I’m grateful to @Andy Lippok for his mention of Jennifer Engelman’s project, called Regenerative Economics, aimed at reforming the secondary-school teaching of economics. https//www.regenerativeeconomics.earth/home On 26Sept26 I attended a workshop in this project and this Post describes my reactions. I’m also grateful to Richard O’Rourke for alerting me to a previous initiative of this kind, organised in the US from 1992 by Jay Forrester - the MIT Professor who pioneered the computer-modelling of complex-system dynamics. This initiative was a limited success - working well with teachers who had the appropriate skills but failing to be adopted throughout the US teaching community as a whole. Two key documents about Forrester’s initiative are his initial description - ‘System Dynamics and Learner-Centered-Learning in Kindergarten through 12th Grade Education’ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/15-988-system-dynamics-self-study-fall-1998-spring-1999/4b944c9130cf9cceae0520907bbd4731_learning.pdf and a critical review of the initiative’s impact 15 years later - ‘The future of system dynamics and learner-centered learning in K-12 education' https://proceedings.systemdynamics.org/2002/proceed/papers/Stuntz1.pdf Englemann’s new initiative seems to have the same overall aims but by wholly different means. She proposes almost no attention to mathematics and modelling, at this stage. Instead, she highlights all the factors that orthodox economics wilfully omits yet are clearly part of an economy. She mentions Kate Raworth’s ‘doughnout’ diagram as a good illustration of such factors. I get the sense that the word ‘regenerative’ in the initiative’s title encompasses several meanings of ‘generating afresh’ - the regenerating of thought, as public understanding; the regenerating of rules and procedures in the economy; the regenerating of money’s mechanisms and the regeneration of the breadth and depth of political possibility. Her summary of principles is an attached screengrab.

An article in the Guardian reveals something unintelligent about Meta’s MUSE AI chatbot - it treats buying and selling as linguistic transactions and doesn’t seem to understand that personality and physicality is involved. Could rule-based mechanisms allow a language model, if sufficiently large, to distinguish between messages about materials and the materials themselves? See - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/28/metas-ai-agent-muse-home-address

I was surprised to hear how Snyder padded the start of his lecture on Colonialism, to allow late arrivals to find seats, by talking not about the legacy of colonialism from the past (his subject in that lecture as an historian) but about the likely future legacy of colonialism today. He spoke about two issues that he saw as having the potential to "… do us in, as a species" - 1) refusal to develop and exploit non-colonial sources of energy (i.e. non-fossil fuels) and 2) ready acceptance of the idea that machines can become the colonial masters of humans. See - https://snyder.substack.com/p/back-to-colonialism The source of my surprise is how easily he mentioned 1) and 2) in passing, without explanation or justification, under the assumption that his audience was naturally already aware of those two issues as common knowledge.

For those of you that do not know me, I write about the inner workings of modern money mechanics. I recently discovered something in preparation for my new book on the Pound coming out soon, and I dedicated a chapter of my book on it but wrote a lighter version in a substack post explaining how the UK can match Germany’s 500b off-balance-sheet infrastructure investment with one of their own that requires: 1. No increase in debt. 2. No increase in taxes. 3. No cuts to spending. 4. No net increase in the money supply. Who would oppose that? Sound too good to be true? The secret is by temporarily stoping Fiat money or reserves from being de-issued, then issuing a new Digital Pound to pay for infrastructure, backed by those reserves. After they have been cycled through infrastructure, the BoE de-issues those reserves instead of sending profits to Treasury. It’s model 1 (MMT) v current model 2 (tax or borrow to spend). I think it works really well, here’s why… During COVID, the BoE purchased a tremendous number of Treasury bonds to save the financial economy and give Parliament money to help prop up the real economy, but many complained it didn’t do enough. As those bonds mature, Tressury sells new bonds and uses the money to pay off the old bonds, which de-issues that Fiat and takes it out of circulation forever. My proposal is to delay that de-issuance until we finance new infrastructure to make the economy more competitive. Steve has shown energy prices track closely with GDP, so Green energy and grid modernization investment is high on the list. In short, we get infrastructure investment today in exchange for no BoE profits in the future: https://substack.com/@jonunderwood/note/p-205262691?r=emteb&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback for anyone who has the time to read it! @Alwyn Lewis hoping you can review.

Steve is more than direct in his criticism of climate-change deniers. Yet a Guardian correspondent uses even stronger language. See - https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2026/aug/24/this-is-not-a-natural-calamity-it-is-being-done-to-us-knowingly He says “Global heating is an outrage, not a tragedy.”… “This is something that is being done to us. Knowingly. Which makes it a crime. A narrow class of people is profiting from our anguish… What they care about is money. Not just enough to get by on. Not even enough to become grotesquely rich with. They want the kind of money that bends others to their will.”. The article ends with what could be seen as an advertisement for the Guardian, thought it is likely true. The picture that illustrates the article is distinctly suitable.