Abstract
A small group of Spanish explorers, cutting their way through the jungles of Central America in 1750, came across the ruins of what they claimed was once a vast city. In the centre of this city, they discovered the ruins of monumental structures such as the Pyramid of the Magician in Uxmal (Fig. 1.1). Being unable to decipher Mayan glyphs, they must have wondered for what purpose the long-disappeared inhabitants had built these magnificent and alien structures.
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Notes
- 1.
Diamond, J (2006) Collapse Viking Press.
- 2.
For an in-depth discussion of this, see Gleeson-White, J (2014) Six Capitals Allen & Unwin.
- 3.
WWF (2016) Living Planet Report 2016.
- 4.
Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S.E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E.M., Biggs, R., Carpenter, S.R., Vries, W. de, Wit, C.A. de, Folke, C., Gerten, D., Heinke, J., Mace, G.M., Persson, L.M., Ramanathan, V., Reyers, B. and Sörlin, S (2015) Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet Science 347:6219.
- 5.
World Bank data: http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview
- 6.
Buttonwood (2016) The Wrong Kind of Savings The Economist 21 April 2016.
- 7.
Tainter, J (1988) Collapse of complex societies Cambridge University Press.
- 8.
See for example Wolf, M (2014) The Shifts and the Shocks Penguin, Turner, A (2015) Between Debt and the Devil Princeton University Press, King, M (2016) The End of Alchemy Little.
- 9.
Kay, J (2012) The Kay review of UK equity markets UK Government.
- 10.
Although technology is now making this possible through monetary transfers via mobile phone networks.
- 11.
Kay, J (2015) Other People’s Money Public Affairs.
- 12.
Cohen, S and DeLong, B (2016) Concrete Economics Harvard Business Review Press.
- 13.
The figures in the table are OTC only, if exchange traded contracts are included, this increases the amounts by about 10%.
- 14.
Kay, J (2015) Other People’s Money Public Affairs.
- 15.
See for example Brandt, F and Georgiou, K (2016) Shareholder vs Stakeholder Capitalism Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository.
- 16.
Leftwitch, Adrian (1995) Bringing politics back in: Towards a model of the developmental state Journal of Development Studies, Volume 31, Issue 3 February 1995, pages 400–427.
- 17.
As note 9.
- 18.
Words of Lord Myners, former City minister; quoted in http://www.standard.co.uk/business/time-for-shareholders-to-get-a-grip-6747570.html
- 19.
From the Threepenny Opera (1928).
- 20.
N. G. Aspinall, S. R. Jones, E. H. McNeill, R. A. Werner, T. Zalk (2015) Sustainability and the finance system Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.
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Silver, N. (2017). Introduction. In: Finance, Society and Sustainability. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56061-2_1
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