Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias. [...]
Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they’ll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it’s coming.
From now until the first of March, OurGoods, an online barter network, is running a pop-up storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan called Trade School, where entry into classes is based not on money or talent, but on meeting the needs of a particular teacher. And while some classes like grant writing and butter making have already filled up, there’s still plenty of room to learn more about irrational decision-making and chair-bound pilates, not to mention composting and improvisation.
Does permanent job loss mean that someone is no longer a consumer? In some cases the answer is yes: some people continue to spend as if they still had a job, and the inevitable result is eventual destitution. Once they run out of unemployment benefits, savings and credit, their purchasing ability decreases to the barest minimum provided by food stamps. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but this makes them rather uninteresting from a new product marketing perspective.
But other people may be quick to shed their biggest categories of expense, walking away from their mortgage and their car loan, allowing their medical insurance to lapse, and developing a new lifestyle that is well within their new budgetary constraints. They may couch-surf, take advantage of house-sitting opportunities or rent a spot at a campground by the season. For the cold part of the year, they may head south and, again, camp out. They may look for seasonal employment, do odd jobs for cash, or use their skills to repair or make and sell items for cash.
With their largest expenses gone, their disposable income may actually be higher. However, their needs and requirements are quite different, and since most product offerings target the settled, fully employed consumer, they are in some ways under-served. This is an area where new product development opportunities abound, and companies that gain a share of this growing market segment and build brand loyalty among this fast-growing consumer underclass will lock in a decade or more of profits and rapid growth. As a marketing strategy, it is not just recession-proof but actually recession-enhanced.
Newly-inaugurated President Barack Obama has been urged by a top US spysat chief to revitalise America’s economy through the use of DARPA*, the legendary Pentagon barmy-boffinry bureau which has given the world the internet and the stealth bomber. More recently the agency has also sponsored initiatives such as mindreading peril-sensitive brainhat binoculars and brainchipped cyborg zombie insecto-bugs.
The recommendations come from Pedro L Rustan, a senior figure in the US National Reconnaissance Office, the secretive agency which handles American spy satellites. Rustan delivered his exhortations to Mr Obama in the form of an open letter to the aerospace mag Aviation Week, titled Refocus DARPA Beyond Defense.
For Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas, home is a cubicle barely bigger than a coffin — one of dozens of berths stacked two units high in one of central Tokyo’s decrepit “capsule” hotels. [...]
Now, Hotel Shinjuku 510’s capsules, no larger than 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide, and not tall enough to stand up in, have become an affordable option for some people with nowhere else to go as Japan endures its worst recession since World War II.
Once-booming exporters laid off workers en masse in 2009 as the global economic crisis pushed down demand. Many of the newly unemployed, forced from their company-sponsored housing or unable to make rent, have become homeless.
I have mental picture of millions of people driving back and forth to work (and other places) over and over again. It’s almost like Brownian motion. Even if people rarely took long trips, there would be plenty of this routine, back and forth motion to ship all the packages we could possibly want, if only there were a service that gave a percentage of these drivers the right incentives, information, and infrastructure to hand off the packages at the proper moment. USExpress could be that service.
To make this more concrete, I’ll use my father as an example. His commute is about 120 miles, round trip, five days a week. That means he drives 600 miles a week, just going back and forth to work. Suppose that my Dad picked up 5 packages somewhere near home, dropped them off somewhere near work, and then reversed the process on the way back. Let’s say he did that just once per week, forty-five weeks out of one year. By making a few extra stops he will have driven 60 miles with 5 packages 90 times. That’s 27,000 package miles, which I have to think is a lot more package-miles than my parents actually send out every year via existing shipping services.
Acres of vacant land are eyed for urban agriculture under an ambitious plan that aims to turn the struggling Rust Belt city into a green mecca.
Reporting from Detroit – On the city’s east side, where auto workers once assembled cars by the millions, nature is taking back the land.
