Removing the Glasses Part III: The Market Knows Best

With unemployment in the US at more than 10%, people are scared, being told by the experts that if we don’t protect Wall Street, “we’ll be fighting for rat meat on the streets.” Wearing the glasses The Market has given us, we mistrust ourselves, deferring to The Market, and blindly following where it leads. But as Joseph Stiglitz says, in doing so, The Market is also shaping our society. Are we sure that what we want is the way The Market has been molding us?

Since 1970, total worldwide production has tripled. Conventional wisdom tells us this means we have tripled our wealth and well-being. But behind those numbers is another truth: Over the last two decades, incomes of most Americans have stagnated while we’ve been told to continue to consume as if there had been an increase! So if we’re not any better off, who’s getting all that money? A recent United Nations study found that the richest 2% of the world's adults own 51% of all global assets, while the poorest 50% own only 1%.

That’s not the world I want, and I bet it’s not the one you want, since neither of us is in that top 2%. In fact, we want the exact opposite: statistics are now showing that communities without large gaps between rich and poor are more resilient and their members live longer, happier lives.

How do we get to the world we want? Many economists are now saying something that actually makes sense to me: we need to change the priorities of our economy. David Korten recommends three steps:

1. Turn from money to life as the defining value, from growing financial capital to growing living capital, and from short-term to long-term investing;

2. Shift the priority from advancing the private interests of the few to advancing the individual and community interests of all; and

3. Reallocate resources from supporting institutions of domination to meeting the needs of people, community, and nature.

This is already being done in a myriad of ways: making the decision to live on less and spend more time with your family, or doing summer-time veggie shopping at the local farmer’s market instead of the supermarket. On a larger level, people are supporting local currencies like Ithaca Hours and campaigning for state-owned banks.

One of the ways the CDCA is working to shift these priorities is through the creation of the Vida Fund...our shared risk investment fund that is partnering with worker-owned cooperatives like the Genesis spinning plant to help create steady, better-paying jobs for poor Nicaraguans. The Vida Fund provides nurture capital: long-term, low-interest loans that the co-ops can realistically pay back. The co-op members risk their labor – in the case of Genesis 1,500 hours each of unpaid work over 3 years – with the hope that their cooperative dream will become a reality. Through the Vida Fund, investors match that risk…effectively reallocating their resources to meet the needs of people and communities.

Other businesses are partnering with co-ops…businesses like Maggie’s Organics, supporting the organic cotton production chain; worker-owned co-op Once Again Nut Butter, partnering with Nicaraguan organic sesame and honey producers; and Their Bucks Coffee, partnering with El Porvenir to reinvest in the community. These buyers know the faces of the producers, have met their families, and are re-introducing the idea of trust and personal relationships into business.

With enough projects like the Vida Fund, community-based economies will become the norm, and mutual trust may then become the expected business norm, giving us a very different economic system, one that has priorities other than making a killing…priorities such as making a living…for everybody. That is how the other 98% of us can become rich, in the true sense of the word. – Becca