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. Only a profound cultural transformation can address our problems. The mainstream view uniting the entire political spectrum is that all our financial problems can be fixed by what amounts to top-down, centralized policy tweaks and regulation: for example, tweaking policies to "tax the rich," limit the size of "too big to fail" financial institutions, regulate credit default swaps, lower the cost of healthcare (a.k.a. sickcare), limit the abuses of student loans to pay for online diploma mills, and on and on and on.
But what if the rot is already beyond the reach of more top-down policy tweaks? Does anyone really think that the lack of another centralized Federal fiefdom and thousands of pages of additional regulation is what ails sickcare? If a 37-page bill took care of the problem in 1933, why can't the same 37-page bill be re-instated? Readers forum: DailyJava.net. Tail Risk and Embalming Fluid, in 2012.
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! Of recognition—I am strangely in the position of thinking the following, mildly heretical thought: tail risk in global markets is now much, much lower than most anticipate. If that’s true, certain asset classes are going to make very large, very surprising moves in 2012. For 2012, therefore, I am planning not on rupture (or rapture) but on decay.
Sara Horowitz - Authors. The Freelance Surge Is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time - Sara Horowitz - Business. Welcome to the Gig Life. The boom in independent work is changing the way we think about jobs and careers. Does Washington get it? 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. Today, careers consist of piecing together various types of work, juggling multiple clients, learning to be marketing and accounting experts, and creating offices in bedrooms/coffee shops/coworking spaces. And, perhaps most surprisingly, many of them love it. This transition is nothing less than a revolution. 1) We don't actually know the true composition of the new workforce.
Book review: Improvisational economies and a globalized building. Posted by Ethan on Dec 7th, 2011 in Developing world, ideas | 2 comments 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”.
Neuwirth’s great strength is as a traveler and storyteller. New Currency Frontiers. Transforming corporate forms through currencies. Transforming corporate forms through currencies Michel Bauwens 10th August 2011 Excerpted from Arthur Brock: “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.
However, this kind of intelligence isn’t a function of IQ, but rather of having or inventing an appropriate language / expressive capacity / channel for this kind of coordination to occur. Currencies of course.” Innovation needs to be freed. 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. But he accepted the invitation even as colleagues begged him not to go and activists like Cory Doctorow turned down invitations to the event, which was seen as an industry/government cabal bent on regulating the ‘Net for its own ends. Barlow made the most of his opportunity. . * “We do not believe that you can remove ‘content’ from the Internet, and if you do this, what is there left?
* “When someone comes to you and says I need a few hundred million dollars to make a movie about 10 foot tall blue people on another planet, that’s not an easy decision to make. Expression is not like that. Part of the audience, at least, loved it—to Barlow’s obvious surprise. The Link Between Peak Oil and Peak Debt – Part 1. 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: 1. Peak oil tends to cause peak debt. Figure 1. Governments try to step in and keep the growth rate in debt up, but the gap is too great for them to make up. 2.
In the current post, called “Part 1,” I will cover the first of these two issues; I will cover the second issue in Part 2. The Relationship Between Growth and Debt I have talked many times about the need for economic growth, in order to make our current system of borrowing money, and paying back loans with interest, work on the extensive basis that it is used today. Figure 2. Figure 3. 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.
Chris Cook: “I distinguish between Community and Commons. Joint and Several I see the former as an associative agreement between individuals ‘severally’ or separately in respect of the use of productive assets held in Common. I see the latter as an associative agreement between individuals jointly or collectively in respect of the creation and exchange of value. The Community agreement sets out entitlements to flows of value from productive assets eg land/buildings in common ownership. Commons Entity Community Entity and. Gregor.us. If you can quantify the self, can you also program it? This Time Really Is Different. As the economy goes down the drain, those who want to believe that America's problems are temporary face an unsolvable dilemma: how do you spin this ongoing disaster in such a way as to maintain your delusions about the future greatness of the United States?
The latest jobs report was a case in point—"ugly" was the preferred word for describing it. John Mauldin is one of those who will grasp at any straw to remain hopeful about the future. I'll quote from his latest newsletter What Happened To The Jobs? 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. Mauldin alludes to a problem which he himself suffers from. You may think Mauldin just pulled a rabbit out of his hat, and you're right, that's exactly what he did. And so forth. The Essay | arts2090 – Publics and Publishing. Q.2 How is the diminution of traditional, and often hierarchical, “authoritative” intermediaries changing the role of publishing in social life? Hunting and gathering is the natural primitive desire instinctive to human beings.
