Grassroots Economics

The screwworm is returning to the U.S., decades after it was eradicated, & it’s going to destroy our food supply. In July 2025, the current administration admitted they’re not going to stop it. There is no plan to speak of. People have no idea how bad this is going to be. The End

Seeing Ourselves for the First Time - There’s a moment that feels like climbing a tree as a child and suddenly seeing your whole neighborhood at once. You knew every house already. You’d been inside many of them. But you’d never seen the landscape they all shared. That’s what this work has been doing to me with economics. Not teaching me something entirely new ... but helping me see the shape of what I’ve been living inside all along: mutual aid and markets, welfare states and platforms, ancient rotating labor groups and Visa, Roman moneta and BlackRock. Different forms, same underlying coordination. At the most basic level, economies aren’t about money. They’re about commitments .. who promises what to whom, how those promises are pooled, valued, limited, and fulfilled. Every system has these functions. What differs is who controls them, how visible they are, and how easily they can be changed. What’s surprised me most is how much clarity comes from naming this simply ... and how often learning happens between systems, not within them. Overlapping pools, mutuals, networks, cultures. No single authority gets it “right.” The system learns at the edges, where different values and limits meet. This isn’t about replacing welfare states or romanticizing bottom-up systems. It’s about having a shared way to describe value coordination across scales—so large systems don’t lose coherence, and small ones don’t stay isolated. If we are going to move together ... then before strategy, we need orientation. We already act from theories, whether we name them or not. Having a clearer model of where we are (and where we came from) changes how we move. I’m still learning this, and it keeps rearranging how I see things. Once you notice the landscape, it’s hard to go back to seeing only the houses. If this resonates, I’d love to keep the conversation going.