Stephen, in one of the breakout sessions I asked authors Michael Shuman (Going Local) and Stacy Mitchell (Hometown Advantage) about obtaining local economic data, remembering how vital this issue had been to my earlier art volunteer work with Portland's now deceased Artquake, and both said I'd not be able to get it. However during a break I persisted but Shuman's reply to my friendly query was a bit muddled by the fact that he was staring at my chest - I was wearing a bright yellow tee shirt with a royal blue dragon on it which got a lot of attention - and he didn't make a lot of sense right then. He did, however, take individual entrepreneurs to his laptop, offering to log into their county data and take a look at numbers, so I know this is an option.
During his speech he argued quite creatively about TINA vs LOIS, or There is No Alternative (aka the "Get Toyota" export development mentality) vs Local Ownership Import Substitution (aka Community Self Reliance) and my written notes say "local businesses triple the multiplier to the local economy" and "the negatives of a full import economy dependency are: more vulnerability, lower multipliers, and lower tax receipts". Another of the key themes for local living economies is promoting a "living rate of return" and a "living wage". Other advantages that LLE's are supposed to provide over distant ownership is that local ownership has higher standards, do not practice destructive exit strategies, create more long-term wealth and can do flexible RoR. (again, from my notes. Am waiting for the online downloads). Of course not all LLE are highly efficient models of super management, so that requires Plugging the Leaks but Shuman et all insist that LOIS is competitive and can be implemented through local planning, local purchasing, and local investing. My notes say Checkout Green Scissors http://www.taxpayer.net/greenscissors/ and the St. Lawrence Co. NY Initiative. BTW, local planning implementations include such things as a Community Bill of Rights (seals), local purchasing directories, B2B brokering, and the local currencies like LETS. You also might want to check on this: http://www.progressivepubs.com/about_prp.cfm. As a final note on this conference, if not the thread, one of the presenters was the Food Service Director for Portland State Univ, where the BALLE conference took place. He reported that he decided to use his purchasing authority (besides the fact that PSU is an urban university with the state's largest enrollment, his Starbucks outlet in the campus food court has the largest receipts in Portland, and that is saying something out here) and contact one of the local organic food alliances, which was more than happy to provide him with suppliers of organic produce and meat for his conference catering service. He said this was proving to be both cost effective and wholesome, it just initially took a few extra steps. We ate nothing but beautiful and delicious organic food all weekend, and he told me when I asked to interview him that you could tell which fish farm a salmon had come from by the gills, because each farm added their own special colorings that made one salmon more pink than others, or not. His purchasing power was making a big difference to local organic farmers and his clientele were pleased, or at least most of them. He said that after he allowed a Fair Trade coffee stand to go into the food court, overnight they took away one third of Starbucks' receipts. - KWC Karen - Very good stuff. It's obviously about taking land-use *planning* seriously and having a planning regime. But this is all so wishy-washy and not nearly as VIRILE or exciting as the thrusting forward of unfettered GROWTH. I do mean seriously that there is a gendered element here - planning is housekeeping, managing a domestic space, whereas entrepreneurial empire-building is a swashbuckling hard-nosed un-sheltered encounter with REALITY. I'll make the world, you wash up. (Our politics is overly dominated by swashbucklers *and* some would say that parliamentary systems with first-past-the-post electoral schemes are strongly *biased* in favour of swashbucklers & bullies.) Anyway, I will catch my breath now. I asked: > Has anyone done this proper kind of "social cost" > accounting? In your dispatch you mention > ... The New Rules web site ... [whose] banner reads > Designing Rules as if Community Matters. > (see www.newrules.org) and somewhere in the back of my memory is a booklet or book by David Ross (in Ottawa) called *Economics as if Communities Matter* or something like that. Arthur, you know David I think. Is this correct? Is the text on-line somewhere? (If you know then I/we don't have to search.) Thanks, Stephen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Vancouver, B.C. [Outgoing mail scanned by Norton AntiVirus] _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
