Taming the Dragon: Transforming Economic Institutions in the Face of Global Change

In the early twenty-first century, environmental risks such as climate change, biodiversity loss, resource scarcity, large-scale migrations, and conflicts over critical resources have become our lived reality in a world where nearly 8 billion people struggle to thrive. These crises have proven impossible to address without fundamental transformations of our economic institutions—exactly as predicted in this groundbreaking work. First published in 1994, Taming the Dragon offers a careful investigation of the processes that have led to global environmental change. It is based on a new and original analysis of economic mechanisms as the result of complex processes of cultural evolution. This analysis enables the author to develop both a short-term strategy and a long-term perspective for managing the global environmental crisis. Demonstrating how and why world economic and environmental policies are dangerously out of sync with each other, Jaeger arrives at an understanding of human reality that stresses the importance of interpersonal relations both in private life and within the world economic system itself.