Money shapes many of the choices available to individuals, families, communities and governments, while economic systems influence how societies value work, distribute resources, reward activity and relate to the living world. Whole Life Times therefore approaches economics as something much larger than markets and finance alone. It includes questions about growth and degrowth, ecological limits, localisation, inequality, banking, work, artificial intelligence, political power, collapse and resilience, and the deeper question of what an economy is actually for.
Economic success is often measured through growth in production and consumption, but those measures can tell us remarkably little about whether people feel secure, communities are thriving or ecosystems are being restored. A wider conversation about economics begins by asking what prosperity is actually for.
Explore recent articlesA continuing WLT pathway into economic localisation, community resilience and the relationship between the global economy, ecological wellbeing and human connection.
Exploring sufficiency, ecological limits and the argument that endless economic expansion cannot be the sole measure of progress.
How AI may reshape employment, productivity, ownership, income distribution, financial systems and the meaning of work.
A field that begins with the economy as a subsystem of society and the biosphere rather than treating the environment as external.
Ecological economics starts from a deceptively simple proposition: economic activity takes place within social and ecological systems whose material and energetic limits cannot be ignored. That opens the door to questions about scale, sufficiency, distribution, ecological carrying capacity and forms of wellbeing that cannot be reduced to monetary value.
Environmental economics and ecological economics often overlap, but they begin from somewhat different places. Environmental economics commonly uses economic tools to understand pollution, environmental damage, resource use and incentives, while ecological economics places the economy more explicitly within biophysical and social limits. Their differences are themselves worth exploring rather than collapsing the two into a single label.
Helena Norberg-Hodge and Local Futures provide an important bridge between economic theory and lived community experience. Their work asks what happens when economies become more place-based, food systems become more local, communities regain economic agency and wellbeing is understood through relationships with people, culture and nature rather than through consumption alone.
Because Helena Norberg-Hodge was featured in the most recent issue of Whole Life Times, this subject can become one of the first places where the forthcoming WLT Article Index demonstrates its value: that magazine feature can eventually feed directly into this Explore page alongside later blogs, Dialogues and curated Local Futures resources.
Explore Local FuturesLocalisation does not mean that everything must be produced locally or that communities should withdraw from the world. It asks instead whether more of the essentials of life can be supported through shorter, more transparent and more resilient economic relationships, with greater benefits retained in local communities.
Economic systems are not governed only by abstract market forces. Laws, taxation, subsidies, regulation, trade rules, public procurement and financial institutions all shape who benefits and who bears costs. State capture becomes an important subject where powerful private interests gain disproportionate influence over public policy or institutions.
That makes state capture relevant not only to economics but also to governance, democracy, corruption, media ownership, lobbying, inequality and the capacity of societies to act in the long-term public interest.
Banks, investment funds, public finance institutions and emerging green banks can influence which industries, infrastructures and technologies receive capital. That creates an important field of inquiry around green finance, impact, accountability, greenwashing and whether financial systems can genuinely help accelerate ecological transition.
Current and recent Money & Economics material — including the recent Helena Norberg-Hodge feature — will ultimately be supplied through the WLT Article Index.
Recent WLT material on economics, localisation, sustainability, work, business, finance and related subjects will appear here as issues are indexed.
Earlier WLT material on alternative economics, Buddhist Economics, Right Livelihood, green economics, local economies, social enterprise, collapse and economic transformation will progressively become discoverable as the historical collection is indexed.
Conversations about the relationship between economic scale, ecological limits, wellbeing and the meaning of prosperity.
Exploring economies rooted more deeply in place, meaningful work, social connection and ecological responsibility.
How artificial intelligence, ownership, labour, corporate power and public policy may reshape the economic landscape.