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Do they have a lasting impact? That is the question...
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Which raises the question: Are cash mobs anything more than a well-meaning gesture that generates nice media coverage? (It seemed like half the people at By Brooklyn had notebooks and cameras.)
For By Brooklyn’s owner, Gaia DiLoreto, the answer is yes. “It was very uplifting,” says DiLoreto, a self-described “recovering finance robot” who left corporate life at the height of the economic crisis to start her own business. “It’s an incredible affirmation of what I’m doing, that so many people believe in what I believe in.”
DiLoreto estimated that the cash mob just about doubled the business she would have gotten on a typical Saturday. More importantly, “people walked into the store who have never been in my store before.”
For her, the cash mob is emblematic of a new type of business model that she sees taking root everywhere around her. Starting something new in this economy has been tough, but DiLoreto says the support from like-minded people has been "overwhelming." Ideas like "locavesting" may not conform to traditional economic thinking, but that doesn’t bother her. “It’s happening,” she says. “Whether it works out on economists’ worksheets or not. I see it everywhere.” If she's right, maybe you'll see the effects on a neighborhood near you.
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The cleantech industry is one of the fastest growing industries in British Columbia, with the province being home to one of the largest industry clusters in Canada and North America.
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See also Vancouver Sun article: Clean technology emerges as driver of B.C. economy
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Clean+technology+emerges+driver+economy/4948691/story.html
Interesting, especially in light of sustainablecities article about obesity rates being on the rise in *cities* (and finding no linkage to economics)...
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The study compared ‘market-liberal’ countries (United States, Britain, Canada and Australia) with seven relatively affluent European countries that have systems that traditionally offer stronger social protection (Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain and Sweden). It concludes that economic security plays a significant role in determining levels of obesity. Countries with higher levels of job and income security were associated with lower levels of obesity.
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Liked this article by Umair Haque. Excerpt:
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Prosperians believe the economy's central problem isn't a lack of demand, or a lack of supply - but a lack of purpose. Prosperianism's foundation can be summed up in a single sentence: 21st century economies can, should, and must have a higher purpose than product.
Prosperians believe that the real challenge of the 21st century isn't kickstarting "growth" and churning out more "product" - but reconceiving what is growing, how it grows, and why it grows. The prosperian agenda is redefining prosperity, so it's more meaningful, authentic, and durable. It's not about just restarting the same old industrial-age engine of GDP, but building a better one.
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Fascinating talk by Matt Ridley at Ted Global: how exchange - a kind of sexual exchange or promiscuity - helps ideas to spread, and in turn, how the spread of ideas turbo-charges development.
An essay written by Adam Bahlke, posted to my WetPaint wiki, Victoria City Style Council. Adam was 14 when he wrote this.
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This essay was written in the summer of 2005. How I came to write an essay on the history of the Upper Harbour was partly because of all the buzz generated around the then recently proposed Dockside Green project, and also because my interest in the Upper Harbour's history had been sparked after several walks along Harbour Road and the Railyards development. Happily, this essay also managed to fulfill a school requirement, so I therefore felt justified to spend several afternoons going through old books and records at the Maritime Museum and looking through the online Royal BC Museum archives. However, since this essay is nearing a year old, whenever the words "current" and so forth are used, it has to be remembered that the events are a) no longer "current" and b) the companies/people involved might no longer exist in Victoria, BC.
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Featured Guest: Gregory Unruh, director and professor of the Lincoln Center for Ethics in Global Management at the Thunderbird School. He is the author of Earth, Inc.: Using Nature's Rules to Build Sustainable Profits."
Placemaking makes the case for economic robustness. Great profile of Vancouver's Granville Island, too.
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...cities first emerged because people gathered together at crossroads, creating busy, vibrant places to exchange goods and ideas. Cities grew out of commerce. The same holds true today. Cities need great places that provide the settings for these kinds of interactions. This is what businesses seek. They want places that are attractive to employees, places where connections can happen, where productivity and creativity increase and where the professional networks foster collaboration and innovation.
