New economy
Supply Chain Failures: Another Reason for Localized Economies
The mainstream media – television, print and digital – routinely cycle through the litany of crises gripping the world. One week they’ll tell us about the latest climate disaster. The next, the focus may shift to the war in Ukraine. A few days later, COVID-19’s latest variant might be trending. The hot topic of the…
Read MoreRepairing broken economies
Sepp Eisenriegler loves giving second chances: to the defunct electrical appliances awaiting repair or refurbishment, the hundreds of unemployed people he’s trained as skilled repairers over the decades and even the two rescue dogs that follow him devotedly around Reparatur-und Service-Zentrum (R.U.S.Z.), the repair and service center he founded in Vienna in 1998. It wasn’t…
Read MoreThe Flower of Transformation
With growing news of war and conflict, ecological and climate catastrophe, stark inequalities, health crises related to both poverty and affluence, the authoritarianism of governments, and the increasing stranglehold of mega-corporations in all aspects of our lives, it is understandable that there is deep anxiety about the present and future of humanity. On the brighter…
Read MoreComparative resilience: 8 principles for post-Covid reconstruction
This past weekend, a bright Georgetown undergraduate asked me how I squared my passion for localization with the theory of comparative advantage. For economics newbies, he was referring to David Ricardo’s argument that every community should find one product to specialize in and trade for everything else. I gave my usual response that the theory…
Read MoreUnlike a Globalized Food System, Local Food Won’t Destroy the Environment
This blog is also available in Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish and Turkish. If you’re seeking some good news during these troubled times, look at the ecologically sound ways of producing food that have percolated up from the grassroots in recent years. Small farmers, environmentalists, academic researchers and food and farming activists have…
Read MoreTo Leave or Remain: Dichotomy or Distraction?
Ever since the Brexit referendum was first announced, we have been bombarded by an array of starkly contradictory pronouncements – from the Leave camp’s now infamous claim that withdrawal from the EU would release £350 million a week for the NHS to the former Chancellor George Osborne’s assertion that Brexit would leave the UK “permanently…
Read MoreThe Commons, Short and Sweet
I am always trying to figure out how to explain the idea of the commons to newcomers who find it hard to grasp. Here is a fairly short overview, which I think gets to the nub of things. The commons is…. A social system for the long-term stewardship of resources that preserves shared values and…
Read MoreBulldoze the Business School
Visit the average university campus and it is likely that the newest and most ostentatious building will be occupied by the business school. The business school has the best building because it makes the biggest profits (or, euphemistically, “contribution” or “surplus”) – as you might expect, from a form of knowledge that teaches people how…
Read MoreLocal Finance Made Simple
The nature of money is to abstract value. That is its role. It stands in place of an actual good or service. If I fail to have the basket of potatoes you are seeking in exchange for the wool from your sheep, I can instead pay for the wool in dollars or BerkShares or Brixton…
Read MoreCTRLshift: An Emergency Summit for Change
In Britain, these days, all the essential endeavors that are supposed to promote general wellbeing and what is known as “civilization” are, it is widely agreed, in crisis: health and social services; housing; education; energy; transport; and of course, though successive governments haven’t taken it seriously, agriculture. Oh yes, and then there’s “the environment” –…
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