New economic thinking could help tackle the planetary and housing crises | Andrew Simms

Jeremy Corbyn's 'people's quantitative easing' for house building was derided by many, but to keep a roof over all our heads in the face of climate change it is time for fresh economic thinking

If your house was slowly falling down, in serious danger of catching fire or getting repossessed you'd know something was wrong and needed changing. Yet, tens of millions of homes are at risk globally according to Nasa's latest research on sea level change, because of ice loss from Greenland and the Antarctic, melting glaciers and the thermal expansion of the warming oceans.

Oikos, meaning household, and nomos, meaning roughly a set of rules, are the generally accepted Greek roots for the word economics. Hence, stripped of its own wilful obfuscations as a discipline, economics is the art of good housekeeping. But, as the Nasa research shows, economics is failing lamentably at the level of planetary housekeeping, just as it is in the UK at the more prosaic but also important level of the housing market.