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People often think of both of these spots as tourist havens, with the usual low-pay, no-future tourist jobs. But a closer look shows that tourists are not the primary force behind the economic success of these places: Granville Island and Balboa Park are multi-use destinations that are heavily used by the local population. After all, at the Granville Island Market the highest-performing vendor is the meat market, which shows that it is a major attraction for locals.
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Studies have shown that even tourists themselves are more interested in an authentic experience than artificial attractions created expressly for them. All over the world travelers are drawn to places—Paris, Tuscany, San Francisco, Kyoto, you name it—with unique qualities that make these destinations interesting and vital. The last thing many tourists seek is to mingle with other tourists. By making more appealing places for residents, you attract tourists better than if you are trying to attract tourists.
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Great article that explains how Canada's taxation system destroys innovation and grass-roots ownership, even under the new Budget 2010 revisions, which were touted by Finance Minister Flaherty as supportive of investment & innovation...
Brief extract below, but click through to read the whole thing.
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As an illustration of the dire consequences of the proposed new changes in stock option taxation, we have had to halt the IPO process for a very successful Canadian technology company. Under the proposed new rules, if all 300+ employees exercised all of their vested options at once, post-IPO, the company would have an immediate withholding tax liability of about $20 million. This is a new, open-ended and completely uncontrollable contingent liability. If we happened to get “irrationally exuberant” technology markets again, the liability could be multiples of $20 million.
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Insightful (and often cutting) article on the status of innovation in Canada. Stephen Downes responded in a blog post, http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2009/07/innovation-in-canada.html, basically agreeing, saying that we need a bit of free market and a bit of government direction as well, and that we (Canadians) need to wean ourselves from our corporate overlords.
In an aside, the G&M journalist (Konrad Yakabuski) notes that Canadians already log more work hours than Americans and are workaholics compared to Europeans - who innovate more and therefore, because they work smarter, don't need to work harder. As it happens, I was just wondering about Canadians and partying/ sociability over the beginning of July (what with Canada Day and Independence Day). Canadians are far less social than Americans, in my experience. For Canadians, sociability and partying means getting drunk - it always has, for as long as I can remember. Americans in this respect are actually the kinder, gentler people. Is it because of work?
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Barring an extension of the workweek - Canadians already put in more hours than Americans and are virtual workaholics compared with Europeans - innovation is the only sure way for Canada to be more productive. It is the key to maintaining our standard of living and providing increasingly costly public services for an aging population.
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"Canada is not being productive because it's not being innovative," said Robert Brown, chief executive officer of Montreal-based CAE Inc., the world leader in aircraft flight simulators and training. "A lot of innovation occurs at the interface with the customer. But when you look at the make-up of Canada's economy, with so much dependence on resources, there is less contact between [our biggest] companies and end users."
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Saw this in Boris Mann's FriendFeed (via his Google Reader bookmarks). Comment on Jason Mendelson of Foundry Group (which "funds primarily light-weight, inexpensive software startups") giving a talk in Ann Arbor. The push-back in the comment interesting insofar as it points to 2.0-bubble-ism and over-eagerness to build on clouds as opposed to "real things." But then again, one could ask, what are the real things? Isn't information real, too?
A 9/10/08 pointer to a 44-pg PDF, "The economic impact of high density development and tall buildings in central business districts: British Property Federation." From the description:
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There is increasing recognition of the need to increase the density of commercial development, especially in the centres of our towns and cities. The sustainability benefits of high density are relatively well known. For example, less urban sprawl means less need to use greenfield sites, more use of public transport and, with mixed use developments, a reduced need to travel.
However, there is also an economic case for increased commercial density, as specified in Policy Planning Statement (PPS) 6 and the State of the English Cities. In current debates about increasing commercial density in London – including through tall buildings – this economic element has been little mentioned, and is perhaps little understood.
This research has sought to explain and estimate the economic costs and benefits of high density commercial development in central business districts. The aim is to provide a more rounded picture of the economic impact of high density development and to strengthen the assessment of such development.
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There is increasing recognition of the need to increase the density of commercial development, especially in the centres of our towns and cities. The sustainability benefits of high density are relatively well known. For example, less urban sprawl means less need to use greenfield sites, more use of public transport and, with mixed use developments, a reduced need to travel.