Cottonwood trees grow through the collapsed roofs of homes stripped clean for scrap metal. Wild grasses carpet the rusty shells of empty factories, now home to pheasants and wild turkeys.
This green veil is proof of how far this city has fallen from its industrial heyday and, to a small group of investors, a clear sign. Detroit, they say, needs to get back to what it was before Henry Ford moved to town: farmland. [...]
It is the size and scope of Hantz Farms that makes the project unique. Although company officials declined to pinpoint how many acres they might use, they have been quoted as saying that they plan to farm up to 5,000 acres within the Motor City’s limits in the coming years, raising organic lettuces, trees for biofuel and a variety of other things.
Pinning down the informal economy is as tough as catching a fake Louis Vuitton vendor running from the police. But it’s huge in the United States – larger than the official output of all but the upper crust of nations across the globe. And, due to the recent recession, it’s growing.
Whether that’s good or not depends entirely on one’s point of view. The rise of the informal economy is either the flourishing of entrepreneurship among America’s poorest or a drag on legitimate businesses that play by the rules. Here, on Harlem’s Malcolm X Boulevard, you can find both.
Perhaps the biggest surprise about America’s shadow economy is its size. Long associated with colorful street hawkers in the developing world, the shadow economy makes up a larger portion of the economies of countries like Greece (25 percent) or Mozambique (more than 40 percent) than it does in the US. But because America’s economy is so much bigger, its shadow economy amounts to nearly 8 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) – in the ballpark of $1 trillion, estimates Friedrich Schneider, an economics professor at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. That’s bigger than the GDP of Turkey or Australia.
There’s nothing particularly ominous about the shadow economy – at least, not the one Professor Schneider measures. He doesn’t include illegal activities like drug trafficking or counterfeiting. The transactions he looks at involve the legal production of goods and services that are not taxed and may violate labor laws.
The article concludes:
Off-the-books work “is probably neutral to good,” says Alfonso Morales, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He argues that formal and informal economies are linked and cannot be neatly separated.
“People who make their money in unregulated businesses probably spend it in regulated ones,” he says.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at the start of the recession in December 2007, the ratio of job seekers to job openings was 1.5 to 1. Now six unemployed workers chase every available job. [...]
Economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute says the economy has lost 6.7 million jobs since the beginning of the recession and that the stimulus bill thus far has generated 750,000 jobs. But in addition to the nearly 7 million jobs lost, the national economy has failed to add the 127,000 jobs per month needed to keep up with population growth. “The real employment hole is 9.1 million jobs,” says Shierholz. “The stimulus bill is great, but it will only generate 3 to 4 million jobs. [...]
“There are so many things in the package completely unrelated to creating a job in the next 18 months.” Only 11% of stimulus money was targeted toward infrastructure, and less than 10% of the jobs created have been public sector jobs.
Sabah Electricity Sdn Bhd (SESB) has stepped up efforts to curb Non-Revenue Electricity (NRE) by dismantling illegal connections from squatter colonies here.
Its enforcement unit saw hundreds of metres of illegal wires being seized during a three-day operation from Tuesday.
If the point is to get people to pay, to turn non-revenue into revenue, then why not work with the squatters to create a solution. It’s such a simple thing, really. Just a slight change in mindset. The South African group Abahlali baseMjondolo has demonstrated in a series of reports that ripping out electrical lines in shantytowns causes deaths, as people return to using candles and lighting fires. There’s a cost in lost revenue and a cost in human lives.
A blackberry-infested plot of land once farmed by indigent people at the former Multnomah County Poor Farm is being reclaimed to feed the poor again.
Multnomah County Commissioner Jeff Cogen is spearheading a campaign to convert one to two acres of county surplus land north of McMenamins Edgefield Manor in Troutdale into a temporary organic farm to combat hunger. Volunteers will harvest enough fresh produce this growing season to feed 240 people for 24 weeks, Cogen estimated.
