Phi Beta Iota: Open Everything (especially OpenBTS, Open Cloud, Open Data, Open Hardware, Open Software, and Open Standards) are the next big leap, or the Internet of Things will be in the service of the elite rather than the 5 billion poor whose entrepreneurial energy can only be harnessed when ALL of them have a free cell phone with Internet access and can receive a free education one cell call at a time.
Also vital in the development of Internet IMPACT as opposed to ACCESS, is the emergence of whole system analytics and true cost economics. Only when ALL have access to true cost information can corruption begin to be detected and eradicated supply chain by supply chain. The nuclear and tobacco and seed industries are three examples of how government corruption and media lies have created massive profit for the few with massive externalized costs to the many.
October 5. Today’s employment report fOrom the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows 114,000 new jobs in September and a drop in the rate of unemployment from 8.1% to 7.8%. As 114,000 new jobs are not sufficient to stay even with population growth, the drop in the unemployment rate is the result of not counting discouraged workers who are defined away as “not in the labor force.”
According to the BLS, “In September, 2.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force.” These individuals “wanted and were available for work,” but “they were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.”
In other words, 2.5 million unemployed Americans were not counted as unemployed.
My friend Jeff Madrick lays out the outlines of the central economic crisis of our times: the hemorrhaging of high paying middle class jobs — a subject I addressed wrt to the loss of manufacturing jobs here.
With domestic policy as the theme of Wednesday’s presidential debate, the Obama campaign is facing a weakening economy. The Commerce Department just reported that GDP grew at an annual rate of only 1.3 percent in the second quarter. Job growth has been tepid, with continued high unemployment and underemployment. When one counts all those looking for full-time jobs and unable to get them, the true unemployment rate is close to 17 percent. Meanwhile, the US faces looming threats of a new European recession and a slowdown in China and other parts of the developing world.
But the starkest evidence that something is seriously amiss in the American economy is the dramatic deterioration of the middle class. Median household income—the midpoint income of all American households—was reported by the Census Bureau (whose data is a year or so behind) to be down in 2011 compared to 2010, despite an economic recovery that began in mid-2009. More disturbing, that figure is now down to around $50,000, which is 7 percent or so below what it was in 2000 and its lowest level since 1996, adjusted for inflation. Incomes are falling still more sharply for black households.
Au moment où vous lisez ces lignes, une cinquantaine d’invitations sont en train d’arriver chez des membres de la société civile: organisations de citoyens, syndicales, d’entreprises, chez des chercheurs, des journalistes spécialisés. des élus du gouvernement et de l’opposition.
Ils sont invités par mon collègue des Finances Nicolas Marceau et moi-même à un exercice de transparence.
Au cours des prochaines semaines, la négociation visant un accord de libre-échange dit de « nouvelle génération » entre le Canada et l’Europe pourrait arriver à destination. Fortement initié par l’ex Premier ministre Jean Charest, l’accord a été négocié depuis deux ans dans une relative opacité, soulevant craintes et grincements de la part de plusieurs, y compris de l’opposition péquiste.
(NOTE: In this essay I intentionally subsume the thinking processes of official decision-makers into the thinking processes of the citizenry as a whole. I realize that official decision-makers can and do make decisions independently of the will of the people, unless that public will is united and organized. But elite decisions made independently of the public do not qualify as “public thinking” – at least in any democratic sense – and in this essay I am attempting to explore the nature of public thinking so that it can be upgraded and empowered to impact public policy. So here we will look at the thinking processes of the entire population and mini-publics thereof as they go about living a relatively democratic life.)
How can we think clearly about the collective thinking processes of a whole population in a democracy? How do populations reflect on public issues and come to conclusions about collective action and public policy? What follows is one framework for sorting out the different dimensions of public thinking and the quality of that thinking process.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The most basic form of public thinking is, of course, what goes on in the minds of individual citizens as they think about public affairs. We see manifestations of this – commonly called “public opinion” – in polls, in voting, in online “citizen input” sites, and in various other visible forms of citizenship that reflect the opinions of individual citizens in the population as a whole.
Public opinion evolves in a message-rich environment that includes – at the next higher level of public thinking – news media and commentaries from pundits and partisans, on talk shows and blogs, and in online forums, letters to the editor, and public hearings. This public thinking often takes the form of mediated or witnessed conversations: Diverse (often polarized) voices express their views to each other while being directly or indirectly witnessed by the public. Our society depends heavily on this kind of media-driven interaction to collectively reflect on its public issues and shape the views of its citizens and decision-makers.
The resounding message of the sharing economy is that it fosters relationships and builds communities. So far, it has focused primarily on the self-interested values of saving money and making money from the idle resources in order to appeal to consumers. The sharing economy should incorporate self-transcending values such as sustainability and goodness to its core message in order to achieve behavior change and cross to the mainstream.
L. Randall Wray and Michael Hudson present at the Modern Money and Public Purpose seminars. L. Randall Wray is a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Michael Hudson Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri (Kansas City), and President of the Institute for the Study of Long-term Economic Trends (ISLET).
This video is an hour and three-quarters long — Wray begins, then Hudson takes over at 43:00 — so I suggest you listen to it over your Sunday morning coffee instead of NPR. (And if you’ve been taking note of all the “tally stick” jokes in the threads lately, I’m guessing this video is where that comes from…)