However, there is also an economic case for increased commercial density, as specified in Policy Planning Statement (PPS) 6 and the State of the English Cities. In current debates about increasing commercial density in London – including through tall buildings – this economic element has been little mentioned, and is perhaps little understood.
This research has sought to explain and estimate the economic costs and benefits of high density commercial development in central business districts. The aim is to provide a more rounded picture of the economic impact of high density development and to strengthen the assessment of such development.
"The world is flat" or "the world is spiky" or ..."the world is complex," maybe? At any rate, this article questions the idea that outsourcing will continue to continue, spreading outward in some sort of new and flattened topography (akin to a downward spiral insofar as the search for ever cheaper labor and laxer labor laws continues, but not wholly downward because economically, there's an upward trend associated with it, too - hence perhaps the "flat" topography). And it presents some interesting data as well as suppposition for why this might be so. It's not just the huge up-tick in transportation costs (although that's a key factor), it's also the logistics -- including "reverse logistics." For example, consumers *want* to do better, and are becoming more aware of the "carbon footprint" of the products they buy.
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For the first time in recent decades, it seems there are now real reasons to question the logic underlying the official future of ever-increasing global trade.
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The biggest, of course, is the rapidly mounting cost of transportation. As oil prices rise, reports the New York Times, shipping costs are driving decisions to shorten supply chains:
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Nice synthesis by Richard Florida (written for his Globe & Mail column) of Jane Jacobs's approach to thinking about economies. Let's hope it makes more people read her 2000 book, The Nature of Economies.
- portal page for the report, "Toronto -- City of Disparities" PDF and related press releases, maps, etc. The report was written by J. David Hulchanski, PhD, MCIP, Director, Centre for Urban and Community Studies and Professor, Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, Research Bulletin #40, published December 2007.
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Toronto is no longer a “city of neighbourhoods” but has become a “city of disparities”. That is a key finding of powerful new research from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Urban and Community Studies. The “City of Disparities” research bulletin, The Three Cities Within Toronto: Income Polarization among Toronto's Neighbourhoods, 1970 - 2000, and media realease set out the dramatic growth in income gaps over the past three decades – as the rich get richer, the poor grow more numerous and the middle-income shrink. Set together on one page, four maps chart the grim progress towards a grossly inequitable city. This research confirms and builds on earlier research from TD Economics, which marks growing poverty in Toronto, and the United Way of Greater Toronto which confirms this critical trend.
- 33-pg PDF update by Toronto Dominion Bank on GTA (Greater Toronto Area)
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But what is intangible wealth, and how on earth is it measured? And what does it mean for the world's people—poor and rich? That's where the story gets even more interesting.
Two years ago the World Bank's environmental economics department set out to assess the relative contributions of various kinds of capital to economic development. Its study, "Where is the Wealth of Nations?: Measuring Capital for the 21st Century," began by defining natural capital as the sum of nonrenewable resources (including oil, natural gas, coal and mineral resources), cropland, pasture land, forested areas and protected areas. Produced, or built, capital is what many of us think of when we think of capital: the sum of machinery, equipment, and structures (including infrastructure) and urban land.
But once the value of all these are added up, the economists found something big was still missing: the vast majority of world's wealth! If one simply adds up the current value of a country's natural resources and produced, or built, capital, there's no way that can account for that country's level of income.
The rest is the result of "intangible" factors—such as the trust among people in a society, an efficient judicial system, clear property rights and effective government. All this intangible capital also boosts the productivity of labor and results in higher total wealth. In fact, the World Bank finds, "Human capital and the value of institutions (as measured by rule of law) constitute the largest share of wealth in virtually all countries."
Once one takes into account all of the world's natural resources and produced capital, 80% of the wealth of rich countries and 60% of the wealth of poor countries is of this intangible type. The bottom line: "Rich countries are largely rich because of the skills of their populations and the quality of the institutions supporting economic activity." -
the rule of law explains 57 percent of countries' intangible capital. Education accounts for 36 percent.
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