Cogen will ask fellow members of the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners on May 28 to approve $22,000 in county funds to buy materials. But he’s already secured commitments for private donors to repay $15,000 of that, and expects the rest of that sum will be raised privately.
He happens to live in New Jersey, where state education authorities have long worried about a dearth of math teachers.
Last week he heard about a new program called “Traders to Teachers” being set up at Montclair State University to retrain people in the finance industry who have been laid off in the deepest crisis to hit Wall Street since the Great Depression. [...]
The university’s 101-year-old College of Education received 146 applications for 25 spots in the first round of the program, which offers three months intensive training followed by a job at a high school in January. The first year on the job includes close mentoring, and after two years probation they can become fully certified math teachers. [...]
“If we’re successful … we could change in a very significant way the quality of math instruction in the state of New Jersey,” said university President Susan Cole, noting that many schools rely on substitute teachers because there are not enough certified math teachers to fill the positions.
Even as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Tektronix and other Oregon tech stalwarts are slashing jobs, new companies are springing up by the bushel in Old Town, the Pearl and Portland’s inner eastside.
These startups are taking advantage of the social media craze to invent new Web tools that broadcast a user’s location online, for example, or stream advertising onto MySpace and other online communities.
But stalwarts they are not, and may never be, even as the state looks for ways out of its deepening recession. [...]
Oregon has long lacked the money, scale and leadership to be a great incubator for tech startups. Those weaknesses are less important these days, as the recession humbles big cities and mega-companies. The trend toward grass-roots technology and collaboration plays to Portland’s strengths.
Tent cities and shelters from California to Massachusetts report growing demand from the newly homeless. The National Alliance to End Homelessness predicted in January that the recession would force 1.5 million more people into homelessness over the next two years. Already, “tens of thousands” have lost their homes, Alliance President Nan Roman says.
The $1.5 billion in new federal stimulus funds for homelessness prevention will help people pay rent, utility bills, moving costs or security deposits, she says, but it won’t be enough.
“We’re hearing from shelter providers that the shelters are overflowing, filled to capacity,” says Ellen Bassuk, president of the National Center on Family Homelessness. “The number of families on the streets has dramatically increased.”
Turns out there’s already another Dangerous Minds episode. This one features Douglas Rushkoff and covers some familiar terroritory for readers of Rushkoff’s columns (which I link to frequently).
I agree with quite a lot of what Rushkoff has to say, and I respect him a lot. But there are a few important things he gets wrong or doesn’t account for.
There’s a contradiction in his assertion that the government/corporate complex will be too broke to enforce monopolies – but he also mentions, when questioned about US foreign debt, that we still have the strongest military. And that’s the thing. Entrenched powers aren’t going to roll over and die as long as they’ve got the bomb and the gun.
Alternative currencies are great. But governments tend squash them as soon as they start disrupting the status quo. See The New Currency War and George Monbiot’s history of alternative currency. There’s a really question of how much the “powers that be” will let “us” get away with – in terms of growing our own food, creating our own currency, and anything else that reduces their power over us.
Much of Rushkoff’s optimism stems from romanticizing a future where Americans break free from our cubicles and start actually “doing stuff.” I’ve noticed a tendency for a lot of people to think that jobs need to be more like what they think their ideal job should be like. Some people say “people need to be out doors” or “people need to work with their hands” or “people need more creative jobs.” They miss the fact that a lot of people genuinely like working with numbers, or programing computers, or doing detailing oriented office work.
Anyway, the millions of people who work in (or have recently worked in) the health care, education, restaurant, hotel, farming, gardening, manufacturing, trucking, rail road, utility, and construction industries may be surprised to hear that all the economy needs is for Americans just need to get off their fat cubicle dwelling asses and “do something.” What percentage of the population is actually employed in just pushing numbers around and managing outsourced labor?
I’m fairly confused on this point because Rushkoff also talks about how the financial industry is essentially extracting value from the rest of us. So are we producing value or not?
