World Hunger: Process direction and its relation to accumulation

Due: When you have completed the Unit 10 activities

Length: 16002200 words

Weight: 15% of your final grade

Instructions:

The book The Rocket Scientists Guide to Money and the Economy is a sweeping tutorial on money, the economy, debt, exchange, and a number of other issues (like environmental degradation, inequality, austerity programs, etc.). The short animation Money Moksha is a broad overview of the content in Rocket Scientists’ Guide to Money and the Economy. For this assignment you are to pick one topic that is discussed in the book and/or video and expand on that topic in a short research essay. Your essay should make use of a combination of Internet resources, newspaper articles (as appropriate), and scholarly books and journal articles. If you need help finding scholarly articles on your topic of interest, please contact the Athabasca University library. Be sure to demonstrate you have read both the book and watched the video.

Suggested Topics

You can pick any topic you want as long as it is marginally related to content in The Rocket Scientists Guide to Money and the Economy. If you are having trouble choosing, here are few suggestions:

• Addiction to money as pathology
• The environmental costs of strategies used to increase accumulation (i.e. product differentiation, planned obsolescence, marketing, etc.)
• The environmental cost of fast fashion
• The human cost of fast fashion (Bangladeshi workers)
• Taylorization of the labour force (Frederick Winslow Taylor and Scientific Management)
• World hunger: Progress, directions, and its relation to accumulation
• The stock market as a method for accumulating labour
• The causes of the French Revolution / The causes of the crises in Syria / The outcome of austerity measures. Debt crises in Greece (or any other country)
• Canadian debt and Canadian debt trends
• The historical emergence of the police
• The political function of the police (i.e., maintaining regimes of accumulation)
• Food banks, history, purpose
• The health costs of poverty and poor nutrition
• Perception sanitation
• The ideology of the western media
• Indoctrination (examples, purpose)
• World debt / World financial crises
• World political crises
• World economic crises
• World ecological crises
• George Orwells 1984 (review, analysis, report)
• Debt jubilee: What is it? How it would solve the crises?
• The necessity of better education
• Consciousness / values / mystical experience
• The spirituality of scientists
• The spirituality of revolution
• Abraham Maslow / Peak experiences
• Mystical experience and political transformation
• The re-enchantment of science

To complete this essay, you will need to track down several external sources. Wikipedia, magazine articles, and web pages are okay, but you must supplement those with at least two academic articles. Dont forget to cite your sources. You can use whatever citation style you like (the Study Guide for this course is in APA), but whichever style you use make sure it is consistent throughout your assignments. If in doubt, check with you tutor on your topic of choice and confirm with him or her the resources that you are planning to use.