Money | 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.
That same year, evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley predicted the two-day work week. Both men warned that someday, we would have so much leisure time, we would be bored out of our minds. "The human being can consume so much and no more," Huxley said in 1930. More recently, a 1965 Senate subcommittee predicted we would be working 14 hours a week by the year 2000, with at least seven weeks of vacation time. And shorter workweeks are not entirely unheard of today. 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.
In particular, it called for more experimentation around ideas, more of a focus on evidence of what works, and more debate around how new and successful ideas and approaches can be taken forward. Credits: All images courtesy of Nesta. 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. In eye-opening interviews with prominent economist Richard Wolff, David Barsamian probes the root causes of the current economic crisis, its unjust social consequences and what can and should be done to turn things around. While others blame corrupt bankers and unregulated speculators or the government or even the poor who borrowed, the authors show that the causes of the crisis run much deeper.
David Barsamian is founder and director of Alternative Radio and author of Targeting Iran. In the news: Truthout Contributor Richard Wolff on Challenging Capitalism in His New Book, "Occupy the Economy", Matt Renner, Truthout.org, May 17, 2012. website - David F. 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.
Photo courtesy of ADP. When Cecilia Pastor greeted us at the door of an empty unit at Spring Meadow Apartments in Springfield, Mass., she was surrounded by the harsh smell of paint and the cleaners she had used to scour the space to make it presentable for a new tenant. A petite 30-year-old woman, she was working for United for Hire, a worker-controlled landscaping, snow removal, and cleaning firm operated by the innovative nonprofit Alliance to Develop Power (ADP).
“One thing I have learned and really like in United for Hire is we work in a community economy, and the money circulates,” she said. A powerful idea “Building a community economy.” For a relatively poor city like Springfield and the surrounding area in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, this is a powerful idea.
A new ownership model Shared benefits. Map: ESOPs by Industry Group | 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. We all actively take part in our own residence by making sure things are kept (relatively) clean, problems are solved quickly, and the house remains a thriving community. We’re witnessing capitalism’s death throes right now. Meet the New Left: Small-Business Owners. Surveys demonstrate remarkably progressive attitudes on everything from taxation to regulation to the environment. An employee counts money from a sale at Chagrin Hardware in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta) A promising new force is finding its voice in progressive politics, though it is still widely ignored or misunderstood.
These overlooked progressives are small-business owners and entrepreneurs who are not usually confused with left-wing activists. It does seem improbable: roughly half of small-business people are Republicans, only a third or so identify themselves as Democrats, and some certainly fit the old stereotype. About the Author William Greider William Greider, a prominent political journalist and author, has been a reporter for more than 35 years for newspapers... Also by the Author The new Fed chair came out in strong support of working families and the unemployed in her foundational speech this week. How to Map the New Economy in Your City. Mapping your community helps demonstrate that “Another World” is not only possible, it already exists.
New economy projects are mostly unconnected, so each one struggles alone rather than supporting each other and even in small towns, people often don't know what's happening in their own backyards. Mapping also can become a community organizing tool - uncovering a reservoir of social assets even in the poorest neighborhoods, which can seed mutual aid and cooperative business ideas to fill in the gaps.
USSEN has a list of communities that have done independent mapping projects, each using its own methodology, criteria, platform and map name. When thinking of entities to fill your map, consider if they incorporate any solidarity economy principles: solidarity, mutualism, cooperation, equity, social and environmental prioritization, democracy, pluralism, and grassroots driven. Most groups will not meet all these criteria, but these principles leave something to aspire and work towards. 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. Fed up with sending their money off to make a fast buck in faraway markets, people are putting their money to work where they live, in markets they trust and understand - starting with food. Abi, talented artist-turned-baker, who borrowed the funds to start a gluten-free bakery.
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. This is how it has to be done. Transition Lab - Preparing the next generation of reconomists? Emergency Entrepreneurship & Economics of Happiness | the ecology 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?
Two patterns, which might really be one, are eye-catching: Greece, as badly as it was hit by the crisis, shows something of this answer in the return of young people to their ancestral villages. Part 2, “Lessons,” here.
Mobile. Co-op Directories | Food Co-op Initiative. Looking for a co-op forming near you? Food Co-op Initiative maintains a map of co-ops still in their organizational stage. Click on the map to see the full version. Cooperative Grocer Network maintains one of the most complete directories of US retail food co-ops. You can search for co-ops by name or state. Co-ops: Stronger Together features an easy-to-use co-op search that also includes natural food suppliers and farmer's markets. Go.coop is maintained by National Cooperative Grocers Assocation. Find.coop is a Data Commons project maintained by the Cooperative Development Institute. Directory.coop allows users to search for organizations anywhere in the world registered with the .coop domain by name or address information. 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 | Home. 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 If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. Bibliographic Info Article provided by American Economic Association in its journal Journal of Economic Perspectives. Volume (Year): 14 (2000) Issue (Month): 1 (Winter) Pages: 159-168 Handle: RePEc:aea:jecper:v:14:y:2000:i:1:p:159-168 Note: DOI: 10.1257/jep.14.1.159Contact details of provider: Email: aeainfo@vanderbilt.eduWeb page: information through EDIRC Related research Keywords:
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] Arguments for post-capitalism[edit] In the Marxist method of analysis and theory of historical materialism, specific modes of production come into being as a result of underlying changes in the level of technology.
Post-capitalist systems[edit] There are a number of proposals for a new economic system to replace capitalism. Socialism[edit] Technocracy[edit] Libertarian[edit] Voluntaryism, a philosophy of economics and social interaction derived from the non-aggression principle (NAP), the homestead principle and natural rights. Anarchism[edit] See also[edit] References[edit] Feasta. WIR Bank. The new economics foundation. New Economy Network Members Area | Home. Building Local Economies | 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. New Economy Working Group | Equitable economies for a living earth. Home | IIER. The Institute for Collapsonomics. News « Econ4. New Economics Institute. The Cambridge Trust for New Thinking in Economics. New Economy Network Members Area | Working Groups. Make economy democratic and sustainable.