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Recently, Jerry Michalski hosted an Yi-Tan phone call to remember Peter Kollock, UCLA professor and lifetime student of cooperation and collective action.

two recent reports highlight the successes of the European system.

These thinkers say that the neoclassical mantra of constant economic growth is ignoring the world's diminishing supply of energy at humanity's peril, failing to take account of the principle of net energy return on investment. They hope that a set of theories they call "biophysical economics" will improve upon neoclassical theory, or even replace it altogether.

"Theory of value" is a generic term which encompasses all the theories within economics that attempt to explain the exchange value or price of goods and services. Key questions in economic theory include why goods and services are priced as they are, how the value of goods and services comes about, and for normative value theories how to calculate the correct price of goods and services (if such a value exists). Theories of value fall into two main categories:

Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.

The global trade in goods depends upon reliable, inexpensive transportation of freight along complex and long-distance supply chains. Global warming and peak oil undermine globalization by their effects on both transportation costs and the reliable movement of freight. Countering the current geographic pattern of comparative advantage with higher transportation costs, climate change and peak oil will thus result in peak globalization, after which the volume of exports will decline as measured by ton-miles of freight. Policies designed to mitigate climate change and peak oil are very unlikely to change this result due to their late implementation, contradictory effects and insufficient magnitude. The implication is that supply chains will become shorter for most products and that production of goods will be located closer to where they are consumed.

"Think local planet, act regionally" is a paradigm that balances: "Think globally, act locally." More and more, it takes a region, a "community of communities" to solve problems experienced locally. This blog is an exploration of emerging “regional communities” and the “regional intelligence” that brings them together. "Community precedes cooperation." This is my thesis. It comes from over 35 years of working for regional cooperation. Communities routinely manage competition. - Tom Christoffel

Non-Scalable is a term often seen in the renewable and sustainable energy market, usually referring to an inherent limitation with the technology trying to be employed. One premise of this blog is that finding problems with scale-of-application for our sustainable future, such that they are deemed "non-scalable", maybe a symptom of a larger underlying assumption about what an appropriate scale for man is. The title of this blog, then, is meant to ring as a reminder for us to ask questions about how we see our relation to the world.