21st Century Economy
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What If We're Beyond Mere Policy Tweaks? (February 6, 2012) The nation's ills cannot be fixed by thousands of pages of regulation or more policy tweaks.
charles hugh smith-What If We're Beyond Mere Policy Tweaks?
I feel motivated today to write about global markets, and especially the lingering fear that’s sure to carry over from 2011 to 2012. The last 18 months have supplied historians with every reason to believe that a replay of the 2008 financial crisis was about to unfold. The difference being that the private sector debt crisis which triggered 2008′s terrible domino event has now been transposed, into a similar risk in sovereign debt. Especially the sovereign debt of peripheral Europe. As a student of macroeconomics, and as one who observes the procession of market psychology—when markets slowly move from the comfort of sleep to the Ker-Pow!
Tail Risk and Embalming Fluid, in 2012 | Gregor.us
Despite the fact that close to one-third of the country's workforce is comprised of independent workers, this sizeable chunk of our economy has none of the protections and benefits that "traditional" employees have… More »
Sara Horowitz - Authors - The Atlantic
It's been called the Gig Economy, Freelance Nation, the Rise of the Creative Class, and the e-conomy, with the "e" standing for electronic, entrepreneurial, or perhaps eclectic. Everywhere we look, we can see the U.S. workforce undergoing a massive change. No longer do we work at the same company for 25 years, waiting for the gold watch, expecting the benefits and security that come with full-time employment. We're no longer simply lawyers, or photographers, or writers. Instead, we're part-time lawyers-cum- amateur photographers who write on the side.
The Freelance Surge Is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time - Sara Horowitz - Business - The Atlantic
…My heart’s in Accra » Book review: Improvisational economies and a globalized building
Robert Neuwirth is bringing new insights to familiar (for him, unfamiliar for most of us) territory in his book, “ Stealth of Nations “. His previous work, “ Shadow Cities ” was a plea to take squatter cities and informal settlements seriously, rather than dismissing them as slums. ( My review of Shadow Cities is here. ) His mission in this new book is for us to reconsider the “informal economy”, which he rebrands “System D”. “System D” is an abbreviation for “l’economie de la débrouillardise”, a tern coined in French-speaking Africa to refer to a system of “resourceful and ingenious” people who make their livings outside the formal, taxed and regulated economy. Neuwirth rejects the term “informal” because the coiner of that phrase, British anthropologist Keith Hart, included the criminal underground in his term, “the informal economy”.
Our commercial economy is headed for destruction. There are many contributing factors, but in the end it all boils down to the fact that we’ve broken the core covenants, contracts or agreements of successful economies. These rules exist for a reason and you can no more avoid them than you can the principles of mathematics or the laws of physics. The commercial economy is completely dependent upon the two layers of underlying economies that it is built on. First, there is the social economy inside of which we raise our children, have real relationships and take care of each other. For example, we don’t pay parents to make babies, teach language, potty-train, or devote a couple decades of care and support.
New Currency Frontiers
“The failure of change agents to re-encode social systems (especially ones with as much influence on everything as money has), is what keeps us on this intolerable trajectory of destruction. So far, the biological equivalent to our most “successful” social organism pattern is cancer. Corporations are structured as a cancer. They use all their resources to grow their own resources even at the expense of their host community or ecosystem. If we don’t want to be cancers on the face of the planet, we have to get much better at encoding social organisms. We need to spawn a huge diversity of new kinds of social organisms with new DNA and learn how to truly co-create collectively.
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Transforming corporate forms through currencies
John Perry Barlow used the eG8 to demolish IP monopolies claims. Other internet advocates backed up the critique of the repressive approach proposed by Sarkozy, see below. Excerpt: “Barlow was a late addition to a panel on intellectual property; his name wasn’t even included on the schedule.
Innovation needs to be freed
The economy is closely linked with the physical resources that underly it. Most economists assume debt can rise endlessly, just as they assume GDP can rise endlessly. But if there really is a limit that prevents oil supply from rising endlessly, it seems to me that there is also a corresponding limit that prevents debt from rising endlessly. As I analyze the situation, it seems to me that here is really a two-way link between peak oil and peak debt:
The Link Between Peak Oil and Peak Debt – Part 1 | Our Finite World
Commons as a Corporation
This point of view, ‘the commons must be a corporation’, may come as a shocker and is by no means an easy text, I had to reread it a few times, but, worth pondering. Chris answers the question: what is the optimal solution for combining a community, a commons, and the necessity to make a living. Answer: the commons, under the governance of a democratically governed corporate entity, allows for multiple community agreements detailing the use of the stock for creating value.
Gregor.us
Dear Readers: I’m currently writing a long-form post twice a month now for Chris Martenson’s excellent website. Accordingly, I’ll be publishing the first (and free) part of these essays here at Gregor.us. Enjoy . — Gregor An emotional, jubilant hooray! could be heard earlier this month when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its latest jobs numbers for January 2012, showing the addition of 243,000 net new jobs. That’s the kind of news both the financial markets and the political complex were yearning for, because it implies that growth is finally greater than the rate at which new workers enter the labor force due to US population growth alone.The Quantified Self health movement , once thought limited to elite athletes or patients suffering from chronic disease, has been steadily expanding beyond body hackers and body builders. Recent research on how the Internet is shaping healthcare from the Pew Internet and Life Project contained an eye-opening fact: fully one quarter of online adults were tracking their own health statistics . There's clearly something important going on here.
If you can quantify the self, can you also program it? - O'Reilly Radar
The US jobs report came out this morning, and it was simply dismal ... First, there were only 18,000 jobs created in June , the lowest since September 2010. While private employment rose by 57,000, government workers dropped by 39,000, continuing a trend as governments at all levels work to cut their budgets. Long-time readers know I think it is important to look at the direction of the revisions, and we got no help.