Schumacher lectures/Amherst Community TV

Dear Friends,

Ernie Urvater of Amherst Community TV filmed the 2009 E. F. Schumacher Lectures in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His films of Bill McKibben and Benjamin Barber's talks will be aired on ACTV.

Scheduled times for the airings are below. You can also stream the shows from the links below.

We hope you enjoy these presentations as much as those attending the lectures enjoyed and were inspired by them.

Benjamin Barber
11/23/2009 at 12:00 PM
11/26/2009 at 6:35 PM
11/30/2009 at 12:00 PM

Bill McKibben
11/22/2009 at 10:30 AM
11/29/2009 at 10:30 AM
12/6/2009 at 10:30 AM

Schumacher Lectures: Benjamin Barber
http://204.213.244.104/Cablecast/Public/Show.aspx?ChannelID=1&ShowID=5239

Schumacher Lectures: Bill Mckibben
http://204.213.244.104/Cablecast/Public/Show.aspx?ChannelID=1&ShowID=5241

Best wishes,
E. F. Schumacher Society staff
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.smallisbeautiful.org

Ralph Nader/Nov 28/Stockbridge MA

Dear Friends,

Ralph Nader has helped us drive safer cars, eat healthier food, breathe better air, drink cleaner water, and work in safer environments for more than four decades. "The Atlantic" named him one of the hundred most influential figures in American history.

Mr. Nader's new book "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" is a work of fiction but it rests on the fervent hope and belief that if we all, as engaged citizens, turn our talents and resources to the most pressing problems before us, we can achieve unimaginable success.

The E. F. Schumacher Society, The Orion Society, and the Bookloft invite you to a talk by Ralph Nader, Saturday, November 28th, 7PM at the First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Admission is free at the door. Space is limited. Donations in BerkShares and federal dollars are welcome.

Mr. Nader will be introduced by H. Emerson Blake of The Orion Society. The talk will be followed by a book signing courtesy of The Bookloft.

Please join us on November 28th,

Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, Jasmine Stine, and Kate Poole
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society

smallisbeautiful.org
berkshares.org
youtube.com/efssociety
twitter.com/neweconomics

Brief Introduction to the BerkShares Currency

Over the past year BerkShares has received an incredible amount of media attention. The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, BBC News and even Fox News have all covered our local sustainable currency. Enjoy this brief collage of media coverage:

Introduction to BerkShares

Economic Ideas that Matter/Jane Jacobs

Dear Friends,

Judith Schwartz turns to Jane Jacobs for ideas that matter when it comes to economics. See her Miller-McCune article below.

Best wishes,
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society

http://www.miller-mccune.com/business_economics/what-jane-jacobs-can-teach-u
s-about-the-economy-1537

What Jane Jacobs Can Teach Us About the Economy

Late urban champion's notions about decline and imports newly resonant during this recession.

By: Judith D. Schwartz | October 24, 2009

How is that economic stimulus package working for you? Think TARP was worth those billions? Perhaps our financial system is back from the brink, but just how far — or how long until we're staring down that same precipice — is not clear. Aside from healthy investment-house bonuses and the fact that General Motors still exists, most have seen little change. While our
financial pundits are still scratching their heads over why our financial structure plummeted so spectacularly let alone what to do about it, many economic thinkers are turning to urban pioneer Jane Jacobs.

Who?

Most know Jane Jacobs as the ultimate champion of cities, who stood up against neighborhood demolition and saw a vibrant ballet where others saw urban squalor. But three years since her death — and a year into a downturn marked by bailouts, foreclosures and sky-high unemployment — her economic vision has come into the spotlight.

"People in economic policy and development are looking carefully at Jacobs' work," says David Boyle, an author and researcher at the New Economics Foundation, a London-based independent economic think tank. "She's been very influential, but subtly so. People aren't always aware of where the ideas come from. This is true from the right and left."

In the landmark The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs called out the folly of urban "improvement" projects that left city districts barren. (Who guessed that people liked to see their neighbors, and that vacant courtyards and hallways invited crime?) In the same way, her 1984 book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, zeroes in on how well-intended subsidies can deplete growth and block innovation. Wealth, she argues, is not merely a matter of assets but rather the capacity to 1) engage those assets in production and 2) adapt to changing circumstances and needs.

