21st Century Economy
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(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.
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
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.
The Freelance Surge Is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time - Sara Horowitz - Business
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”.
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.
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
i 16 Votes 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.
The Link Between Peak Oil and Peak Debt – Part 1
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.
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. To learn more, I turned to Fred Trotter ( @fredtrotter ).
If you can quantify the self, can you also program it?
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?
This Time Really Is Different
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.Changing Models of Ownership
Changing Models of Ownership Michel Bauwens 7th June 2011 In societies saturated by hyper-consumption, the joy of acquiring, of holding the new object in your hands and knowing with satisfaction that it’s yours, is familiar. Equally recognizable, though, is that creeping anxiety when the sheen starts to fade and your mind gets distracted with a new, better, life-improving version, and at this intersection, ownership becomes a pain, a burden. Shareable presents a three-part investigation of changing models of ownership, undertaken by Claro Partners.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.