Rushkoff is correct in tracing the modern collusion of government and corporations back to the very beginnings of corporations, but he falls into a certain trap that libertarians tend to fall into: the idea that getting rid of the government influence would solve the problem of megacorporations (or other large institutions) would stop their meddling in the market and lead to a laissez faire utopia.
The problem is that the government is not the only way large institutions (be they for-profit corporations, religious institutions, unions, professional organizations, or non-profit organizations) manipulate the market. We could try splitting up megacorproations – but that requires government intervention and gets sticky quick (for all the reasons that libertarians warn against government intervention).
The typical libertarian assumption, as I understand it, is that without government intervention the market would quickly self-correct – all those decades of entrenched power and influence would cease to matter as real competition came to the fold. Needless to say, I don’t share this belief. And actually, I rather doubt Rushkoff does either.
I look forward to Rushkoff’s book. I suspect many of my points will at least be addressed.
In light of all of this, 250 new manufacturing jobs in Detroit doesn’t seem like much. But the article does paint an optimistic portrait of the future of energy related manufacturing in the US. (via WorldChanging)
As some of my e-mailers recognize, their dilemmas are those of the relatively fortunate. They are young. They have advanced degrees. As Sam wrote, “It should be noted that I’m a very lucky, healthy, happy 23-year-old male who, aside from having little money and having caught a bad break on his choice of careers, has nothing to complain about.” For a dose of perspective, I’ll include an e-mail from Dani, who is 28, lives in Chicago, and couldn’t go to college right out of high school. She works in a warehouse office and will finally graduate in May with a two-year associate degree for which she scrimped and borrowed and is “fighting tooth and nail for.” She can’t see how she can afford to go on in school, and she points out that “for those of us not privileged enough to have [a college degree] being seen as not as valuable as someone who is ’smarter’ than us because they have a degree puts us behind in the job market even further. We are already worried about our futures, and the thought that this economy or even one bad thing happening [could] disrupt our paycheck-to-paycheck lives, is more than terrifying.” It is bad to have a degree that you fear is underwater. But it’s still worse to have no degree at all.
This article fails to adequately address the matter at hand because they only compare people with advanced degrees with those without any sort of degree or special training what so ever.
Here is another question: are people with advanced degrees better off than those who opted for vocational training of some sort, or even those who only got bachelor’s degrees? Comparing the plight of MBAs, Phds, and lawyers to plumbers, mechanics, dental assistants, etc. would be more relevant. It would also be worthwhile to compare people with advanced degrees with people who have bachelor’s degrees in certain fields such as biology, math, computer science, and engineering.
Ms. Omega, 48, is one of the beneficiaries of the foreclosure crisis. Through a small advocacy group of local volunteers called Take Back the Land, she moved from a friend’s couch into a newly empty house that sold just a few years ago for more than $400,000.
Michael Stoops, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said about a dozen advocacy groups around the country were actively moving homeless people into vacant homes — some working in secret, others, like Take Back the Land, operating openly.
In addition to squatting, some advocacy groups have organized civil disobedience actions in which borrowers or renters refuse to leave homes after foreclosure.
The groups say that they have sometimes received support from neighbors and that beleaguered police departments have not aggressively gone after squatters.
1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest.
2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.
Carlos Cruz has a strategy for surviving the worst global recession in 60 years: pay less in taxes and pass the savings along to customers.
“I’m declaring half as much as I used to,” said Cruz, 29, who runs a painting business in Madrid. “Prices have fallen by 30 percent and customers will choose you for a difference of as little as 50 euros ($67.70),” said Cruz, an Ecuadorian who has lived in Spain since 2001.
The production of goods and services that are lawful, though not declared, may grow the most as a proportion of total output since 2000, according to Friedrich Schneider, a professor at Austria’s Johannes Kepler University of Linz.
