“Greed is good.”

That idea was famously uttered by a fictional stockbroker named Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie “Wall Street.”

That line leapt out at Jon Erickson. He was an undergraduate studying economics at Cornell University in the late 1980s and he was coming to believe that the misguided priorities of conventional economics did not lead to prosperity, but to a failed and grossly unequal society and was “a path to planetary ruin.” 

Erickson is now an ecological economist, and he champions a new kind of economics that fosters a healthy, balanced relationship between people and planet. Ecological economics has been gaining influence both in academia and in environmental and social justice movements.

“I think of it as 21st century economics. It's an economics that reflects the realities of living on a full planet,” Erickson said.

Jon Erickson makes the case for a new economics in a new book, “The Progress Illusion: Reclaiming Our Future from the Fairytale of Economics.” Erickson is the Blittersdorf professor of sustainability science and policy at the University of Vermont, a faculty member of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and a Fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment. 

Erickson sees the current challenge as “taking power back from the wealthy elite and overturning the idea of a market society, returning back to democratic institutions and systems of trust and community. (It's) about social movement building.”

“The challenge now is that it can't be every four years. It's got to be day to day, week to week, month to month. It's got to be overturning the kind of brainwashing that we've all gone through.”