Here you'll find an introductory video, some information from your instructor, and helpful tips on navigating the class in NEO.

We often feel torn between looking inward and looking outward, choosing personal change versus global action. What does it mean to start our movement toward wellbeing economies with ourselves? Julia Kim - our friend from the Gross National Happiness Centre in Bhutan and a member of the Club of Rome - sagely encourages us to consider inner wellbeing before diving into the bigger, structural issues.

welcome to a different sort of economics class, where we question whether or not an economy has to function the way we’ve believed it to, where we question the concepts that are premised on exclusion and extraction, where we’ll establish a basic definition of what an economy even is and how it could function. While we’ll cover the common economic terms like supply and demand, the free market, marginal cost, and so many others, we won’t accept them at face value. Instead, we’ll study them to analyze their place in an economy designed not to generate profit for some, but wellbeing for all. In other words, we need to understand the system we have to replace it with something we want.

Capitalism as we know it today isn’t actually that old - only a couple hundred years, a blink in the eye of the history of the universe - and yet we can hardly imagine a world without it. So ubiquitous are its impacts on our lives that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” as Mark Fisher writes and others often reiterate. While capitalism is most obviously an economic system, it has shaped our political and social systems - even if we live under, for example, a socialist or communist government. It’s more of a worldview than anything else, a system of valuation, a way of making sense of our relationships to each other, our ecosystems, something that shapes our culture, beliefs, hopes, and ideas of what’s possible. While not universal, it is global in its reach and influence. This module will challenge and guide us as we begin to define and discern the water around us; we can’t pave the way for something better if we don’t.

The story of capitalism is the story of enclosure. It’s a story about shared resources siphoned for private profit, and a story of individualism and distrust. It’s a story of the commons. And the story we hear most often is a tragedy. In this module, we’ll rewrite the story of the commons using the work and ideas of other thinkers, from Elinor Ostrom to Jason Hickel. We’ll rethink our ideas of ownership, of care, of our capacity to collaborate and ensure our mutual thriving. Wellbeing, we’ll learn, is a collective project, and we’ll consider different approaches to ensuring our mutual thriving.

While many of us dread Mondays or long for the summer vacations of our youth, we know we need to work to survive. What would it mean to do something we love with our days, or at least something that brings us satisfaction and is useful, without the pressure of going hungry, sick, or cold? In this module, we’ll stick with these questions and analyze the meaning of work, consider the difference between our jobs and truly fulfilling work, ask why it causes so much suffering under current economic systems, and burrow deeper to interrogate and redefine the fundamental purpose of work.

Our availability of or access to money strongly influences how we use our time, direct our energy and attention, mobilize our knowledge, and channel our labor. Money can drive us to cruelty and desperation. It can fray relationships, erode trust, and limit the possibilities for relationships, including those we have with ourselves and wider webs of life. Because the influence of money is pervasive in its presence or absence, it is worth considering what it is, where it came from, as well as why it has caused us trouble from ancient times into the twenty-first century. As we reimagine an economy organized around wellbeing, we’ll ask if we can - and should - also reimagine money.

Capitalism relies on, amplifies, and reproduces certain differences that many of us cling to. These differences are what allow for the cheapening of certain lives. (Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore explain this well in their History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, which you can revisit in module three if you’d like.) As we’ll see, identifying these differences, shading them with more nuance and texture, and understanding how they divide and weaken solidarity are essential to understanding how inequalities are produced and reproduced, and why it can seem so challenging to upset the unequal and inequitable systems. Understanding class and status, in particular, are essential if our goals involve leveraging solidarity to create the world we want, that serves all of our diverse needs, hopes, and dreams - not just those of the ruling class.

What if we considered gifts and sharing not only as lessons to teach children, but as integral parts of economics? What if it wasn’t irrational or painful at all, but instead a manifestation of our human impulses to care for others? We introduced questions like these when we analyzed ownership and the commons; here, we’ll dive deeper as we consider the value of sharing and gift economies.

“We can’t expect exponential growth on a planet with finite resources,” I remember my ecology teacher preaching to a class of fifteen year-olds years ago. She wasn’t the first person I heard say that exact same phrase, and she certainly wasn’t the last. You’ve likely heard your own variations of the idea as well. It’s an idea that has stuck with me (and countless others) for a while. But what’s been harder to locate is a better model that’s ecologically sound, intellectually coherent, and socially viable. When I was younger, my impulse was to run into the woods and live off the land; it was harder to do than I believed, and demonstrated an immature understanding of how economies work. (Economies, after all, emerge in the woods, too). The idea – the worldview or paradigm, really - that a neoliberal capitalist economy premised on and assessed by growth, competition, and supremacy of a supposedly free market is a fiercely defended one. It has become the default setting for most economies worldwide. The pervasive force of neoliberal capitalism has bewitched many of us. Like any strong spell, we may rightly struggle to think beyond it.

Needless to say, policy is integral to our study of wellbeing economies. What role have policies and policymakers played in constructing economies that yield vast wealth inequality, that enabled an agricultural economy based on the unpaid labor of enslaved humans, that have contributed to the climate crisis? In what ways can we reimagine and leverage policy to cultivate economies that prioritize wellbeing? What are the limitations of policy? Why do private businesses so often do what we want our public institutions to manage? We’ll dive into these questions, meet people doing good work in this field, and begin crafting policies of our own in this module.

One of the most important takeaways in our exploration of wellbeing economies is that no system is perfect, and they are all run by human beings who are constantly learning, adapting, and making sense of a complex, changing world. And even so, new ways of structuring economies do not need to be perfect to make the world and our lives better. The Gross National Happiness movement challenged the idea that GDP was all we had, challenged the idea that we had to be the biggest or the loudest to change the economy. GNH as a concept requires more than just our idealization; it requires our thoughtful and earnest engagement with it, and our honest application of its principles in the places where we live.

We’ve introduced some of the reasons why movement toward wellbeing economies matters, unpacked the qualities of modern economies that stand in opposition to our wellbeing, and glimpses into alternative visions of what an economy organized around wellbeing could look like. And while we’ve offered some strategies for cultivating them, it’s no secret that change and the movements that usher them in are complex and are often rife with struggle. There is so much more to learn.