Lory Kaufman
Bio
Biography
Lory Kaufman is a steady-state activist, a retired entrepreneur, businessman and, since retirement, a published author. His series, The Verona Trilogy, is a futuristic adventure partly based on what he came to understand actually is a steady-state civilization. Wanting to make his depiction of a possible future based on real background information, Lory educated himself on many economic and environmental subjects.
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He was the first to be given the descriptor of ‘post-dystopian writer,’ meaning he wasn’t following the herd and writing dystopian fiction, which was all the rage at the time.
Lory wrote about a time when humans learned their lessons and created a civilization that could thrive for thousands of years into the future. Part way through the series, when he came across the writings of Herman Daly, he then could put a name to what he was envisioning in his story, a steady-state economy. However, as he read more widely about steady-state economics, which included Professor Daly’s teacher, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Daly’s own student, Brian Czech, among others, Lory came to the conclusion that the key to a long-lived civilization is the purposeful reinvention of our world economic structure. Specifically, this meant putting forward actual suggestions of how a steady-state economy could be organized. It wouldn’t matter if humankind continued to reinvent technology to the point where it became more and more efficient.
Without changing the underlying structure of our economics system, as long as it continued to feed into the obsolete economic growth structure, there could be no long-term possibility of humanity thriving far into the future.
He also observed that almost all steady-state writing had been conceptual and theoretical, the most progressive proponents going on a campaign to convince people that it is necessary. But what is the use of convincing people it was necessary if you couldn’t give a comprehensive description of how a steady-state economy could work? This is not a criticism. It was a necessary step along the way. But now Lory says it is time for practical discussions on the specifics of how a steady-state could be organized, and then it has to be marketed to the public. This is his vision.
Other past work Lory has done as a precursor to working in alternative economy spaces is spending many years working with the Green Party all over Canada and the United States. Always practical, he funded a private company (Goods for Greens) in 2000 to provide election supplies to help the party look more professional.
Finally, outside of the ecological and economics spaces, Lory is co-authoring the upcoming autobiography of Jamal Saeed, a brilliant Arabic intellectual, and now a refugee living in Canada, who spent twelve years in Syrian military prisons. The Road from Damascus is coming out in 2022.
Steady-State Economics
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