Business, financial and personal finance news. NEW YORK (CNNMoney) Decades ago, experts predicted we would all be working just 14 to 15 hours a week by now, and would have so much free time, we wouldn't even know what to do with ourselves.
Instead, U.S. workers have been stuck with the official 40-hour workweek -- or even longer for many of us -- since 1938, in order to finance our ever-expensive lifestyles. The predictions: Back in 1930, renowned economist John Maynard Keynes predicted technological advancements would mean we would all eventually work just 15 hours a week. Activity – Coalition for Capital Homesteading. Creating jobs and tackling worklessness – who (and where) are the innovators? Guest post from Laura Gardiner, Policy Adviser – Innovation in Jobs, Nesta.
Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation, has been exploring the ways in which organisations and individuals are innovating to create jobs and tackle worklessness. We began this process in our Making It Work report that was published last October, and we’ve now gathered all the examples we’ve come across together on our living map of jobs innovators. We hope will become a thriving picture of what’s happening and what works, and a useful resource full of practical ideas for those working to build a new type of local economy. Making It Work assessed the current approach to tackling worklessness and made the case for more innovation in the jobs market and in local economies.
Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism. Today's economic crisis is capitalism's worst since the Great Depression.
Millions have lost their jobs, homes and healthcare while those who work watch their pensions, benefits and job security decline. As more and more are impacted by the crisis, the system continues to make the very wealthy even richer. To Build a Community Economy, Start With Solidarity. United for Hire worker Jorge Funes paints the exterior of Greenfield Gardens in Springfield, Mass., one of the housing complexes owned by Alliance to Develop Power.
A Visual Guide to Employee Ownership. Community-based economy: We're all in it together. Cooperative Economics: Replacing a Capitalism in Collapse. (Image: Hands together via Shutterstock)Truthout is able to confront the forces of greed and regression only because we don’t take corporate funding.
Support us in this fight: make a tax-deductible donation today by clicking here. I live in a co-op house with 30 other people in Madison, Wisconsin. While we pay rent to the nonprofit organization that manages Madison’s co-op properties, our only landlords are each other. We have weekly meetings to discuss house business and make decisions in a democratic process, using a consensus model. We agree to not buy any food or products for the house that come from detestable companies like Monsanto, Koch Industries and Tyson, and get most of the ingredients for house meals from the farmer’s market and a local food co-op.
Meet the New Left: Small-Business Owners. How to Map the New Economy in Your City. Mapping your community helps demonstrate that “Another World” is not only possible, it already exists.
Financing our Foodshed: Growing Local Food with Slow Money. Economy | Apr 8, 2013 About the Author: Carol Peppe Hewitt is a business owner, social entrepreneur and life-long activist.
She is cofounder of Slow Money NC which works to finance North Carolina's sustainable food and farming economy by connecting individuals committed to building local food systems with entrepreneurs who have compelling needs for capital. Growing up in rural Northwest Connecticut, Carol watched as working farms disappeared one by one. She now works to change that trend, guiding patient capital to sustainable farmers and food businesses in North Carolina. In towns and cities across North America, a quiet revolution is underway. Meet the New Left: Small-Business Owners.
42 Ways to Build a Culture and Economy Beyond Capitalism. It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism.
At its most basic, this strategy calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization. The image, then, is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth, power, and meaning from them until there is nothing left but shells. This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at overthrowing the system; it is an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it with something better, something we want.
Thus, capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Transition Lab - Preparing the next generation of reconomists? Emergency Entrepreneurship & Economics of Happiness. From Austerity and a Return to Poverty, Forward to Better and Richer Living… Much has been made of the economic troubles in Europe.
Of course, high unemployment does not bode well, and high youth unemployment is even worse a burden. Bailing out banks and seeing their management return to getting bonus payments while social services and benefits are being cut hardly makes for a social (and economic) climate that inspires confidence. At the same time, one wonders what protests against austerity (or the American calls to invest anti-cyclically so as not to throttle off growth) are supposed to achieve – a return to the spending of money that isn’t really there, but only created out of thin air in the form of debt, to be repaid later, with interest?
