The Myth of Expansionary Fiscal Austerity | Reports

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REPORT: The Myth of Expansionary Fiscal Austerity from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR):

"In making the argument for fiscal austerity, some have claimed that pushing for lower deficits rather than stimulus spending is a better route for restoring growth," said Dean Baker, author of the report. "However, the severity of the Great Recession in the United States means that austerity policies would almost certainly result in further contraction of the economy."

Old habits of decision making reside in scarcity-based mindsets, residual and out of place in a postindustrial age of complexity and abundance.

The real restoration is already here in the small and transformative numbers of people and their ideas. The next step is "Strategic Doing" - working together to bring these ideas to fruition by sharing Brainpower and resources in communities, organizations, on campuses, and in companies.

COINS 2010 Coolhunting Academy: Skills Training to Strengthen Creativity and Collaboration

The COINs 2010 Coolhunting Academy document (above) offers background information for the upcoming Coolhunting Academy, a hands-on skills training workshop for entrepreneurs, organization, government, foundation, and economic development professionals.

The Academy offers an ideal opportunity to learn and apply new skills to "coolhunting" - the practice of seeking the most creative ideas and people - for the purpose of "coolfarming" - the practice of collaborating to help them succeed.

You will learn technical skills training and connect to new conversations with other like-minded entrepreneurs focused on advancing creativity as a driving force in regional economic development. You will discover new friends and colleagues interested too, in generating transformative projects and initiatives for enterprise development.

The October 2010 Coohunting Academy is presented prior to the COINs2010 Conference, October 7, 8, & 9, 2010. Attendance at this workshop is free for conference attendees; registration is $120 for workshop participation only. A three-month trial version of Condor is included.

Skill Set for the Ideal Condor user -- (note: if you do not have all of these skills ask your favorite Tech Geek to accompany you to work together!)

* very good computer skills, knowledge in a Web application development language (php, Javascript, perl, java), database skills (MySQL)

* and can be applied for organizational analysis, as in this case:

* sociology, psychology

* or Web mining, brand tracking, marketing, as in this case:

* marketing, branding, communication

Academy Details and Logistics --

Meet the GalaxyAdvisor Team who leads Workshops:

Kai Fischbach - Chief Scientist
Hauke Fuehres - Chief Technology Officer
Peter A. Gloor - Chief Creative Officer and Founder
Ken Riopelle - Chief Coolfarming Officer

DATE: Thursday, October 7, 2010
TIME: 11:00 am – 4:00 pm
LOCATION: Arnold Hall, 1810 Bull Street, Savannah, Georgia 31401

Take me directly to the COOLHUNTING ACADEMY REGISTRATION

The October 2010 Coohunting Academy is presented prior to the COINs2010 Conference, October 7, 8, & 9, 2010. Attendance at this workshop is free for conference attendees; registration is $120 for workshop participation only. A three-month trial version of Condor is included.

CONFERENCE FEE: Academic and Professional Rate: $180.00. Reduced Student Rate: $50.00.

Super Science Initiative: New Frontiers for Collaboration

Check out this website I found at innovation.gov.au

Australia and Ireland are investing in innovation and economic development based in universities focused on space and astronomy, marine and climate, and future industries.

These two forward thinking countries understand the direct connection between innovation, education, and economic development.

Beyond this, every country and region investing funds in innovation will need to invest as well in new habits of communication and collaboration.

One approach - COINs-collaborative innovation networks - is driven by swarm creativity and accelerates the formation of entrepreneurial cultures.

You can learn more about swarm creativity and COINs in this video interview with MIT research scientist, Peter Gloor. Additional resources are available here.

Get started by registering for the COINs2010 Conference and connect to this knowledge community exploring the emerging science of collaboration.

 

Designers Accord 2009: An Important Conversation Exploring the Future of Design in Open Systems

Note to readers:  I-Open mistakenly posted the Designers Accord 2009 document as a shareable piece of information. Apologies to our Design colleagues! The document has been removed.

We've asked the authors to supply us with a shareable version we can post here. The Accord unquestionably offers valuable insights for entrepreneurs working in Open Source Economic Development.
You're encouraged to continue to follow along and learn about the related efforts in the design industry at the October Design Ethos conference hosted at SCAD. Thanks for your patience. - Betsey Merkel, I-Open.

