Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Whether it is growing congestion due to ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft, rising housing costs due to Airbnb, or increasing agitation from gig workers being forced to work longer hours for less pay, cities are at the forefront of the battle to control the exploitative platform economy.
There is a movement on the rise that it is leveraging the power of community, networks, and participation to work on systemic challenges.
All of this makes it clear who the real beneficiaries of globalization have been. And suddenly it seems a bit absurd to be touting as “progress” the pennies that have trickled down to the poorest when the overwhelming majority of new income since 1980 has been captured at the top.
Our obsession with economic growth is making our task much more difficult than it needs to be. It’s like we’ve chosen to fight this battle facing uphill, with one hand tied behind our back.
An ecologically feasible Green Deal would involve resource and energy caps, at source, effectively the equitable rationing of commodities (goods and services). Doing this would also incentivise the transition to less ecologically and resource intense offerings across the market, so long as emitting activities are not thereby driven underground.
If multilateral institutions are going to adjust to the new world unleashed by distributed apps and digital technologies, they should begin by exploring the great promise of commons in meeting urgent needs, giving people some genuine control over their lives, and compensating for the inherent limits of bureaucratic state systems and markets.
Like the original New Deal, the GND is trying to do something that has never been done before; we will have to learn from experience and experiment and correct the mistakes we will inevitably make along the way. But with these strategies we can make a start in the right direction.
This is the first road to solidarity economy, traveled by many who set out from the reality of poverty and experiences of popular economy. As these initiatives encounter others arising from other realities, with different motivations, the idea of a solidarity economy sector acquires greater visibility.
Many of the exploding number of local projects are actually not local, but transnational in nature: as Enzio Manzini called them, they are “Small, Local, Open, Connected.”
Last week Vox published an article on the global poverty debate. The piece – by journalist Dylan Matthews – raises a few issues that I think are worth addressing. I set out nine brief points here, responding to specific quotes from the article.
The opening chapters of this updated, revised, and expanded second edition Managing without Growth tell how the recent idea of economic growth emerged from the idea of progress, itself only a few hundred years old.
We demand that fossil fuels be kept underground and that the subsidies and tax breaks that keep the fossil fuel industry viable be shifted towards a clear, grassroots-based Just Transition.
