Market coordination — premised on concentrated private ownership, private investment, and allocation or provision guided by the profit imperative and capitalist power — cannot adequately address the challenges of our age of overlapping emergency — from the cost of housing and healthcare to our prospects for delivering deep decarbonization and resilience. How can we reorder our economy and politics to ensure collective green prosperity and reconstruct a 21st Century green economic democracy?
As US Programme Director at Common Wealth, I work on this question through my own research and by leading the design and delivery of Common Wealth’s US research programme and strategy. Our US Programme is currently organized around three pillars:
Progressive macroeconomic governance and decommodification of life’s essentials: Universal social provision of energy, healthcare, elder/disability/childcare, housing, and transportation divorced from dependence on market access;
Democratically coordinated decarbonization and global green cooperativism;
And, reorganizing the corporate economy and building a green industrial democracy for the 21st century.
As Common Wealth develops its US research programme and strategy, I am keen to build collaborative relationships and partnerships in the US.
My research has mainly focused on advancing democratic planning, and building the “green mixed ownership economy” as politically and technically essential for deep decarbonization. The topics I research, write on, and design policy towards could be categorized as industrial policy or strategy, economic planning, macrofinance, or economic governance and management. I am a student of global political economy and ultimately aspire to the realization of a planetary cooperative commonwealth.
Like many who came of age post-08, I have spent quite a bit of time trying to understand money, finance, investment, and how each relate to the state. I am currently quite eager to widen and deepen my “real economy” sectoral knowledge—particularly that of energy/electricity systems and the healthcare sector.
Before joining Common Wealth, I researched (global) macrofinance, economic management, and industrial planning policy for decarbonization at E3G. There, I wrote a bi-weekly newsletter on green macrofinance and transition planning. I began my career as a researcher in political economy as Gar Alperovitz’s research assistant at the Democracy Collaborative’s Next System Project. There, I supported Alperovitz’s draft manuscript of political economic theory “The Next System,” which advances his model of a Pluralist Commonwealth, centered on (multiscaler and decentralized) democratic ownership and planning.
I studied global political economy at Penn State and Columbia. But I’ve learned the most from lurking on Twitter.
Drawings by my partner!