Great to read this draft and see so many of our Canadian friends riding to the rescue !
I remember while I was a full time science policy wonk in Washington ( NSF , OTA and Nat. Academy of engineering from 1974-1980 ) I was able to bring the great reports of Canada's Science Council, particularly those on The Conserver Society to the attention of members of the US Congress .
Today, sadly the US is still struggling to overcome the defunct ideologies of economics and the theory-induced blindness promoted by the Chicago School. My later work with the Canadian National Roundtable on the Economy and Environment enabled me to present our Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators there in Toronto in 2000,( the first systems approach to measuring national " progress' beyond macroeconomics , using the now familiar web-based " dashboard " with multi-disciplinary indicators unbundled for public understanding). I am currently on the Advisory Board of the Canadian Index of Wellbeing , which might be mentioned, as it is a far more rigorous approach than the rash of fashionable but culturally-biased" happiness " approaches . So I still worry that trying to adapt macroeconomic modelling to the whole systems transition we are undergoing, will continue to be a waste of time and money.
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The chapter by John Fullerton on Finance is welcome , since economics has managed to ignore the role of finance for too long. I would like more discussion of the fatal flaws of compound interest , which I discussed in my Politics of the Solar Age ( 1981, 1986) as a dangerous mathematical abstraction counter to the Second Law of Thermodynamics , with hugely -destructive effects on ecosystems, beyond the issue of discount rates. Also, the issue of the politics of money-creation and credit allocation as the flywheel of the inequality and ecological devastation today needs to be covered. Nor did I find any solid policy proposals already gaining traction, , e.g. financial transaction taxes , such as we of the WorldShift Council proposed to the G-20 in Mexico June 19th. However , I'm happy John has taken up this reform , as well as that of public banking ( see the Public Banking Institute on whose advisory Board I serve www.publicbankinginstitute.org ). I also hope you can add a reference to the Ethical Markets- Capital Institute Statement crafted here in 2010 on TRANSFORMING FINANCE , and join me, John, Graciela Chichilnisky and all the other global experts who joined us in signing it at www.transformingfinance.net

Other issues , such as the proposals for countries to use Chapter 9 for declaring bankruptcy , and other reforms of the international agencies , the UN , the IFIs which I discussed in my Beyond Globalization ,
( 1999) and offered by many others since then , including those of my erstwhile currency trader friend T. Ross Jackson ( another Canadian ! ) in his OCCUPY WORLD STREET ( 2012) , to which I wrote the Foreword , might also be referenced .
And references to the work of Kenneth Boulding , Nicholas Georgescu -Roegen , Barbara Ward and E.F. Schumacher , all my dear departed friends , as well as Joan Robinson , who won the debate of the Two Cambridges by pointing out that those at Harvard could not define " capital " ! This would be a nice gesture acknowledging that we all stand on the shoulders of these earlier pioneers .

The document is exciting, not least because it is filled with “Yes, but...” moments. Here are five yesbuts that intrigue this reader:

1. If the Anthropocene denotes a period of time in which human activity has caused such great damage, isn’t it time we moved on? Or, in Paul Shepard’s imagining, back? http://amzn.to/LU9tUp

2. If it is true that “financial engineering moved to greater and greater abstraction”, and that when financial assets are created “there is a further separation between investor and investment” - won't a “global macroeconomic model” (pp 28, 71) make things worse?

3. If ecosystem function “at some critical level is therefore priceless” - why would *any* monetization of the commons be acceptable?

4. Would a resilient capitalist system (p48) be less ecocidal than the one we have now?

5. If “ordered structures in nature - like sand dunes and snowflakes, flowers and trees... fade away in the mists of time” (p83) - then is it not our ultimate duty to just fade away?

In conclusion, a special thanks to whoever wrote the explanation of nucleation (p75) as “the way rain or show is made possible by dust particles around which moisture accumulates”. The next time someone asks what, if anything, I do, I will say “I’m a dust mote”.

I would like to propose that we add the following proposition to this debate:

The 19th Century innovations in value creation, capital formation and wealth distribution that gave us Corporate Finance and Exchange-Traded Capital are structurally incompatible with the emerging 21st Century ethos of sustainable prosperity. These were cutting-edge innovations in the 1800s, designed to meet the demands of American Industrial Expansion along our Western Frontier, fueled by technical innovations in economies of scale. These innovations worked remarkably well, and we reached the limits of that Frontier not later than the middle of the 20th Century. For a time, we re-directed our expansionist energies to Outer Space, but by the end of the 20th Century we had travelled into Space, and found that there is really nothing out there for us. Not right now, anyway. So, our new reality in the 21st Century is that we have the Earth, and it is well and truly ours, but it is all we have. Our challenge is to innovate cutting edge technologies for value creation, capital formation and wealth distribution that are purpose-built to deliver sustainable prosperity without geopolitical expansion.

It will not be enough to make modifications and revisions to the Corporate Finance/Exchange-Traded model. That is like adding cycles and epicycles to Ptolemy's earth-centric model of the universe. Just makes a fundamentally inadequate system that much more difficult to work with (and spawns a whole profession of "experts" who really just waste their time, and our resources, on what is nothing more than busy work). What we need is a whole new model, akin to Johannes Kepler's construction of the sun-centered model of the universe.

It is also not helpful to reprimand the practitioners of Corporate Finance and Exchange Trading. These people are not miscreants (at least not for the most part). They are professionals doing a very good job of doing what they know how to do. It's not that Exchange Trading is hostile to sustainability. It's blind to it. It's like the difference between a train and an airplane. It makes no sense to criticize a train for not being able to fly. Trains and planes are very different things, built for very different purposes. If you want to fly, don't take the train. And if you do take the train, don't expect to get airborne!

We don't need to make the freight train of Exchange-Trading work better. We need to invent a whole new way to travel in this new reality of prosperity within the circular geography of the biosphere: we need to invent, if you will, an "airplane" of sustainability!

I think the simple principle to learn is that any growth system, of either natural or human design, starts with multiplying 'greed' as a system explosively grows by taking ever more control of its environment. That naturally runs into problems.

For money the detailed steps are first investing for profits to add to investments, making them multiply. When that runs into trouble (as it has by our overwhelming the earth) the purpose of investment has to change. People must then (somehow) **turn to investing for profits to spend** (not invest), to stabilize prosperity rather than to take it to the collapse of their environment. see Chapter 16 of The General Theory.

It's not easy reading, but is perhaps the most unread critical insight into man's future ever written.... http://www.synapse9.com/ref...