In 2006, having delivered a paper at the Tellus Institute in Boston, I was invited to participate in their on-going project, the Great Transition Initiative, an ambitious, collaborative attempt on the part of scholars and activists to analyze alternative scenarios and chart a path to a hopeful future, a "future of enriched lives, human solidarity, and environmental sustainability." (See their home page at gtinitiative.org.) For my part, I worked with physicist Richard Rosen to set out in some detail three alternative, positive, possible economic systems, each compatible with Great Transition values, all of them economically viable. One is a "slightly imaginary Sweden" (to use Robert Heilbroner's evocative phrase), one is a version of my own "Economic Democracy," and one is inspired by E. F. Schumacher's classic Small is Beautiful. The result of our collaboration can be downloaded from gtinitiative.org/resources/paperseries.html.
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