I've been reading the book with this title by Frank Ackerman (yes, I know it's a different publisher, but humour me, please!) and have wondered about the wisdom of engaging with conventional economics when trying to develop an economics that is sympathetic to people and the planet.

It's all in the title really, isn't it? What at first seems to be a witty pun, in reality sums up all that is wrong with a conventional approach to economic life. Chief Seattle was closer to the heart of green economics when he said (or perhaps didn't say--there is much argument about this anecdotal comment) that you cannot eat money. It is evidence of the dislocation between economic values and real value that we can even be asking a question like this.

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Welsh Economics Colloquium (see the post on my own blog http://gaianeconomics.blogspot.com/2009/03/when-is-economist-not-economist.html) and was reminded of the way mainstream economists operate by using assumptions to divorce their deliberations from reality. The discipline is infested with maths which allows you to do anything. If you set the interest rate right then the process of discounting allows you to push your disastrous activities so far into the future that they end up costing nothing at all.

The blog put me back in touch with Hazel Henderson, author of another excellent book published elsewhere but still worth a read: The Politics of the Solar Age. Hazel always refers to herself as a 'futurist' rather than an economist and is scathing in her account of the profession. Her work was so ahead of its time that although it was published nearly 30 years ago it is still well worth reading today.