Back to the original post:

I-Open is co-sponsor of the COINs2010 conference Oct 7-9 hosted at SCAD in Savannah, GA. The conference will collaborate with the concurrent Design Ethos Conference also hosted at SCAD during the same time frame. SCAD Professors Scott Bolyston, Graphic Design, and Christine Miller, Design Management - hosts of each conference - are developing ways for the two gatherings to intersect, learn, and explore collaboration opportunities.

The Designers Accord document posted here offers an important snapshot of the global educational design community's desire to pursue discovery of the role of design at the intersections of social, economic, environment, and cultural issues today.

Links to learn more:

More about this important 2009 conversation and this resulting report:

The Designers Accord Final Comments document was submitted as a report to the editorial committee of the 2009 Designers Accord Global Summit 2009.

On October 23 and 24, 2009, the Designers Accord convened 100 individuals from some of the world’s most distinguished academic and professional institutions, for two days of highly participatory discussion, planning, and action around the topic of design education and sustainability.

This group of thought-leaders, design educators, and experts discussed, challenged, and conceived of a new path for undergraduate and graduate design programs to integrate sustainability. We tackled topics ranging from creating curricula and writing grants, to communicating to trustees and motivating students. These topics were culled from pre-Summit meetings and brainstorm sessions.

The format of the Summit was structured to enable this group to create a collective point of view about best practices and methods for integrating sustainability into design programs all over the world. We are currently synthesizing the outputs from the Summit. We plan to publish the output online and in printed form. The medium and format will be determined by the content.

You can learn more at this link:
http://www.designersaccord.org/initiatives/summit/

Analysis / Elusive Employment / Special Reports / Current Affairs / ISN

The Path of Unemployment in the Great Recession

Unemployment line in memoriam, FDR Memorial site, Washington, DC

The current Great Recession has led to a dramatic rise in unemployment in the US – the highest in the post-World War II era – with rates expected to remain like this for several years to come. Europe has fared better, with work sharing helping to keep unemployment down – an arrangement that could help the US mitigate the acute suffering associated with several more years of the labor market crisis.

By Dean Baker

It has been two-and-a-half years since the recession officially began in the United States. While the economy has been growing for more than a year, unemployment remains near the 10.1 percent peak of October 2009. Few economists predict a rapid decline from its June level of 9.5 percent and, with stimulus being phased down over the next year, it is very plausible that the rate will edge higher in coming months.

The US, unlike most western European countries, is not set up to sustain long periods of high unemployment. Its system of social welfare is very much centered on work. This is most evident with health care. The vast majority of non-elderly people get their health care through employer provided health insurance. Individual policies tend to be very expensive, especially for people with any history of medical problems. When people lose their jobs, they generally lose their health care coverage as well. While there is a public program for low-income families, it doesn’t cover most of the unemployed, and the quality is often quite poor.

The same is true of other forms of public support. The US was never very generous to people who are not working, and it has become less so in the last three decades. That is why the prospect of a prolonged period of high unemployment in the US is likely to mean serious hardship for large numbers of people.

Worse than ever

The unemployment seen in this recession is already as bad as in the worst previous post-war recession, and it is almost certain to linger much longer. In the 1981-82 recession, unemployment in the US peaked at 10.8 percent in December 1982. However, the economy turned sharply upward at the beginning of 1983, and the unemployment rate fell back quickly. By July 1983 the unemployment rate was down to 9.4 percent, and it had fallen to 8.3 percent by the end of the year.

There is little prospect for a similar turnaround in this downturn. While the unemployment rate has edged down slightly since its October peak, most forecasts show the rate remaining nearly constant or just falling modestly over the next year and a half. Most official projections show the unemployment rate remaining well above its normal level until 2015 or 2016.

It is also worth noting that the same level of official unemployment implies a considerably worse labor market situation today than in the early 1980s. This is due to changes in the age composition of the labor force and also a declining coverage rate for the labor force survey used to measure unemployment.

The change in the age composition is fairly straightforward. In the 1981-82 recession, the huge baby boom cohort was mostly in its 20s or early 30s. The youngest were still teenagers. Workers at these ages have few financial and family commitments and therefore tend to change jobs more frequently. As a result, we expect to see higher rates of unemployment among younger workers. By contrast, the baby boomers are now mostly in their late 40s or 50s, ages at which workers very infrequently change jobs. Therefore we should expect a lower unemployment rate at present compared with 30 years ago.

If we look at unemployment by age group, it turns out that for every age cohort the unemployment rate is higher at present than it was at the peak unemployment rates of the 1981-82 recession. This means that on an age-adjusted basis the unemployment rate in this recession has already been much worse than during the recession that had prior claim to being the worst in the post-World War II era.