According to Jacobs, the engine of economic life is "import-replacement." What this somewhat clunky term means is making the products you have been buying. For example, much of New England, where I live, is rich in hardwood forest. But there is no large-scale furniture manufacturing here. Aside from what a few artisans produce for a mostly upscale market, it's imported: Our tables, chairs and bed frames are made from fast-growing trees in Southeast Asia, shipped over and stained to look like oak, maple or cherry. If made here, we'd no longer be dependent on furniture from elsewhere; workers here would apply their own innovations to create their own products and techniques and we'd have more products to trade with other places.

This process, replicated over and over and on a large or small scale, invigorates the economy. Workers gain skills, capital gets invested in new equipment, trading partners emerge, consumer taste gets more sophisticated, etc.

This does not happen when a large corporation plunks a factory down in a derelict neighborhood or rural outpost. But that has been the favored approach to perk up an area's economy. The upshot is that the population becomes reliant on one industry that may not be appropriate for the setting. Supplies get shipped in from elsewhere and other wealth-producing activity
languishes.

"Jacobs pointed out that to boost an area's economy, the normal plan is to bring in a branch of some big business. But then you have an industry without roots. They're not using local accountants and local printers," says Susan Witt, executive director of the E.F. Schumacher Society in Great Barrington, Mass., which, since its inception in 1980, maintained a close working relationship with Jane Jacobs. "It's through those roots that you get the economic multiplier effect of small businesses. And a branch or factory based elsewhere can leave as easily as it arrived."

Michael Shuman, research and public policy director of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, says research suggests that subsidies to attract and retain development are not effective at jumpstarting economies. One unpublished study he led recently looked at the three largest economic development programs in 15 states and found that fewer than 10 percent of companies involved devoted even a small majority of expenditures to local businesses; in most cases 90 percent of the money spent went out of state.

"The economic developers I speak to no longer even try to defend these subsidy strategies," Shuman says. "They've run out of excuses except for the fact that the politicians like them. Politicians get more mileage from one big deal that brings 1,000 jobs than an entrepreneurship program that generates 10 jobs in 100 local businesses. Even when the rhetoric has shifted to the importance of local, in terms of where the money goes, it's still following an old and entirely discredited mode of economic
development."

As for the stimulus bill, Shuman says it has "the worst features of economic development on steroids. If in a typical year, millions [are] spent on pork, this year more than a trillion is spent on pork." Even if the stimulus package is a success, he says, the program "could have been more successful with less money if we had followed Jane Jacobs' ideas" of local resilience
through import-replacement.

She wasn't omniscient, and her modern acolytes aren't claiming that. "Where was Jane Jacobs wrong?" Shuman asked. "What she didn't anticipate was the Internet. The argument that cities were the only important economic engines is weakened considerably by Web-based businesses, which have diversified and strengthened rural economies. Another thing she didn't entirely anticipate was climate change, which makes trade as a tool of growth a little more suspect."

Cities and the Wealth of Nations came out 25 years ago. But the dynamics described are eerily familiar. Take, for instance, what Jacobs called "transactions of decline" — trade encouraged to prop up the economy. An example she uses is ongoing, entrenched military production. This appears productive, but it sucks the oxygen out of the economy. Innovation and
entrepreneurship (import-replacing processes) slow down, there's less inter-city trade to spark new products and ideas, and the economy loses complexity and the ability to adapt. Entire regions become dependent on military spending; they need a war for growth to occur.

The real estate market crash followed a similar trajectory, says Sanford Ikeda, associate professor of economics at SUNY Purchase. "Look at all the incentives in the run-up to the bubble," he says. "People were encouraged to take more risk than optimal, and [many were] making money on unproductive transfers. Not only is this not productive, but it's an obstacle to growth."

One could look at the derivatives market in the same way, as all the entrepreneurial energy goes into the transactions themselves rather than productivity.

The economic downturn has prompted many to question assumptions about growth. "There is a new focus on what happens on the local level, on import-replacement businesses and what it takes to encourage them," says Schumacher's Witt. "Chambers of commerce are putting more into networking and training for small businesses. There's less talk of tax incentives.
These are all Jane Jacobs concepts."

Judy Wicks, founder of the White Dog Café in Philadelphia, and the founder and chairman of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, says her business decisions have been informed by Jacobs' economic vision. "I took seriously the notion of 'local supplies with local labor for local consumption,'" she says. "I asked, 'What are we importing that we can make
locally?' That's what builds community wealth. Instead of starting another White Dog in another location, I started a Black Cat because there was no store nearby that focused on locally made and fair-trade products."

