The Next Edge

Snippets from Christine Milne's speech at the National Press Club in Canberra.

26 Sep 2012

"The economy is a tool; a tool we humans invented - like democracy and politics - to help govern our relationships between each other, and between ourselves and the world we live in. If our economic tools are not getting the outcomes we want, making us happy, safe, healthy, better educated and fulfilled and protecting and preparing our country for an increasingly uncertain future in a world on track to be 4 degrees warming, then it is time our economic tools changed."

"Most of the battles of political philosophy over the last two centuries have been about competing views of how to run an economy. Where the old economic right, broadly speaking, has sought to create a 'strong' economy and the old left sought to create a 'fair' economy, neither has grappled with how an economy can be strong or fair when ecological limits are being reached: 'without environment there is no economy'."

"What is not excusable is that the old parties continue to do so. They have failed to keep up over recent decades when the huge ecological challenges of the 21st century - from accelerating global warming to food and water shortages, from air and water pollution to energy crises and resource depletion in a world headed to 9 billion people - have become overwhelming. How can we say we are working towards a strong or fair economy when we aren't addressing these challenges? Just as we hit the limits, the big old parties are moving closer to each other and further out of touch with what people and the real world need."

"To set us on our new path, a path to an economy which serves the needs of people and nature, both for today and for tomorrow:

• We will need new economic tools;
• We will need to learn to do more with less;
• We will need to reprioritise our investments; and
• We will need sensible management of taxation and revenue to fund these investments.

"What will be different is that we will have replaced the idea that Australia's wealth is dependent on digging-it-up, cutting-it-down and shipping-it-overseas with the knowledge that our prosperity depends at a personal and collective level on our brains, on our health, on our creativity and on a healthy environment."

"But are the Greens actually anti-growth? That depends on what you are growing and how it is measured. I am for growing natural, human, social, manufactured and financial capital and I am against growing global warming, species extinction, poverty, poor health, inequality, conflict and corruption."

"The Greens want to see everyone given the opportunity to "practise the Art of Living", we want to see people lifted out of poverty, and we know that unless this is done while protecting the environment which sustains us it can only last a very short time. That is what growth is supposed to achieve. The problem is, we measure it with the wrong tools; tools which tell us we're growing when in fact we're not.

If economic growth as it is currently measured isn't actually making us happier, healthier, cleverer or safer then it isn't real growth. If we are growing our economy in defiance of physical limits, that isn't real growth: it's a confidence trick."

In my opinion, the sharing economy has been feeding on and catering to some fundamental human needs and desires since the very dawn of civilisation. That does not mean it is not related to peer production. On the contrary, peer production reinforces collaborative consumption and the sharing economy. It does so in two main ways. It creates and evolves technological infrastructures which transform the scope of increasingly more activities and the context in which they take place, thus turning them into peer activities.

To illustrate, consider how users of P2P file-sharing networks have redefined the consumption of cultural goods like music as an essentially peer activity. Most readily visible, however, is the way in which peer production promotes the sharing economy by means of enriching the commons. If we think of the commons as a shareable economic infrastructure, then we can see clearly how peer production liberates the sharing economy from constraints long imposed upon it by exclusive property regimes.

George Dafermos from Delft University of Technology has been one of the few researchers specializing in the governance of free software communities and, thereby, has established more clear criteria for genuine peer production.

nef's Happy Planet Index is an innovative measure that shows the ecological efficiency with which human well-being is created around the world.

It is the first ever index to combine environmental impact with well-being to measure the environmental efficiency with which country by country, people live long and happy lives.

visit neweconomics.org for more.

also see video re: 21 hr work week.

Our proposal is that the users of the commons should be commons-friendly enterprise structures and not profit-maximising companies. These ethical companies, whose members are the commoners/contributors themselves, would be organised as global open design companies. These would be linked to networks of small factories that produce on the basis of shared values and could more easily adopt open-book management, open recruiting and open supply lines, ensuring transparency to the whole network, in order to create maximum mutual alignment between participants. This is simply an extension of the existing organisational practices of ‘immaterial commons production’, which combines full transparency of all actions with negotiated coordination. (...)

It requires distributed access to physical places for collaboration – co-working centres – as well as the widespread possibility for peer learning. Distributed access to financial capital is a further condition, notably crowd-funding, social lending and distributed, decentralised currencies such as cryptography-based digital money Bitcoin. The spread of these peer to peer forms of funding has already attracted the attention of the Bank of England executive director, Andrew Haldane, who has suggested that peer to peer finance models could sweep away the inefficient retail banks before too long.

Rethinking my existence as Homo Economicus, and hopefully growing a new kind of wealth within and around myself.

follow the journey with @sebpaquet

For every creditor there must be a debtor and both are necessary. While the creditors – the banks – have realised their power, the debtors – everyone else – haven’t. A glance at the level of private debt reveals just how much potential there is.

Student debt now stands at an estimated £40.3bn, while a combination of stagnant pay and high living costs has left Britain’s average family with unsecured loans worth £7944 each – a staggering total of £210bn of unsecured debt. It is a severe drag on an already knackered economy. Suppose, though, if people refused to repay.

Rather than channelling falling incomes back to the banks that scripted the recession, they simply reject repayment. Immediately, there would be a union of debtors capable of clawing power away from financiers. The old cliché would kick in: ‘Owe the bank £10,000 and the bank owns you. Owe the bank £10,000,000 and you own the bank’. Like those canals and railways of industrial Britain, the credit cards and student loans of financialised Britain give people leverage over elites. The difference is that it now takes debt strikes, and not labour strikes, to harness this power.

TED Talks There's been an explosion of collaborative consumption -- web-powered sharing of cars, apartments, skills.