian thinking within the world, not just of economics and business and markets, but of who we are and how we work in the world instead of iterating the mistakes that we have made in the past.

And that if you’re listening to this, you are almost certainly brought up believing we’re true and they’re not. But it’s only when we see it laid out by people with the clarity of mind that Jennifer brings, that we can begin to unpick things and begin to be different in the world, which is what the future needs of us. If we want to be the good ancestors that I believe we all do, then we need to understand the underpinnings of why what we did was wrong and how we can move forward. So there are links in the show notes. Whatever else you do this week, please go and have a look at Jennifer’s book, absorb some of it, take it in, and then share the ideas with the people in all of your networks. Bridge building is how we build a different future, so please go and build some bridges and if you want to ask some questions, I am having an Ask Me Anything evening on June the eighth. It’s a Sunday. Sunday evening, seven o’clock till eight o’clock our time. This is for people within the Accidental God’s membership but you can join for a pound and then leave again. Really, we’re not trying to draw you in if it’s not your thing. If it is your thing, you can come and join and specifically the Ask Me Anything is supposed to be about our Heart Mind module, which walks you through building what I consider to be the three pillars of a functioning heart, mind, gratitude, compassion, and joyful curiosity, and we set up these Ask Me Anything, evenings or Ask Manda Anything (Thank you, Lou), so that you could come along and ask about that module. But if you just want to ask about anything, do it. Come along. It’s fine. You need to be in the membership. You can join and leave again. And if you don’t want to join the membership, we have a gathering on the 6th of July, which is designed to help us look at how we become the best ancestors that we can be.

And spoiler alert, I think that involves doing the inner work. If we don’t heal our relationships with all parts of ourselves, ourselves, and each other ourselves in the web of life, we cannot become the best ancestors that we can be. So I will be focusing on that. So if you’re interested in that, you do not have to be a member. So that’s it. Ask Me Anything on Sunday the eighth, seven o’clock, for which you do have to be a member, or the gathering on the 6th of July, four o’clock till eight o’clock – these are all UK times – for which you don’t have to be a member, but you can be if you want to.

So there we go. That’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot to Alan Lowells of Airtight Studios for the production to Lou Mayor for the video and for the transcript, to Faith Tilleray for the website, and for all of the logistical work that keeps us together and for the conversations that keep opening doors to new possibilities, thank you. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. We wouldn’t be here without you, and we appreciate every single download. If you have time to go to the website app of your choice and leave us five stars and a review, we would be enormously grateful and it definitely does tweak the algorithms.

I do see an uptick every time I ask for this, and I definitely do not intend to ask for it every time, but if you have time. It is worth it. Thank you. And if you know of anybody else who is involved in any way in educating themselves or young people of any age, please send them this link. This is crucial to how we move forward. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you, and goodbye.

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