Jane Jacobs was an advocate of decentralization; her belief that economies function on a regional, as opposed to national, level has helped spur recent interest in launching local currencies.

But her suspicion of bigness was pragmatic rather than ideological: In her view, the larger and more complex the institution or economy, the less accurate the feedback it provides. And accurate feedback is crucial for a system to self-correct. One way to look at our financial near-crash is as the result of crisscrossing feedback loops: mixed messages coming from GDP,
foreign exchanges, the stock exchange, housing sales, the data from different parts of the country contradicting each other so that when policy adjusts for one area it destabilizes another like a seesaw that veers up and down but never finds equilibrium.

With so many layers in our financial system, feedback gets lost.

"A large economy is floated by so many factors," says Mary W. Rowe, who runs the New Orleans Institute for Resilience and Innovation, and for several years directed Ideas That Matter, a Toronto institute based on Jane Jacobs' work. "The more opportunity you have to see feedback, the better you can course-correct. This is what the sustainability movement is doing-tightening up feedback loops so that people are aware of [a product's] real costs, such as the environmental impacts, and true costs, of their production, consumptions and disposal."

One advantage of local, as opposed to centralized, production, is that there's more transparency, she says. Efficiency, in the sense of economies of scale, does not always promote wealth and productivity, she says. "You don't want so much control in one place. Most innovation happens on the grassroots level."

It's easy to lapse into theory with economics. But money matters get very real when people are losing their jobs. Could these ideas — import-replacement, adaptation, small feedback loops — help put people back to work? Wicks says yes: "If we start making products at home then we can start dealing with the problem of unemployment."

Everyone is an Activist

Dear Friends,

In this fragile economy discussion of a new, re-envisioned, economics is a common topic, bridging political affiliations. People are eager to join in practical action that addresses a system in crisis, driving an activism in which every citizen is a participant.

For twenty-nine years, the E. F. Schumacher Society, joined by a circle of partners and allies, has imagined, implemented, and shared information about citizen-initiated projects for shaping sustainable local economies.

Headed by Alisa Gravitz, Green America (http://www.greenamericatoday.org)- formerly Coop America – has long been a dynamic leader in this constellation, promoting an economics where people and planet matter. Its work involves a deep commitment to whole-story economics, asking not only how and where a product is made but also by whom and under what conditions. From advancing Fair Trade supply chains and reducing sweatshop labor worldwide to promoting socially and ecologically responsible business and investment at home, Green America empowers citizens to make informed and responsible choices when they enter into economic exchange.

Heeding E. F. Schumacher's tenet that education must clarify our central convictions, Green America boldly advocates for a world where all people have enough, where all communities are healthy and safe, and where the bounty of the Earth is preserved for the generations to come. Green America provides resources and tools for individuals and institutions as they make economic decisions.

For more than twenty-five years Alisa Gravitz has led Green America in developing marketplace solutions to social and environmental problems, with emphasis on climate change, community investment, corporate responsibility, green business, and fair trade. Ms. Gravitz is also a nationally recognized leader in the social investment industry. She co-authored Green Amerca's “Guide to Social Investing” and is a recipient of the prestigious Socially Responsible Investing Service Award.

Ms. Gravitz promotes a green economy as the solution to both the environmental needs of our planet and the current financial crisis, inspiring myriad grassroots actions to “reduce consumption and waste of the world’s resources and totally reshape the global economy in the direction of sustainability.” (alternet.org) Her innovative work to create a more socially just and environmentally sustainable society generates as much concrete action as it does enthusiasm and hope for the future.

Please join us on Saturday, October 17th in welcoming Alisa Gravitz at the 29th Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures. She will be joined by speakers Bill McKibben and Benjamin Barber. The location is the First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Tickets are 25 BerkShares/Dollars (15 for members of the E. F. Schumacher Society, seniors, and students). We recommend registering in advance.

For more information on the event or to pre-register please visit: http://www.smallisbeautiful.org

Email: efssociety@smallisbeautiful.org

Or call (413) 528-1737.

