Rethinking the Economy

[Here's one last framework brain dump. I think I've gotten as far as I can for now, so I'm going to let this simmer on a back burner for a while.]
Right now, the economy isn’t working for most of us. It isn’t surprising, because right now our society is shaping our economy [...]

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My latest idea for tinkering with the values-based framework — reorganize v 0.1 so instead of having a section on myths followed by a section on alternatives, break it into pairs of myths and alternatives.
NOTE: This post is mostly for me — to help me get this next step out of my [...]

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One other interesting point from Desai, Brief, and George’s paper, on the problems with relying on the actions of individual corporations to stop the crazy CEO compensation problem we’ve got:
J. P. Morgan declared that top executives’ compensation should be capped at twenty times the wage of an average worker. However, unless all organizations adopt this [...]

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I’ve been wrestling with bits and pieces of a framework, but no matter how much I play with them, the end result is all over the place. So, time to get it out of my head. Here’s a quick dump of where I am:
Creating a Values-based Economy
A. The way we usually talk about the [...]

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It’s time, says Robert Reich, to drop a Top Hat on the corruption spewed by the market:
In the words of lobbyist Lauren Maddox, “The policy process is an extension of the market battlefield.”
The answer is not necessarily found in broader or stricter “ethics rules” barring specific gifts to politicians. Such rules may have [...]

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Mark Mykleby, a friend of Thomas Friedman who works for the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Office of the Chairman, published a letter in “his hometown paper, the Beaufort Gazette in South Carolina,” about the BP oil disaster. Friedman liked the letter so much he republished it in his column.
This isn’t BP’s or Transocean’s [...]

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I’ve been doing a little thinking about how to talk about values and choice. For the hell of it, I decided to see how Republican Party websites do it. Most of them were cookie-cutter, negative, and pretty boring — cut taxes, cut government regulations, and cut wasteful spending. The Texas Republican Party put a little [...]

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Here’s my new working definition of a more democratic economy:
A more democratic economy is an economy where the major stupid decisions you have to live with are ones you helped to make.

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[Part 7 of Values-based vs. Market-based Approaches to the Economy]
The case I’ve laid out over the last six posts is not an argument against using markets as a tool. As I’ve said, for example, despite all the problems with cap and trade it’s certainly possible that this usage of markets could be [...]

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[Part 6 of Values-based vs. Market-based Approaches to the Economy]
One of the fundamental principles underlying a market-based framework is that through consumer choice, everyone gets a say. Some bureaucrat doesn’t decide what shoes you get to wear, you do. If you decide hot pink ballerina slippers or combat boots — or hot pink [...]

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