Local Living Economies:
The New Movement for Responsible Business

By Judy Wicks

A socially, environmentally and financially sustainable global economy must be composed of sustainable local economies. Yet, tragically, from American “Main Streets” to villages in developing countries, corporate globalization is causing the decline of local communities, family businesses, family farms and natural habitats. Wealth and power are consolidating in growing transnational corporations that wield alarming control over many important aspects of our lives – the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the news we hear, and even the government we rely on to protect the common good. By working cooperatively, locally-owned businesses and conscious consumers can create an alternative to corporate globalization that brings power back to our communities by building sustainable local economies – living economies that support both natural and community life.

The CLT Model: A Tool for Permanently
Affordable Housing and Wealth Generation

By Gus Newport

The gap between wealth and poverty is growing in the U.S., because policies to stabilize the lives of the poor and people of color do not focus on long-term solutions. Our economy is unstable, in an inflationary spiral that continues to raise the cost of basic goods, including food, gasoline, medicine and health care. Most depressing is the lack of affordable housing for the poor, working and unemployed, and seniors with limited retirement income. The severity of the shortage of affordable housing has multiplied in recent years. Barbara Ehrenreich demonstrated the stark reality of the situation facing low-income wage earners in her book Nickel and Dimed in America. She found from personal experience that in today's America, two incomes are required in order to live “indoors,” let alone reside in safe, adequate housing. Insufficient affordable housing is being developed to fulfill the need, and most that is developed remains affordable only during the terms of the initial financing, due to relatively short-term subsidies, after which time it reverts to market rates. As a result, over the longer term, public affordable housing resources actually aid gentrification, eventually displacing the very people they were meant to assist.

Economics of Scale vs. the Scale of Economics:
Towards Basic Principles of a Bioregional Economy

By Kirkpatrick Sale

Economics of scale is what conventional industrial economies are all about, finding ways to more profitably and efficiently exploit nature. But the scale of economics is what the economies of the future must be about, finding ways to live so that healthy communities may foster a healthy earth.

There are only two essentials to consider in coming at the problem of the optimum scale for an economy to produce and distribute goods and services: the natural ecosystem and the human community. An economy that does harm to the natural world – depleting resources, extincting species, producing pollution, piling up wastes – has grown too large; an economy out of democratic and humanitarian control – where decisions are made by distant corporations and a polity whose choices are beyond individual influence—has grown too large.

The Politics of Money

By Hazel Henderson

The word is out that economics, never a science, has always been politics in disguise. I have explored how the economics profession grew to dominate public policy and trump so many other academic disciplines and values in our daily lives. Economics and economists view reality through the lens of money. Everything has its price, they believe, from rain forests to human labor to the air we breathe. Economic textbooks, Gross National Product (GNP) and the statistics on employment, productivity, investment and globalization – all follow the money. Happily, all this focus on money is leading to the widespread awareness of ways money is designed, created and manipulated. This politics of money is at last unraveling centuries of mystification.

The Real Economy

by Dr. Robert Costanza

Stories about the economy typically focus on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), jobs, stock prices, interest rates, retail sales, consumer confidence, housing starts, taxes and assorted other indicators. We hear things like “GDP grew at a 3-percent rate in the fourth quarter, indicating a recovering, healthy economy, but with room for further improvement.” Or, “The Fed raised short-term interest rates again to head off inflation.”

But do these reports, and the indicators they cite, really tell us how the economy is doing? What is the economy, anyway? And what is this economy for?

Dear Friends of Vermont Commons,

If our common interest is to help establish a more independent Vermont Republic, then part of that effort will be to build a more independent Vermont economy—one in which, as economist Fritz Schumacher advocates in Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, the goods consumed in a region are produced in a region. Therefore, as the brilliant regional planner and intuitive economist Jane Jacobs argues in Cities and the Wealth of Nations, the strategy for economic development should be to generate import-replacement industries. She would have us examine what is now imported into the state and develop the conditions to instead produce those products from local resources with local labor. Unlike the branch of a multi-national corporation that might open and then suddenly close, driven by moody fluctuations in the global economy, a locally owned and managed business is more likely to establish a complex of economic and social interactions that build strong entwining regional roots, keeping the business in place and accountable to people, land, and community.

From Common Wealth to Common Property

By Peter Barnes

Read more here.

We all know what private wealth is, even if we don't own much. It's property we inherit or accumulate individually, including our fractional claims on corporations and mutual funds. When President Bush speaks of an "Ownership Society," it's this kind of wealth he has in mind.

But there's another trove of wealth that's not so well known: our common wealth. Each of us is the joint recipient of a vast inheritance. This shared inheritance includes air and water, habitats and ecosystems, languages and cultures, science and technologies, social and political systems, and quite a bit more. Though the value of these manifold gifts is hard to calculate, it's safe to say they're worth trillions of dollars. Indeed, according to Friends of the Commons, their aggregate value probably exceeds that of everything we own privately.

The Politics of Money

By Hazel Henderson

The word is out that economics, never a science, has always been politics in disguise. I have explored how the economics profession grew to dominate public policy and trump so many other academic disciplines and values in our daily lives. Economics and economists view reality through the lens of money. Everything has its price, they believe, from rain forests to human labor to the air we breathe. Economic textbooks, Gross National Product (GNP) and the statistics on employment, productivity, investment, and globalization – all follow the money. Happily, all this focus on money is leading to the widespread awareness of ways money is designed, created and manipulated. This politics of money is at last unraveling centuries of mystification.