Denise Hearn | Embodied Economies: How our Economic Stories Shape the World

Economic policy can seem abstract and distant, but it manifests the physical world - affecting us all. Our economic stories shape our systems, and they in turn shape us. What myths continue to constrain us, and how might new stories emerge to scaffold the future? This talk will explore concepts we often take as gospel: profits, competition, economic value, efficiency, and others -- and asks how we might reshape them to better serve planetary flourishing -today, and well into the future.
Denise Hearn is a writer, applied researcher, and advisor focused on how economic power and paradigms shape our world. Hearn holds an MBA from Oxford Saïd Business School and advises governments, financial institutions, companies, and nonprofits on antitrust, economic policy, and new economic thinking. Hearn is currently a Resident Senior Fellow at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment and co-authored "The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition" (02018) with Jonathan Tepper.
Hearn's work is published in "The Financial Times", "The Globe and Mail", "Stanford Social Innovation Review", "Bloomberg", and "The Washington Post" and she currently writes the Embodied Economics newsletter. Hearn is also Advisory Board Chair of The Predistribution Initiative - a multi-stakeholder project to improve investment structures and practices to address systemic risks like inequality, biodiversity loss, and climate change.

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A different story of economics would be: Voyage from Yesteryear by James P Hogan It is peculiar in that it creates a new cultural social psychology from scratch, then the old one tries to reimpose itself. But technology is central to the story. That is rhe problem with seeking stories from history. History didn't have the tech! Steam locomotives did not exist when Adam Smith became the godfather or uncle of economics or whatever he is. Marx mentioned depreciation 35 times in the first two volumes of his major work, but not of consumer microwave ovens. How many people want to live without that story? However that does not mean that we need the planned obsolescence of microwaves.