Performing Alternative Economic Models

An Interactive Performance-Lecture Exploring Community Wealth Building

For many, our current economic models no longer ensure our basic human needs are met. However, other worlds are possible, but we can’t create those worlds without you. Join performance artist Steven T. Licardi and I as we imagine, explore, and develop alternative economic models in the form of Community Wealth-Building. This performance-lecture will incorporate games, theatre pieces, and visual art making that will help us to feel our way into these new worlds. Come and be a part of the future!

Please register (for free) here.

This event is made possible by funding from the Center for Communicating Science at Virginia Tech.

New Paper on “Addressing Inequality”

Our new paper entitled “Addressing Inequality: The First Step Beyond COVID-19 and Towards Sustainability” is now available. I will provide the story behind this paper in a subsequent post.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted billions of lives across the world and has revealed and worsened the social and economic inequalities that have emerged over the past several decades. As governments consider public health and economic strategies to respond to the crisis, it is critical they also address the weaknesses of their economic and social systems that inhibited their ability to respond comprehensively to the pandemic. These same weaknesses have also undermined efforts to advance equality and sustainability. This paper explores over 30 interventions across the following nine categories of change that hold the potential to address inequality, provide all citizens with access to essential goods and services, and advance progress towards sustainability: (1) Income and wealth transfers to facilitate an equitable increase in purchasing power/disposable income; (2) broadening worker and citizen ownership of the means of production and supply of services, allowing corporate profit-taking to be more equitably distributed; (3) changes in the supply of essential goods and services for more citizens; (4) changes in the demand for more sustainable goods and services desired by people; (5) stabilizing and securing employment and the workforce; (6) reducing the disproportionate power of corporations and the very wealthy on the market and political system through the expansion and enforcement of antitrust law such that the dominance of a few firms in critical sectors no longer prevails; (7) government provision of essential goods and services such as education, healthcare, housing, food, and mobility; (8) a reallocation of government spending between military operations and domestic social needs; and (9) suspending or restructuring debt from emerging and developing countries. Any interventions that focus on growing the economy must also be accompanied by those that offset the resulting compromises to health, safety, and the environment from increasing unsustainable consumption. This paper compares and identifies the interventions that should be considered as an important foundational first step in moving beyond the COVID-19 pandemic and towards sustainability. In this regard, it provides a comprehensive set of strategies that could advance progress towards a component of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 10 to reduce inequality within countries. However, the candidate interventions are also contrasted with all 17 SDGs to reveal potential problem areas/tradeoffs that may need careful attention.

Inclusive Capitalism

Earlier this month, Prof. Robert Ashford and I had the pleasure of engaging with various academic, government, and non-government entities in the UK about our ideas on inclusive capitalism. The two images below will take you to a version of the presentations we gave at the University of Oxford, in London (at the Portcullis House and Syracuse University’s Faraday House), and at the University of Southampton.

In the first presentation, I outline two major challenges that can be represented by two “ice hockey stick” curves. The first curve relates to global climate change, but can be thought of as emblematic of a range of stubborn environmental concerns that show no signs of halting or declining with continued economic growth. I predict that we will soon see a similar curve for the volume of plastic waste in the world’s oceans. Curves could also be drawn for the bioaccumulation of persistent chemicals. For example, when looking at the health of long-lived and high trophic level marine mammals, there is now evidence that some killer whales have consumed sufficient quantities of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) to be fireproof. Many scientists are now concerned about the health and environmental impacts of these chemicals, especially on reproductive and immune systems.

The second ice hockey stick curve provides a snapshot of the concentration of wealth in the US that is accompanied by a series of graphs that chart a number of concerns relating to the hollowing out of the middle class (or job polarization) in America and the EU, and to trends in income inequality over the past several decades.

The real challenge comes when the two curves are considered alongside one another. In 2012, the Rio+20 conference advanced the notion of the Green Economy as a mechanism through which progress will be made towards sustainable development. Since the dominant strategy for advancing a green economy – that targets the decoupling economic growth from growth in environmental impacts – is based on advanced and hyper-efficient technologies, a critical question is what will happen to well-paying jobs and more broadly to trends in income inequality and job polarization. (For more on this issue, see my book review of Cents and Sustainability.) Having mapped out these macro concerns, Prof. Ashford (in his presentation) provides a new way to view them based on the principles of binary economics (what we call inclusive capitalism).

The following text (from our talk description) provides a brief overview of the content of Prof Ashford’s presentation (which can be viewed by clicking on the image below below).

To reverse growing income inequality and to achieve greater and more broadly-shared prosperity and sustainable growth, Professor Ashford advocates a much more “inclusive capitalism” (beyond conventional right- and left-wing strategies of austerity and stimulus) based on “binary economics.” The inclusive capitalism approach is to broaden competitive market opportunities to acquire capital with the earnings of capital. The same market mechanisms that presently assist mostly wealthier people to acquire capital with the earnings of capital can even more profitably be opened, without redistribution, to assist poorer people to acquire capital with the earnings of capital. The prospect of such ownership broadening will unleash substantial (presently suppressed) productive capacity in the UK because the prospect of more broadly distributed capital earnings in future years provides great untapped incentives to profitably employ more labor and capital in earlier years.