The aging of the population is not the only issue that affects the measure of unemployment. The coverage rate of the Current Population Survey (CPS), the labor force survey used to measure the unemployment rate, has fallen sharply over the last three decades. In the early 80s more than 95 percent of the population was covered by the survey. In recent years, the coverage rate has slipped to 88 percent. This decline in coverage would not matter if the people who are excluded from the survey are similar to the people who are covered.

However, we have good reason for believing this is not the case. The groups that face the highest unemployment rates (e.g. young African-American men) also have the lowest coverage rate. Using a comparison with Census data from the 2000 Census, my colleague John Schmitt concluded that the fall in coverage rates is likely to lead to an understatement of the unemployment rate of approximately 0.2 percentage points. This means that if we adjust for both age composition and declining coverage rates, the current unemployment rate would be comparable to an 11 percent measured unemployment rate in 1981-82.

Europe: From unemployment to partial employment

While the downturn has led to high and prolonged unemployment in the US, it has not had quite the same effect in Europe. Although the overall unemployment rates are very similar at present, the European average is inflated by the 20 percent unemployment figure for Spain, which adds more than a full percentage point to the EU average. It is also important to remember that the EU started the downturn with an unemployment rate that was two percentage points higher than in the US. This means that the recession led to a much sharper rise in unemployment in the US than in Europe. This is in spite of the fact that Europe has actually seen a sharper decline in GDP than the US.

One of the main reasons for the difference is that several European countries, most notably Germany and the Netherlands, have adopted a policy of work sharing to limit unemployment. The basic logic of work sharing is very simple. Under a standard system of unemployment insurance, workers are paid out benefits only if they are completely unemployed. In effect, the government is paying workers for being unemployed.

Under work-sharing schemes, instead of just paying workers for being completely unemployed, the government pays workers for being partly unemployed. In the standard model used in Germany, if a firm cuts workers hours by 20 percent, then the government covers 60 percent of the lost wages or 12 percent of the total wage. The employer is expected to pick up another 20 percent of the lost wages or four percent of the total wage. The worker is then left with four percent less pay but is working 20 percent less time. Since this likely corresponds to working a four-day week rather than a five-day week, savings on commuting and other work-related expenses may come close to offsetting the cut in pay.

Germany has been able to use this system to keep its unemployment rate from rising at all in the recession. In fact, its unemployment rate is slightly lower today than it was at the start of the recession. The Netherlands, which has also aggressively pursued a work-sharing policy, has seen a modest rise in unemployment, but its unemployment rate was still just 4.1 percent in the most recent data.

The success of Germany and the Netherlands thus far in protecting their workers from unemployment in such a steep downturn is a remarkable step forward in macroeconomic policy. It would be best of course to avoid recessions altogether, but if their impact on employment can be offset to the extent accomplished by these two countries, then it would be an enormous accomplishment.

In the US workers are seeing near double-digit unemployment with the implied loss of income and benefits, as well as the loss of self-esteem and social status that is associated with long-term unemployment. By contrast, workers in Germany and the Netherlands are adjusting to the falloff in demand with shorter workweeks and longer vacations. This is a great model and with luck it will quickly be adopted throughout the EU.

It may take a bit longer to see work sharing catch on in the US. While 15 million are unemployed, none of the people responsible for the recession are in that category. Economic policymakers are not given their jobs based on performance nor do they lose them as a result of bad performance. Therefore, we are likely to see far more suffering in this recession in the US than in Europe as the unemployment rate remains high for several more years.

Dr Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author only, not the International Relations and Security Network (ISN).

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From Dean Baker, Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Economy of Culture

Storytelling deepens our understanding of social and economic investment in a Quality, Connected Place, one of five areas in the Innovation Framework, a heuristic model of investment in Open Source Economic Development.

In this video interview, Northeast Ohio experience artist Melissa Daubert describes a collection of art pieces she created about her time living and teaching in Zimbabwe as a Peace Corps volunteer.

From Melissa’s story we begin to understand how culture knits together local assets to generate a dynamic hyper-local economy of established mores, the wisdom of traditional thought leaders, knowledge of project design and construction to ease daily living, and simple rules to establish trust and respect in the community.

These are important elements every neighborhood needs to identify and connect local creativity and accelerate the generation of small, widespread collaborative projects for local prosperity.