The shift, measured by tax analysts and economists using surveys, money-supply data and anecdotal evidence, is caused by businesses going off the books to cut costs and workers taking informal jobs to survive rising unemployment. It offers a buffer against the ravages of the crisis and may help explain why the slowdown hasn’t prompted more social unrest.
On the supply side, local governments should penalize owners who stockpile vacant housing, perhaps by imposing increased property tax rates on properties left vacant, and by moving aggressively to seize vacant properties when the owners fall behind on paying those taxes. On the demand side, governments should expand homesteading programs that permit and help low-income people to take over vacant housing—but only after it finds its way into city hands.
To be sure, these programs were only marginally successful in the 1970s, in part because of lack of funding, but also because of the difficulty of restoring abandoned urban properties to habitable condition. The housing that is becoming vacant during the current downturn, by contrast, is relatively new and should be easier for homesteaders to repair. The federal government should also move quickly to protect those in financial trouble from foreclosure and eviction by requiring foreclosing banks (many of which are themselves receiving taxpayer bailouts) to rent out foreclosed homes to their former owners at fair market value. In fact, as this letter to the editor in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday correctly observed, allowing owners to remain as renters in their foreclosed homes helps safeguard the value of the houses—which is good for the occupants, good for the banks, and good for the housing market as a whole.
The sudden increase in squatting shows that the housing market that is out of kilter. The solution is not to chase squatters off, but to bring the market back into balance by helping them find a place to call home.
Although it is small consolation in the face of overwhelming economic strife in Detroit and elsewhere as the foreclosure crisis continues, this story gave me a real feeling of hope and renewal. To me, this example and other corresponding cases – like the artist-driven re-imaginings of shopping malls and big box stores seems symbolic of an even larger cultural shift. The arts community isn’t just moving into one downtrodden urban neighborhood; rather, they’re taking on the ruins of the unsustainable. They’re taking on big box stores, shopping malls, and grid-connected homes in the car capitol of North America. And they’re not just creating new art. They’re seizing the opportunity to turn old shells of buildings into independent, renewable energy-powered, 21st century-ready spaces.
What I’m most eager to hear next is that creative pioneers are conquering McMansions in the suburban hintersprawl. As Bryan Walsh wrote recently for Time Magazine, “The Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech predicts that by 2025 there will be a surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (on one-sixth of an acre [675 sq m] or more) in the U.S.”
Will subdivisions be turned into workshops and performance spaces? Or possibly into small-scale agricultural communities, or enclaves for artisan food-production? At the very least, will they become denser, transit-connected and less car-dependent … and what will drive that?
10. Teach yourself programming
9. Get a Personal MBA
8. Learn to actually use Ubuntu
7. Get started on a new language
6. Trade your skills, find an instructor
5. Academic Earth and YouTube EDU
4. Teach yourself all kinds of photography
3. Get an unofficial liberal arts major
2. Learn an instrument
1. Learn from actual college courses online
In the energy sector, utilities are especially struggling to lure young people to an industry that’s plagued with a somewhat outdated stigma. Peter Darbee, CEO of San Francisco-based Pacific Gas and Electric (NYSE: PCG) in January 2008 told the San Francisco Chronicle that within five years more than 40 percent of the utility’s 20,000 employees will be eligible for retirement. Almost half the nation’s utility workforce will be nearing retirement age by 2016, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
Overall, job seekers with college or technical training will have the best shot at filling utility positions. Computer systems analysts and data analysts are expected to be among the most in-demand workers, in addition to employees with the training to help utilities expand their renewable energy portfolios, according to the Labor Department.
When it comes to training a workforce for a rapidly changing economy, the country’s nearly 1,200 community colleges are at the center of it all. PG&E has even partnered with community colleges to develop its PowerPathway program to train future employees.
With shorter programs and lower tuitions—about $2,360 on average nationwide—than four-year schools, community colleges present fewer barriers to entry for students than private technical colleges or even big, state universities. Plus, many technical and career programs are designed to train and certify workers for in-demand fields in less than a year compared to conventional four-year degree programs.
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