Beyond the Rhetoric: The Complicated, Brief Life of Occupy Boston. Dewey Square after the Dec. 10 eviction of Occupy Boston Boston's Dewey Square on Dec. 9, as some occupiers evacuated and other drew together in preparation for eviction The view from inside Occupy Boston's Sacred Space, an interfaith chapel inside of a tent.
Protestors prayed here up until the eviction. One of the last artifacts remaining on the Sacred Space's shrine was a replica an occupier had made of the account of a fictional prisoner in Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, the origin of the Guy Fawkes mask used by Anonymous and OWS. Austin Smith, 24, mans the medical tent nine days before eviction, when Occupy Boston was still protected by court order.
A calm evening at Occupy Boston, a week before they lost the court order that protected their protest village in Boston's Dewey Square The tent city was quickly torn apart, and police and sanitation piled the remains against the sidewalk of Dewey Square. And Boston is an emotional city. The love economy (3): Lisa Gansky on the ecological potential of p2p object sharing. What struck me is the truly radical economic notion enmeshed in the Mesh: The more we share our stuff, the less we need to buy all that new stuff that inevitably leads to ever-rising greenhouse gas emissions, environmental degradation, and the pursuit of unsustainable consumption Excerpted from a report by Todd Woody on a lecture by Lisa Gansky by :
Capability approach. The capability approach (also referred to as the capabilities approach) is an economic theory conceived in the 1980s as an approach to welfare economics.[1] In this approach, Amartya Sen brings together a range of ideas that were hitherto excluded from (or inadequately formulated in) traditional approaches to the economics of welfare.
The core focus of the capability approach is on what individuals are able to do (i.e., capable of). Assessing capability[edit] Initially, Sen argued for five components in assessing capability: The importance of real freedoms in the assessment of a person's advantageIndividual differences in the ability to transform resources into valuable activitiesThe multi-variate nature of activities giving rise to happinessA balance of materialistic and nonmaterialistic factors in evaluating human welfareConcern for the distribution of opportunities within society Key terms[edit] Functionings[edit] Capabilities[edit] Agency[edit] Nussbaum's central capabilities[edit] Life.
Can we become 'happy citizens' in a climate of insecurity? We are told that a healthy happy citizen must enjoy "meaning, mastery and autonomy".
Cameron's Big Society requires citizens to be innovative and not averse to risk. Yet can we become happy and playful in a climate of economic insecurity? At the start of this debate series on the potential of happiness to shape political discourse, William Davies hoped that it would return our attention to production - or more specifically, how our experience of work in organisations is a crucial determinant of our wellbeing and life-satisfaction.
A long history of economic thought in the 20th century had led up to a moment where the consumer was sovereign, and the producer his willing slave: workers' conditions were always ultimately malleable - flexible, just-in-timed - in the retail service of this whim-laden desiring machine. Of course this machine, as Davies plaintively says, was often a worker too. The love economy (2): The political appropriation of happiness in the UK. Excerpted from a report by Pat Kane, on how various UK forces are trying to use ‘happiness’ politics: (the original article has many links) Pat Kane, reporting from anti-austerity Scotland: “I’m fascinated to observe the battle raging between the major UK parties for ownership of the new sciences of the “social animal” or “social brain”.
They’re all struggling to realise their own political capital from the intellectual collapse of utility-maximising “economic man”, in the face of consiliences between neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, epidemiology, network theory and more. And not forgetting a financial crash that caused its architects to doubt their own intellectual edifice. The love economy (1): Hazel Henderson on compound interest as a violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. If systems are too large and interconnected to manage and banks are “too big to fail,” then they need to be carefully dismantled and decentralized to restore diversity and resilience following nature’s design principles.
Monetary monocultures now on a global scale have demonstrably failed. Healthy, homegrown, local economies need protection from global bankers and their casino. Complimentary local currencies and peer-to-peer finance are flourishing (see my “Democratizing Finance“). Bloated financial sectors can be downsized and return to their role of serving real economies.
In the USA, small non-profit community development finance institutions (CDFIs) are growing to fill the needs of micro-businesses Below is a video profile of one of our heroes, economist and world thinker Hazel Henderson, now active in the Ethical Markets initiative. This video profile was produced by Nathalie Beekman, artistic director at Pavlov e-Lab, The Netherlands: Hazel Henderson: But, what can be done?