From David Wilcox, social reporter and thought leader in "civil society"

Latest Post

Building Big Society giving and doing by making it easier to listen

 

Update and summary: Lord Nat Wei, one of the authors of the Big Society idea and Network founder, will no longer blog about the vision. He will be working as unpaid advisor to Government. Meanwhile, many people are talking about Big Society, but finding it difficult to get to the core idea and connect with each other. The network could make a virtue of listening, and encouraging many voices.

There’s been lots of discussion around Big Society over the past couple of weeks, as you can see from my bookmarks, the Twitter stream, and this smart way of displaying content generated in many different places.

Using paper.li you can agree a hashtag (keyword with # before it) then ask people to post links (URLs) of blog items or other content in a tweet containing the hashtag. Set up paper.li to search for the tag, and it displays both the tweets and the original articles – creating your own news page refreshed daily (thanks @evangineer). (read more...)

David Wilcox has offered considerable thought leadership in understanding modern civil society and the idea of civic engagement.

Social Reporter extends the discussion between face-to-face and online engagement around the powerful issues affecting neighborhoods today.

David's earlier blog, Designing for Civil Society, began exploring and reflecting on the intersections and possibilities of social media, engagement, and collaboration in August 2007.

"The Pattern of Renewal: What to Look for and Help Bring Forth" by Christopher Reynolds

Chris Reynolds, teacher, musician, and traditional healer, writes about the regional economic and cultural transformation already taking place in Northeast Ohio at its centers of creativity, spirituality, and healing. 

He writes,

In our time, the general pattern is that the world, as perceived by the orphan, is much more expansive, meaningful, loving and merged with spiritual realities than the “real” world as delineated by the current family, educational, religious, political, scientific and technological systems. 

The resultant isolation and suffering brings the orphans to a crisis point that many do not survive. The individuals who do manage to find the healing information for their lives, usually through a form of death and rebirth experience, are now gathering in greater numbers at our local creativity and healing centers.

Chris writes further,

The renewal our region is seeking has already been quietly underway for some years now. This essay is a Calling in itself to those who would be leaders to invite those centers and individuals who have been living in this renewed, holistic manner into public awareness.

There is an astounding amount of wisdom for our times waiting to be welcomed home and permitted to share what Joseph Campbell in the Hero of a Thousand Faces called, “The Boon”, with the culture at large. 

Time, money, effort, generosity invested in the wave of renewal I described opens a better way forward for the future generations.

Who is the orphan in your community and how will you welcome their creative, wholistic insights?

 

 

Leading and Creating - a set on Flickr

David Deming, Sculptor and President of the Cleveland Institute of Art, contributed an interview to I-Open research about his work leading and creating.

The images tell the story of David as an artist, who with steadfast creativity, shapes the three-dimensional likeness of an inner soul with a personal signature that is warm and generous.

But between the stories of leadership and the re-making of spirits with tools and earth, lies the secret to innovation: creativity.

What can we learn from the disciplined habits of creatives? The efficiency? The destructionism? What can we learn from the doers who blindly transform ideas to projects feeling their way forward, to re-create education and re-wire government?

Be alert to the sights and sounds of creativity around you - these jewels, the assets that reside in every community and the most valuable of all social and economic investments to prosperity building.

Photos and their narratives by Alice Merkel

Listen to a series of interviews on
Livestream
Vimeo
You Tube

Learn more about the Cleveland Institute of Art

Copyright 2010 Betsey Merkel and I-Open. Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works. Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open) 4415 Euclid Ave 3rd Fl Cleveland, Ohio 44103 USA

The Village: A Microcosm Economy of Culture

Melissa Daubert, Experience Artist, Cleveland, Ohio, introduces us to local Zimbabwe paintings and provides a tour of "The Village" a collection of idealized architectural structures from her experience living in Zimbabwe as a Peace Corps teacher educating students in metal working.

Village pieces embody what is important to people, the community, and the economic way of life. From Melissa's experience, values and investments focus on health care, education, environment, commerce, gender equality and empowerment of women, and addressing daily living needs.

"The Village" is comprised of several works --

The Tongue Wagger, the Cooking Hut, the Pit Toilet and Bathing Space, The Sleeping Space, The Sausage Tree, the Look Out Tower, and the post-Zimbabwe piece, All American Ants.

Each each structure tells a story about its relationship to local culture and community. You can see objects close up and learn the story about each at this I-Open Flickr set http://www.flickr.com/photos/iopen/sets/72157623225592857/

Learn more about what's happening in Open Source Economic Development:

Copyright 2010 Betsey Merkel and I-Open. Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works. Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open) 4415 Euclid Ave 3rd Fl Cleveland, Ohio 44103 USA