Upstream is a quarterly documentary and bi-weekly conversation series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. Blurring the line between economic analysis and storytelling, we look beyond the numbers to explore a wide variety of themes pertaining to our tumultuous 21st century economy.
188 episodes transcribedWhen it comes to climate policy, it probably won’t come as a surprise to most that the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is one of the weakest bills tha...
Vandana Shiva is an activist and tireless advocate for food sovereignty for farmers’, peasants’, and women’s rights. She’s a world-renowned ecofeminis...
It’s clear that we need to decarbonize our economy as quickly as possible in order to avoid the worst of climate change — but carbon isn’t the only pr...
There are many traditions or tendencies among the left. In fact, sometimes just trying to wrap our heads around all of the rich theoretical frameworks...
Is the growing ascendance of digital money simply an organic evolution away from the purported inconveniences of physical cash? Or is this transition...
Traditionally within Marxist thought, there are two major classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or workers and capitalists. Within these two c...
It may not come as a surprise to most of you to hear that capitalism is the root cause of climate change. But if we unpack this a little bit, we see t...
The logic of orthodox economic thinking has come to dominate and permeate every aspect of our lives, from the deeply internalized capitalism which sha...
The US Supreme Court has just overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion rights which had set the precedent for almost 50 years, throwing...
There’s a broad conflation within our present day capitalist society between the success of individual members of certain oppressed and marginalized g...
What if what we thought we knew about environmental conservation is wrong and it’s not the ethical and regenerative movement we thought it was? Turns...
Fully automated luxury communism. Fully automated luxury gay space communism..? Fully automated, queer, neo-decadent, meta-modern communism? Okay so,...
More than just a region, Silicon Valley has also become a concept — and what that concept represents means a lot of different things to different peop...
The latest installment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC report, released this month, gives us three years to drastically cut...
“The pursuit of private financial gain is what drives inequality and ecological harm.” This is the perspective of Jennifer Hinton, a leading proponent...
Standing Rock was a pivotal moment in regards to Indigenous resistance — but it was just one in a long line of battles that Indigenous peoples have be...
There are many ways women across the world have been disproportionately impacted by COVID. The pandemic has simultaneously increased the demand for un...
By traditional metrics, the U.S. economy is doing pretty well right now — better than any other high income countries. But, at the same time, we have...
In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers lose focus every three minutes. We ten...
Why do so many of us often feel like shit when we leave work? Where does that ambient feeling of alienation come from? That nagging sense that we’ve s...