Best Wishes,
Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, Kate Poole, and Jasmine Stine

Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.smallisbeautiful.org

Manufacture Goods, Not Needs

Dear Friends,

As part of his vision for diverse regional economies, E. F. Schumacher advocated for production and manufacturing from local resources for local needs. “It is not a question of choosing between modern growth and traditional stagnation,” Schumacher advised, but rather “of finding the right path of development, the Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility…” More than ever before, the current economic crisis implores us to identify contemporary articulations that support Schumacher’s Buddhist Economics and tools and vehicles for its advancement.

Distinguished author and senior fellow at Demos (www.demos.org), Benjamin Barber provides one such articulation, by first offering an incisive portrayal of global capitalism at its worst. It’s what he calls ‘push capitalism’: manufacturing needs for the goods we’re producing – a disastrously far cry from producing useful goods to meet real human needs. Barber explains in his 2007 book, “Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole,” that capitalism “seems quite literally to be consuming itself, leaving democracy in peril and the fate of citizens uncertain.” In it he offers a vivid critique of the market’s fabrication of needs and its branding and commercialization of just about everything.

Nevertheless, Mr. Barber encourages idealism as the new realism and points to possibilities for liberating ourselves from the “civic schizophrenia” brought about by the modern age of consumerism. He points to various seeds of resistance: consumer boycotts, renewed funding for the arts, micro-lending, and the corporate responsibility movement. He challenges business to earn profits through creative innovation that serves instead of endangers. Most urgently however, Mr. Barber encourages us to take informed responsibility for our role in economic exchange, and calls for deep change in our cultural and civic lives:

“The struggle for the soul of capitalism is…a struggle between the nation's economic body and its civic soul: a struggle to put capitalism in its proper place, where it serves our nature and needs rather than manipulating and fabricating whims and wants. Saving capitalism means bringing it into harmony with spirit--with prudence, pluralism and those "things of the public" (res publica) that define our civic souls. A revolution of the spirit. “ (The Nation, 2009)

Benjamin R. Barber is a Senior Fellow at Demos (www.demos.org), as well as president and director of the international NGO CivWorld at Demos, and its annual Interdependence Day event. An internationally renowned political theorist, Dr. Barber brings an abiding concern for democracy and citizenship to issues of politics, culture and education in America and abroad. He consults regularly with political and civic leaders in the United States and around the world.

Benjamin Barber's 17 books include the classic Strong Democracy (1984); the recent international best-seller Jihad vs. McWorld (1995 with a Post 9/11 Edition in 2001) and Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, published by W.W. Norton & Co. in March, 2007.

Please join us on Saturday, October 17th in welcoming Benjamin Barber at the 29th Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures. He will be joined by speakers Bill McKibben and Alisa Gravitz. The location is the First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Tickets are 25 BerkShares/Dollars (15 for members of the E. F. Schumacher Society, seniors, and students). We recommend registering in advance.

For more information on the event or to pre-register please visit: http://www.smallisbeautiful.org

Email: efssociety@smallisbeautiful.org

Or call (413) 528-1737.

Best Wishes,
Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, Kate Poole, and Jasmine Stine

Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.smallisbeautiful.org

David Boyle at launch of Brixton Pound

Dear Friends,

David Boyle is one of the senior staff at the New Economics Foundation in London and well known for his writings on local currencies. He is part of the NEF team working with the E. F. Schumacher Society to form the New Economics Institute in North America.

David gave the following address last week at the launch of the Brixton Pound.

Best wishes,
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society
www.smallisbeautiful.org
www.berkshares.org

http://transitionculture.org/2009/09/18/david-boyles-speech-at-the-launch-of-the-brixton-pound/

David Boyle’s speech at the launch of the Brixton Pound

“One of my first experiences of currencies along the lines of the Brixton pound was in Ithaca in upstate New York, where they have had an amazing printed currency for the last 15 years. You can get loans in it. The biggest loan was for $36,000. Not bad for a local currency. Some of the notes are printed on paper made from Angora rabbit fur, which is an innovative solution to the problem of counterfeiting which has not yet struck the Bank of England. But I met a man there who had been mugged in Manhattan. The mugger searched through his wallet and said, hey what are these?. He brandished a pile of Ithaca notes.

My friend explained that they were a way to keep local economies moving, and the mugger was fascinated. Wow, he said. You’re right about the world: money doesn’t work for people like us, does it. And of course it doesn’t work very well. It works beautifully for a very few, for whom it is endlessly elastic and flexible and forgiving. When Robert Maxwell fell off his yacht, he owed twice as much as Zimbabwe. But he had a yacht.