This ensures the survival of civilization, and society. In the media scope, we behave in much the same way. The explosion in the way people interact, collaborate and exchange information online is proof of this. Networks are transforming traditional modes of publishing. The reciprocal nature of social relationships in a network community can be seen clearly in the form of blogging and commenting. The impact of networking and user interaction, as opposed to the traditional ‘delivery’ method of broadcast news is made viable through Delanga’s, “organismic metaphor.” The successes of Amazon, and Trip Advisor reveals the power of peer review, and indicates the success of network publishing, where individuals are sharing and learning from each other. Changing Models of Ownership.
Revival of the cooperative economy in the U.S. and in the UK. Excerpted from Gar Alperovitz in Yes magazine: (original has many links) At the cutting edge of experimentation are the growing number of egalitarian, and often green, worker-owned cooperatives. Hundreds of “social enterprises” that use profits for environmental, social or community-serving goals are also expanding rapidly. In many communities urban agricultural efforts have made common cause with groups concerned about healthy nonprocessed food. For-profits have developed alternatives as well. A different large-scale corporation, Seventh Generation—the nation’s leader in “green” detergents, dishwashing soap, baby wipes, tissues, paper towels and other household products—has internal policies requiring that no one be paid more than fourteen times the lowest base pay or five times higher than the average employee.
In certain states, companies that want to brandish their new-economy values can now also register as B Corporations. Heather Stewart: Kevin Kelly on how to sell free. The question of whether access or ownership is more important was directly addressed — and answered — by Kevin Kelly, senior maverick at Wired magazine, during his keynote speech at TOC 2011. In no uncertain terms he said access was the future: There’s this huge shift we see in the entire environment where people get more value out of having access to something rather than owning it. With Netflix, you don’t own the movies, you just have access to them — Spotify, Pandora, and Last FM are music streams that go by; you don’t actually own the music, you just access it … Why own them if you can have instant, all-the-time access?
What’s more, he suggested our current models of selling items — books, music, etc. — will change. In a world where everything is moving to the free, we have to have a different attitude … the only things that become valuable are the things that cannot be copied. So, the monetization comes from the speed of delivery, personalized experiences and individual attention. The Onset of Catabolic Collapse. I've commented more than once on the gap in perception between history as it appears in textbooks and history as it's lived by people on the spot at the time. That's a gap worth watching, because the foreshortening of history that comes with living in the middle of it quite often gets in the way of figuring out a useful response to a time of crisis -- for example, the one we're in right now.
This is all the more challenging because the foreshortening of history cuts both ways; it makes small but sudden events look more important than they are, and it also helps hide slow but massive shifts that will play a much greater role in shaping the future. The same gap in perception afflicts most current efforts to make sense of the future looming up ahead of us. Let's start with some basics. The central idea of catabolic collapse is that human societies pretty consistently tend to produce more stuff than they can afford to maintain. It's what happens next that's crucial to the theory. Maintaining critical infrastructures on the other side of the oil peak. Locke and his Failed Metaphysics of Private Property. Economic benefits of shorter working hours in a new ‘non-economic’ conception of time. Protecting bankers’ and creditors’ interests above all else is foolish economic policy. It enriches one group of people at the expense of nearly everyone else.
Excerpted from Juliet Schor, commons-oriented economist, author of the book Plenitude: (Juliet’s proposals are rooted in her different conception of time, which we feature just below) “Protecting bankers’ and creditors’ interests above all else is foolish economic policy. It enriches one group of people at the expense of nearly everyone else. But these days, it’s hard to get a hearing for the view that the wealthy countries remain wealthy, that we can solve our economic problems without making most people worse off, and that we can also do it while addressing the much larger challenge we face: climate change and growing ecological devastation. So what’s the alternative to slashing government programs, budget cutting, and more concentrated wealth at the top? The third benefit of shorter hours is the time itself. Case study of a community economy: The Alliance to Develop Power in western Massachusetts:
Via (originally from The Nation): Reproduced from Sally Kohn: “From the vantage point of national politics, it would appear that the greedy, inequality-dependent version of capitalism, which just two years ago was teetering at the brink of extinction, has managed to survive, even tightening its grip on our so-called democracy. After all, the most striking quality of the status quo is its perpetual resilience.
So it’s even more striking when viable alternative models blossom from grassroots organizations led by the low-income people and people of color most often locked out of the status quo. It’s potentially revolutionary when these alternatives point to a new vision of real economic democracy. One prime example is the $80 million “community economy” created by the Alliance to Develop Power, in western Massachusetts. It all started with housing. ADP is expanding its community economy based on ideas generated by other community-organizing groups.
The Ten States Running Out Of Children. Peak Oil & Future of Urbanism. Building a 21st Century Economy. Positive role of complementary currencies (thesis of the week, part 2) Life After Shopping.