Michaels, F. S. _Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything_. Kamloops, B.C.: Red Clover, 2011. [https://www.overdrive.com/search?q=FAE56982-DC2E-44B0-9EB5-C0833F8774E0](https://www.overdrive.com/search?q=FAE56982-DC2E-44B0-9EB5-C0833F8774E0). # Progressive Summary # Key Points Today, an economic monoculture is shaping different areas of our lives: - work - relationships with others and the natural world - community - physical and spiritual health - education - creativity Key assumptions of the economic monoculture: - we are individuals that can exist in isolation from one another - we are rational thinkers, with rationality defined as cost-benefit analysis determining the most efficient route to achieving a goal - we are self-interested - we have unlimited wants - there is not enough to satisfy these unlimited wants, ie resources are scarce - the world is made of markets - prices are set by the forces of supply and demand, not by individual choice - the same applies to wages - there is no one to blame for economic suffering - it's all down to the markets - the market is regulated by competition, and doesn't need to be regulated by governments - just as buyers and sellers act efficiently, so do markets - when supply and demand are balanced, markets are at peak efficiency - peak efficiency is reached when markets are as widespread as possible in the world - there is no limit to how much markets can grow - apart from certain things that are taboo (children, sex, organs, political seats, cocaine, assassinations) - we are free to enter and leave markets - the more choice we have as a buyer, the better off we are - relationships in markets are primarily competitive and transactional - we can compare ourselves with others to see how we stack up in the competition - the better our information, the better off we are - perfect information allows us to make the best decision (we are always working with or against information assymetries) - life gets better when GDP grows These assumptions are misguided because they assume we know: - what condition we are in - what our options are - what what we want Economist Tibor Scitovsky compares knowing what we want to being given a long menu in a Chinese restaurant. Most of us will end up choosing the same thing that we know, or we try something different that turns out to be what we don't like. > Though what you want and prefer can be shaped by advertising, tradition, a changing context, or your own experience, the economic story maintains that you know yourself, you know what you prefer, and you know whether or not you were satisfied with what you chose the last time. That maynot always be true, but that’s how the story goes. # Comments # Quotes > Over time, the monoculture evolves into a nearly invisible foundation that structures and shapes our lives, giving us our sense of how the world works. It shapes our ideas about what’s normal and what we can expect from life. It channels our lives in a certain direction, setting out strict boundaries that we unconsciously learn to live inside. It teaches us to fear and distrust other stories; other stories challenge the monoculture simply by existing, by representing alternate possibilities. > Monocultures and their master stories rise and fall with the times. By the seventeenth century, for example, the master story revolved around science, machines and mathematics. Developments in fields like biology, anatomy, physics, chemistry and astronomy were early harbingers of modern science. People began to believe that the nature of the world could be discovered through mathematics, that physical laws directed the behavior of all bodies, and that living creatures could be systematically catalogued in relation to one another. Life was understood as a series of questions with knowable answers, and the world became methodical and precise. A scientific monoculture was created.  > > That scientific monoculture was radically different from the religious monoculture that preceded it. If you had lived in sixteenth century Europe, a hundred years earlier, you would almost certainly have understood your life through the master story of religion and superstition. People lived surrounded by angels and demons. When Galileo contradicted the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church by claiming that the sun and not the Earth was at the center of the solar system, he was accused of heresy and sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. Excommunication from the church and the damning of your eternal soul was a real threat, and you could literally pay for your sins to guarantee yourself a short stay in purgatory. Religion was the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. > Monocultures, though overwhelmingly persuasive and pervasive, aren’t inescapable. In the end, the human experience always diverges from the monoculture and its master story, because our humanity is never as one dimensional as the master story says it is. The human experience is always wider and deeper than a single narrative, and over time, we become hungry for something the monoculture isn’t speaking to and isn’t giving us — can’t give us. Once you know what the monoculture looks like, you can decide whether it serves a useful purpose in your life, or whether you want to transcend it and live in a wider spectrum of human values instead — to know it so you can leave it behind. > In our time, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the monoculture isn’t about science, machines and mathematics, or about religion and superstition. In our time, the monoculture is economic. Because of the rise of the economic story, six areas of your world are changing — or have already changed — in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. How you think about your work, your relationships with others and the natural world, your community, your physical and spiritual health, your education, and your creativity are being shaped by economic values and assumptions.