Michael A Peters: Greening the Knowledge Economy: A Critique of Neoliberalism

Greening the Knowledge Economy: A Critique of Neoliberalism

Excellent Blog Post from a thought-leader on this topic - Prof. Michael A Peters from Waikato University, Hamilton, New Zealand:

"What this age demands more than ever is an understanding not simply of systems in natural, social and geopolitical environments and their interrelations, but also the logic of large-scale system-events, their emergence and collapse, and their impacts for humanity. In the economic and political realm, as social scientists, we need to know more about the logic of large-scale events governing system failures, such as the collapse of the Soviet system in 1989 and the collapse of the neoliberal global financial system in 2008. The social sciences have not been good at predicting or analyzing these kinds of events, which demand a better interface between social and natural sciences and their mediation and understanding through new mathematical and computational theories of complex systems, of complexity and chaos, and of the difficulties with formal mathematical modeling and simulation. Complexity theory is a broad term used for a research approach to problems in diverse disciplines (physics, chemistry, molecular biology, meteorology, economics, sociology, psychology and neuroscience) based on nonlinear, nondeterministic systems evolution. Cybernetic, catastrophe, chaos and complexity are forms of thinking that historically have attempted to theorize these phenomena.
I try to demonstrate the need for understanding the importance of philosophical thinking in order to build a case for understanding the concept of environment as a suitable perspective in order to trace the complex ecologies comprising knowledge societies and economies. The argument is made that the most sustainable and "productive" interface in advanced postindustrial societies in the 21st century will be that between the knowledge economy and the "green economy" - what I refer to as the "greening of the knowledge economy. .....

..... The postmodern critique of neoliberalism is not merely a negative account of neoclassical assumptions or simply an updating of economics according to the debates of the 1980s and after.