Mobile. Food Co-op Initiative. Looking for a co-op forming near you?
REconomy. Transition Lab - Preparing the next generation of reconomists? Moral Economy Project. New Economics Institute. The Blue Economy. The Blue Economy: 10 years - 100 innovations - 100 million jobs is a book by Gunter Pauli. The book expresses the ultimate aim that a Blue Economy business model will shift society from scarcity to abundance "with what we have", by tackling issues that cause environmental and related problems in new ways. The book highlights potential benefits in connecting and combining seemingly disparate environmental problems with open-source scientific solutions based upon physical processes common in the natural world, to create solutions that are both environmentally beneficial and which have financial and wider social benefits.
The book suggests that we can alter the way in which we run our industrial processes and tackle resultant environmental problems, refocusing from the use of rare and high-energy cost resources to instead seek solutions based upon simpler and cleaner technologies. Background[edit] See also[edit] References[edit] External links[edit] New Economy Network Members Area. How to Map the New Economy in Your City. Some Macroeconomics for the 21st Century. Abstract This note describes a numerical simulation of a model of economic growth, a simplified version of Robert Tamura's (1996) model of world income dynamics, based on technology diffusion.
The model makes predictions for trends in average world income growth and about the evolution of the relative income distribution that accord well with observation. The model is used to forecast the course of world income growth and income inequality over the century to come. Download Info. Solidarity economy. The definition of "solidarity economy" consists of activities organized to address and transform exploitation under capitalist economics, and can include diverse phenomena.[1] For some, it refers to a set of strategies and a struggle aimed at the abolition of capitalism and the oppressive social relations that it supports and encourages; for others, it names strategies for "humanizing" the capitalist economy—seeking to supplement capitalist globalization with community-based "social safety nets". The still evolving term "solidarity economy" is an English translation of a concept formally formulated in Lima, Peru in 1997 (economía solidaria), in Quebec in 2001,[2] and in Brazil during the World Social Forum of 2001, and in Portuguese as "economia solidaria".[3] It is also represented by the French "économie solidaire" and similar terms in several other languages.
As such it is sometimes translated by other expressions such as "solidarity-based economy". Social and solidarity economy[edit] OpenEconomy. Post-capitalism. Socialist economics and the socialist calculation debate concern the organization and functioning of a post-capitalist system. This subject encompasses alternatives for the major elements of a capitalist system, such as the wage and profit systems, market-based allocation, private ownership of the means of production, and the use of money as a measure of value; and critical analysis of post-capitalist economic models.[1]
Feasta. WIR Bank. WIR Bank logo. The new economics foundation. New Economy Network Members Area. BALLE - Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. Slow Money: Investment strategies appropriate to the realities of the 21st century - Slow Money. World Economics Association. Tellus Institute - For a Great Transition. Equitable economies for a living earth. Home. The Institute for Collapsonomics. News « Econ4. Fast Company (fastcoexist.com) reports on Econ4: “We’re economists: we want to promote not only the supply of new economics teaching but also student demand for it.”
Read the story and accompanying interview here. The Wall Street Journal, reporting on the American Economics Association’s recent decision to require economists to disclose potential conflicts of interest, quotes Econ4′s George DeMartino and Gerald Epstein, leading advocates of uploading ethics into the profession. George DeMartino, a University of Denver professor who headed the panel, has argued for the adoption of an even broader “economists’ oath” that would address questions like the ethics of advising dictators and the responsibility of economists to stand up for the poor.Gerald Epstein, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who has previously criticized economists’ lack of disclosure, in an email called the policy “a very big step forward.”
Read the story here. Popular economics education? New Economics Institute. The Cambridge Trust for New Thinking in Economics. New Economy Network Members Area. Make economy democratic and sustainable.