Archive for May, 2010

May 25th, 2010 True wealth is not business-as-usual

Last night at town hall Juliet Schor walked her audience through a short history of the economic convulsions that have brought us to this point of high unemployment, environmental degradation and market decisions made with indifference to both.  This model she calls the business-as-usual economy. In her new book, Plenitude: The new economics of true wealth, she carefully details market assumptions that keep the consequences to natural resources out of the equation when assessing the cost of production and consumption.

This key flaw leaves the consumer in a state of ignorance.

“…it is important to recognize that consumers have been cut off from the material realities of production. Producers and retailers prefer that consumers not think about the damage their purchases are having on the earth, so information is not typically available, especially at the point of purchase.”   p. 47

In order for us to rescale our consumption to appropriate levels she brought up the ideas of the honorable Frithjof Bergmann, whom I’ve mentioned in a previous post. I’ve often been intrigued by the idea that he calls “high-tech self-providing”.  Ms. Schor takes this idea and gives examples of how some people are already taking advantage of their own capacity to create enterprises for “modern off-grid, resilient communities”.  Other examples might be mushroom farming, beekeeping, raising chickens and many forms of urban agriculture. She also mentioned fab labs, or fabrication laboratories, which appear to be the holy grail of community-supported production means. Here is a description from MIT’s FAQ page:

“Projects being developed and produced in fab labs include solar and wind-powered turbines, thin-client computers and wireless data networks, analytical instrumentation for agriculture and healthcare, custom housing, and rapid-prototyping of rapid-prototyping machines.”

I left the lecture feeling upbeat about the future in a very unexpected way. After nearly a year of unemployment, the urge to become involved with a meaningful exchange of ideas overcame me with enthusiasm. The need for something to make sense at last fulfilled. Looking for work felt like complicity in a game I no longer wanted to play.

May 25th, 2010 Found: people who “get it”

I read authors who connect the dots, and bring together the issues of behavior, environment and the economy. So when there is an opportunity, I listen to the works of:

Juliet Schor, Richard Thayer, Cass R. Sunstein, Tyler Cowen, Paul Krugman, Raj Patel, and Gary Hamel, among others.

I listen for the buzzwords and pay attention to who else is using them. If these eight are just a handful of the thought leaders behind recent critiques of the economy, then I want to be as informed as possible about what they believe are the solutions to unemployment, for example.

May 25th, 2010 Not your business-as-usual blog

The MVO blog attempts to follow trends in emerging economic theory as they relate to jobs, creation of livelihood and our collective, general well-being.

May 4th, 2010 One-liners to live by

Did you happen to catch Conan O’brien on 60 minutes last Sunday? You’re not missing anything. He admitted that he believes that: “Everything happens for a reason.” Really?

I suppose some people would nod in agreement. I’m not one of them. That one-liner has never appealed to me. It smacks of desperation. It smells like human spirit gone sour, now needing a catch-all phrase to unpack its guilty burden. So why don’t we just say: “I can’t make sense of this so I’m just going to imagine a force greater than myself has access to an infinite wisdom that ultimately will act in my favor. So there!” After all, isn’t that what it really means?

I’ll have none of it. I prefer pith that is a little harder to divine. I go for bold mystery and audacious assertion instead. Try these on for size:

Failure is impossible!

Or another favorite:

Do not fear mistakes – there are none.

Who needs to understand a thing? Armed with these verbal shields I can leap tall buildings in a single bound, walk through walls, and basically achieve anything to which I put my mind. Who can so sheepishly waste time feeling disappointed in the absence of failure and mistakes?

If I need a one-liner to live by these do me just fine, thank you very much.