Lisi Krall: "Agriculture, Surplus, and the Economic Superorganism"
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 553 Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2023
⏱️ 81 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode, 'Superorganisms' converge as Nate is joined by economist and anthropologist Lisi Krall to discuss the evolutionary origins of our current systemic predicament. Starting with the Agricultural Revolution, the evolutionary conditions of surplus and ultrasociality have combined to shape the way humans interact with their environment, ultimately leading to our current out of control global economy. Is this global system an inevitable emergent phenomenon of the human condition? Does surplus inherently breed inequality and hierarchy, such as the current capitalist system? What type of social evolution will we experience as we meet the limits of an expansionary system and move towards a Great Simplification?
About Lisi Krall
Lisi Krall is a professor of economics at State University of New York, Cortland. Dr. Krall engages a heterodox and transdisciplinary approach to understanding economic systems, their etiology, structure, dynamic, and the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world that is contextualized through them. She incorporates evolutionary biology, anthropology, history, heterodox economics, and deep materialism to understand how we arrived at this paradoxical moment where humans appear trapped in an economic system that functions as if it is not of this Earth at the same time it is clearly a material system. Her latest book, Bitter Harvest: An Inquiry into the War Between Economy and Earth, explores the formation and evolution of the economic system (the economic superorganism) that took hold beginning with the cultivation of annual grains and is now embodied in global capitalism.
For Show Notes and more: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/86-lisi-krall
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/eQNI4bUv_Fs
More details & show notes: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/86-lisi-krall
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. |
| 0:06.3 | That's me. |
| 0:07.7 | On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, in our society. |
| 0:17.0 | Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's |
| 0:23.0 | eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it |
| 0:28.7 | as a society and as individuals. |
| 0:33.1 | Today I am pleased to welcome my friend Lisey Krawl to the great simplification. |
| 0:40.2 | Leasy is a professor of economics at the SUNY University of New York in Cortland. |
| 0:47.0 | She was a Fulbright scholar, a SUNY senior scholar, the recipient of many awards, including |
| 0:51.8 | the Chancellor's Award for Research. |
| 0:55.7 | Her most recent book, |
| 1:02.9 | Bitter Harvest, an inquiry into the war between the economy and the earth, takes a wide lens view of the evolution of humans through the agricultural revolution, all the way to the |
| 1:08.7 | progression of capitalism to today's economic |
| 1:11.9 | superorganism. |
| 1:13.9 | Today, Lisa and I discussed the importance the agricultural revolution had on framing, setting |
| 1:20.7 | the foundations of the structure of the global energy-hungry system that we have today. We also talk about the profound duality of the global energy hungry system that we have today. |
| 1:28.4 | We also talk about the profound duality |
| 1:32.0 | between humans and the other than human world. |
| 1:35.5 | And both of these are actually core tenets of my work. |
| 1:40.0 | So Lisi and I have been traveling parallel paths |
| 1:42.9 | on this research. Please welcome Professor Lisi and I have been traveling parallel paths on this research. |
| 1:46.8 | Please welcome Professor Lacey Crawl. |
... |
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