Economics for the Anthropocene

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.​

Peter Barnes avers that we are no longer in the Holocene epoch, but in the Anthropocene epoch, an era in which humans are "a, if not the, dominant geological force on our planet," and thus we cannot continue with business as usual. Barnes argues that the best means to achieve the goal of an economic system that provides an adequate income for all and functions in harmony with nature is "to 'propertize' some common wealth and share the income from that wealth equally." Through the institutionalization of a common wealth trusts – legal entities that would represent nature, future generations, and society – economic externalities, such as pollution, would effectively be internalized and reflected in the price of the good. The compensation that these trusts would derive from the monetization of externalities could then be used to mitigate income inequality.