Episode Summary: Emerge Podcast Episode 9 — Measuring What Matters, with Guest Pamela Haines
Guest: Pamela Haines, member of Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, writer, workshop leader, and author of Money and Soul. She has also written three Pendle Hill pamphlets, three volumes of essays for the Quaker Quick Series, and three volumes of poetry. Her blog and podcast can be found at pamelahaines.substack.com.
Host: Burt Dallas, Radnor Climate Action Committee
Theme: The conversation centers on Pamela’s framework of “emerge values” — empathy and mindfulness, ecological integrity, right action/resilience, growth, and endurance — as applied to building a living economy for a livable earth. Key topics discussed:
Flawed economic measurement — Critique of GDP as a measure of wellbeing, since it counts harmful activity (private prisons, predatory lending, pollution cleanup) while ignoring unpaid caregiving work and ecological damage. Alternative models mentioned: Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness and France’s adjusted-GDP approach. Linear vs. circular economy — The “extract, produce, consume, discard” model is traced to frontier mythology and manifest destiny, contrasted with circular economy practices (waste-to-resource innovation, right-to-repair movements, product leasing models).
The commons — Historical enclosure of commons (English fencing of grazing land, colonization/indigenous land seizure) paralleled with modern enclosures: privatized DNA, public utilities, and data centers. Reference to Elinor Ostrom’s research debunking the “tragedy of the commons.”
Money and banking — Explanation of how most money is created through bank lending rather than government printing. Deep dive into the Bank of North Dakota, a century-old public bank that keeps profits in-state, funds community banks and student loans, and weathered the 2008 recession without exposure to Wall Street.
Debt and inequality — Discussion of how interest transfers wealth from borrowers to lenders, historical tax rates (91% top marginal rate in the 1950s vs. ~38–39% today), and debt forgiveness movements like the Jubilee Campaign that canceled $37 billion in developing-nation debt.
Corporate and shared rights — Corporations gaining outsized legal rights compared to individuals; the counter-movement toward “rights of nature” (e.g., Wisconsin’s wild rice rights movement) and reclaiming shared/public rights over private property.
Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics — A model balancing a social foundation (meeting human needs) against an ecological ceiling (planetary boundaries), used as a framework for pursuing “safe and just” economic activity. Call to action — Pamela closes by tracing “economics” to its Greek root (household management), arguing that everyone already has the expertise to reclaim economic values, starting at the family/community level and expanding outward. The episode blends personal reflection, historical analysis, and concrete policy examples, framing economic transformation as a matter of values (especially empathy and ecological integrity) rather than pure technical policy.