New economics – Feb 18

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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

Green Collar Jobs Study and Report
Raquel Rivera Pinderhughes, San Francisco State University (USA)
Poverty and unemployment are significant problems in Berkeley and other Bay Area cities and there is an urgent need for a new source of living wage jobs for low income residents with barriers to employment – a population that includes youth and adults who do not have a high school degree, have been out of the labor market for a long time, were formally incarcerated, have limited education and/or labor market skills.

This report describes a category of jobs with significant potential to fill this need – green collar jobs. Green collar jobs are blue collar jobs in green businesses – that is, manual labor jobs in businesses whose products and services directly improve environmental quality (Pinderhughes, 2006).

Green collar jobs are located in large and small for-profit businesses, non-profit organizations, social enterprises, and public sector institutions. What unites these jobs is that all of them are associated with manual labor work that directly improves environmental quality. Green collar jobs represent an important new category of work force opportunities because they are relatively high quality jobs, with relatively low barriers to entry, in sectors that are poised for dramatic growth.

The combination of these three features means that cultivating green collar jobs for people with barriers to employment can be an effective strategy to provide low-income men and women with access to good jobs – jobs that provide workers with meaningful, community serving work, living wages, benefits, and advancement opportunities.
(February 2008)
Suggested by J Barton.
The complete title of the report is “Green Collar Jobs: An Analysis of the Capacity of Green Businesses to Provide High Quality Jobs for Men and Women with Barriers to Employment “

Poverty Is Poison
Paul Krugman, New York Times
“Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.” That was the opening of an article in Saturday’s Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory – and hence the ability to escape poverty – for the rest of the child’s life.

So now we have another, even more compelling reason to be ashamed about America’s record of failing to fight poverty.

L. B. J. declared his “War on Poverty” 44 years ago. Contrary to cynical legend, there actually was a large reduction in poverty over the next few years, especially among children, who saw their poverty rate fall from 23 percent in 1963 to 14 percent in 1969.

But progress stalled thereafter: American politics shifted to the right, attention shifted from the suffering of the poor to the alleged abuses of welfare queens driving Cadillacs, and the fight against poverty was largely abandoned.

In 2006, 17.4 percent of children in America lived below the poverty line, substantially more than in 1969. And even this measure probably understates the true depth of many children’s misery.

Living in or near poverty has always been a form of exile, of being cut off from the larger society. But the distance between the poor and the rest of us is much greater than it was 40 years ago, because most American incomes have risen in real terms while the official poverty line has not. To be poor in America today, even more than in the past, is to be an outcast in your own country. And that, the neuroscientists tell us, is what poisons a child’s brain.

…Poverty rates are much lower in most European countries than in the United States, mainly because of government programs that help the poor and unlucky.
(18 February 2008)

Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail
Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises (IDE)
IDE founder Paul Polak has collected his experiences from more than 25 years finding innovative solutions to poverty in a new book, Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail, now available from Berrett-Kohler Publishers.

In this hard-hitting new book, Paul Polak tells why traditional poverty eradication programs have fallen so short, and how he and his organization developed an alternative approach that has succeeded in lifting 17 million people out of poverty. In the book, Polak explodes what he calls the “Three Great Poverty Eradication Myths”: that we can donate people out of poverty, that national economic growth will end poverty, and that Big Business, operating as it does now, will end poverty.

Throughout the book Polak tells fascinating and moving stories about the people he and IDE have helped, especially Krishna Bahadur Thapa, a Nepali farmer who went from barely surviving to earning $4,800 a year-solidly upper middle class by local standards. Out of Poverty offers a new and promising way to end world poverty, one that honors the entrepreneurial spirit of the poor themselves.

From the Preface:
… The next section, Chapters 3 to 8, describes what many small-acreage farmers have taught me, a practical approach capable of ending the poverty of some 800 million of the world’s dollar-a-day people. For poor people themselves, there is little doubt that the single most important step they can take to move out of poverty is to learn how to make more money. The way to do it is through grassroots enterprises –just about all of the poor are already tough, stubborn, survival entrepreneurs–and they have to find ways to make their enterprises more profitable. For small-farm enterprises, the path to new wealth lies in growing market-centered, high-value, labor-intensive cash crops. To accomplish this, poor farmers need access to affordable irrigation, a new generation of farming methods and inputs customized to fit tiny farms, the creation of vibrant new markets that bring them the seeds and fertilizers they need, and open access to markets where smallacreage farmers can sell their products at a profit. This range of new products and services for poor customers can only be created by a revolution in current design practice, based on the ruthless pursuit of affordability.

From Chapter 1: “Twelve Steps to Practical Problem Solving”:

• Go to where the action is.

• Talk to people who have the problem and listen to what they say.
• Learn everything you can about the problem’s specific context.
• Think big and act big.
• Think like a child.
• See and do the obvious.
• If somnebody has already invented it, you don’t need to do so again.
• Make sure your approach has positive measurable impacts that can be brought to scale. Make sure it can reach at least a milliion people and make their lives measureably better.
• Design to specific cost and price targets.
• Follow practical three-year plans.
• Continue to learn from your customers.
• Stay positive: don’t be distracted by what people think.

(15 February 2008)
Suggested by J Barton.

The crisis is so bad the financial press turns bolshie
Jerome a Paris, Daily Kos
Since my last diary here (the credit crisis slowly worsens), things have continued to get worse in the financial world, with more markets collapsing and frantic attempts by banks and other players to save their skin, often at further cost to other markets (see some examples below).

What is interesting is a trend amongst the smarter market commentators to (finally) acknowledge that there were excesses in the recent past, that growing inequality was indeed a problem, and that stark measures are now needed.

While their avowed goal is to save capitalism from its excesses, their proposals are often things that could almost be supported, indeed, they sometimes sound downright bolshie.

[EB note: “bolshie” = “bolshevik” = leftist]

I write “almost”, because they are only coming up with them now, forced by the reality of the coming crash, after mocking for years similar proposals from the left. Reality is moving the Overton Window back in the right direction (ie left), let’s not stop at the first sign of compromise and push our advantage…

Now you may say that I’m only quoting one paper, and that this is not representative. After all, the WSJ is still arguing that we’re not facing anything that cannot be cured by some tax cuts, and the Economist is pointing fingers at Europeans and Asians for not doing their part to help solve what could still be a minor bump. But the FT, while it has been a consistent promoter of neoliberal ideology in its columns (as I have chronicled in excruciating detail over at the European Tribune over the past 3 years), it has also been a slightly less openly ideological paper, more willing to open its pages to discordant voices and to look a bit further into things.

And thus, its columinists and editorialists, looking at today’s crisis, are recommending:

• more taxes for the rich (to pay for society’s infrastructure!)

• more stringent regulation of the investment banks (and no longer any right to voluntary self-regulation)
• a more pro-active monetary policy focusing as much on asset price inflation as on “normal” inflation
• and, altogether, less veneration for the world of investment bankers, as it is prone like all others to irrationality, excess and denial of reality, but has the added problem that it makes all of society pay for its excesses

…The next president, whoever s/he is, will inherit a massive mess, and in all likelihood a full-fledged economic crisis. It’s essential that the narrative be ready for change then, and the babysteps made by some financial commentators should be used as stepping stones to a more ambitious policy.
(17 February 2008)