For the rest of us, it is very concrete. We have to pay what little we borrow back according to the rules. Because otherwise, well its moral jeopardy, isn’t it. We might learn bad habits. We might get perverted somehow from the straight and narrow. Then there wouldn’t be enough to bail out Citibank again! But then Americans, it seems to me, understand these things better than we do. Their new kinds of money caused the War of Independence in the first place. Benjamin Franklin with his printing machine. They had 5,000 depression currencies in the 1930s which luterally kept people alive through the Great Depression. Some of them were made of wood, which is a bit bizarre.

We have Captain Mainwraing. Or we did. In fact, that whole tradition of dull, careful bank managers has been swept away in this country. When American investigators began looking into the subprime mortgages which cause the great bank crash of 2008, they looked down the list of borrowers and – on the very first page – they found one paid to someone called M. Mouse.
Other cartoon characters followed. When you start shelling out mortgages willy nilly to anyone, whether they can afford it or not, because they are considered risk free to the bankers – that’s what happens. That’s the opposite of the kind of money we need, and the opposite of the imaginative self-help money we are launching today.

Worse than that. It is a kind of lie. A kind of theft. There used to be 144 breweries in New York a hundred years ago. Now there are six. There used to be ten thousand local papers in this country then. Now there are about a few hundred. We are experiencing a money system that is driving out this diversity because it is monocultural. It makes everywhere the same. One kind of measuring stick. One kind of business. Monoculture money systems drive out other cultures, other species, other languages, other opinions, other forms of wealth. We can see this everywhere.

The great harbours and rivers that have bustled for a thousand years. Empty. The farming communities and fields of the world covered with weeds. Even the great corporations – whatever else we may think of them – shedding all the real work until they are just shells that just do financial services. There’s a great silence descending on the world. It’s a kind of death. The very opposite of life creating, and that’s why I am so excited about the Brixton pound.

There’s a kind of thrill about it, it seems to me. You hold those notes and you say, Can you do this? Can we just print it then? It seems too simple. Aren’t there laws against it? The answer is you have to make sure you’re not claiming it is a bank of England pound, a promise to pay the bearer on demand pound. In fact, the organiser of the Liberty Dollar in the States, who mints sterling silver coins he calls dollars, has just been arrested. Ten years, the Isle of Wight County Council were prosecuted for minting their own coins. But they would have been fine if they hadn’t called them euros.

So no, it IS legal to print your own. You can use what you like as money after all, if someone will accept it. We still have that freedom at least. But there’s still a moment of breathlessness when you hold these things in your hand. As if you were somehow touching the stuff of life. And in a way you are. Because money is like blood. It circulates around us, and when it disappears somewhere – because of some squall on Wall Street – our lives seize up a little.

And let’s stay with the idea of lifeblood for a moment. Before William Harvey announced his theory about how blood works in 1616, most people thought it was made in the liver and the heart and swallowed up by the other organs. Harvey showed that it was the circulation of the blood that really mattered. If nothing circulates, the patient dies. It’s the same with economics, and local economies. If the money goes round, or any medium of exchange, the place lives. If it doesn’t, it dies.
It doesn’t matter really how much money there is in total.

But economics hasn’t reached William Harvey yet. It still adds up the bottom line, and if doesn’t work, they get the scalpel out and bleed the patient. So money is life, and we can make our own. That’s why I say those Brixton pound notes are alive. It is a small liberation to use one. A bit like the moment Gandhi made salt for the first time. a symbolic moment of revolt, using the stuff of life. So every time we use one of these notes, it seems to me – and we are going to have to use them if this is going to work – it is a moment of liberation.

To run our own lives. To set us free just a little bit from dependence on the government or Tesco. Or are they the same thing these days? To make Brixton a place, knitted together, with its own money and its own life, not just a tube station with housing attached. I don’t pretend it’s going to be easy. I don’t pretend there are no great issues to face, and decisions to make. I don’t pretend we can possibly get there in one leap. There are going to be disappointments and frustrations along the way.

But every time we invest in this money and take it out of our pockets, to exchange it for something – looking the shopkeeper in the eye as we do so – we are shaping our futures. We are clawing back just a little control over that great global money system that swirls above us like the gods. It may be a bit of paper now. But it is a small lever with which we can move the world. Good luck to it.