The Occupy movement is trying to figure out its future, and keep the momentum going:
But Ross, too, soon found himself enchanted by the possibility of the movement. A trained economist, he decided to start an Alternative Banking working group, with the ambitious plan of setting up an Occupy Bank – built on a cooperative, credit-union model, but operating nationwide. ‘There’s a big Hyde Street retailer in Britain with huge profits, all shared amongst its workers,’ Ross notes. ‘Everyone gets eight weeks holiday a year, wonderful pension plans. But culturally, we’ve been told there’s only one model of a company, which is purely profit-driven, where the workers get paid the least possible. In fact, that’s not the best model for a sustainable economy, and there’s some evidence that shows if you treat your workers better and pay them more, particularly if you give them a stake, then they will perform better. It’s kind of obvious.’
What’s also obvious is that this phase of Occupy, with talk of credit unions and occupying the SEC, while eminently worthy, is also kind of boring, especially when compared to the thrill of Occupy’s park phase. Some, though, are ready to move on. ‘It’s easy to go back to the park occupation and fetishize it, in a way,’ says Occupy Chicago’s Brian Bean. ‘I prefer not to run a mini-society – I want to run society.’
“The Battle for the Soul of Occupy Wall Street.” — Mark Binelli, Rolling Stone
More from Binelli
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The Occupy movement is trying to figure out its future, and keep the momentum going:
“But Ross, too, soon found himself enchanted by the possibility of the movement. A trained economist, he decided to start an Alternative Banking working group, with the ambitious plan of setting up an Occupy Bank – built on a cooperative, credit-union model, but operating nationwide. ‘There’s a big Hyde Street retailer in Britain with huge profits, all shared amongst its workers,’ Ross notes. ‘Everyone gets eight weeks holiday a year, wonderful pension plans. But culturally, we’ve been told there’s only one model of a company, which is purely profit-driven, where the workers get paid the least possible. In fact, that’s not the best model for a sustainable economy, and there’s some evidence that shows if you treat your workers better and pay them more, particularly if you give them a stake, then they will perform better. It’s kind of obvious.’
“What’s also obvious is that this phase of Occupy, with talk of credit unions and occupying the SEC, while eminently worthy, is also kind of boring, especially when compared to the thrill of Occupy’s park phase. Some, though, are ready to move on. ‘It’s easy to go back to the park occupation and fetishize it, in a way,’ says Occupy Chicago’s Brian Bean. ‘I prefer not to run a mini-society – I want to run society.'”
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Published: Jun 7, 2012
Length: 25 minutes (6,437 words)
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Resuscitating a battered newsweekly in 2011 is a tough bit of business. Last year, The Daily Beast and Newsweek lost a combined $30 million. Ad page numbers tell how difficult it is, too: Newsweek’s ad page performance between April to September was down 18 percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau quarterly report. This is easy to dismiss (what isn’t down these days!) — but Time is up 4 percent for the year, The Economist is flat and Newsweek is competing, year-over-year, against a version of itself that had an ownership change, a lame duck editor and a very uncertain future.
“Tough Times at Newsweek.” — John Koblin, WWD
See more #longreads from John Koblin
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Resuscitating a battered newsweekly in 2011 is a tough bit of business. Last year, The Daily Beast and Newsweek lost a combined $30 million. Ad page numbers tell how difficult it is, too: Newsweek’s ad page performance between April to September was down 18 percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau quarterly report. This is easy to dismiss (what isn’t down these days!) — but Time is up 4 percent for the year, The Economist is flat and Newsweek is competing, year-over-year, against a version of itself that had an ownership change, a lame duck editor and a very uncertain future.
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Published: Nov 18, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,094 words)
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Longreads Pick
When it comes to economic growth and the creation of jobs, the denser the city the better. How great are the benefits of density? Economists studying cities routinely find that after controlling for other variables, workers in denser places earn higher wages and are more productive. Some studies suggest that doubling density raises productivity by around 6 percent while others peg the impact at up to 28 percent. Some economists have concluded that more than half the variation in output per worker across the United States can be explained by density alone; density explains more of the productivity gap across states than education levels or industry concentrations or tax policies.
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Published: Sep 5, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,726 words)
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Though Ali Abdullah Saleh has proved deft at maintaining power, he has accomplished little else. Forty per cent of Yemeni adults are illiterate, and more than half the country’s children are malnourished. In addition to the bribes—one of Yemen’s largest expenditures—there is corruption. The government in Sanaa makes even the Karzai regime, in Afghanistan, seem like a model of propriety. Mohamed Ali Jubran, an economist at Sanaa University, told me, “Any resources that the government is able to get its hands on are siphoned off by the people around the President. What is left over is not enough to meet the demands of the Yemeni people.”
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Published: Apr 4, 2011
Length: 43 minutes (10,995 words)
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Japan’s reactors are “light water” reactors, whose safety depends on an uninterrupted power supply to circulate water quickly around the hot core. A light water system is not the only way to design a nuclear reactor. But because of the way the commercial nuclear power industry developed in its early years, it’s virtually the only type of reactor used in nuclear power plants today. Even though there might be better technologies out there, light water is the one that utility companies know how to build, and that governments have historically been willing to fund. Economists call this problem “technological lock-in”: The term refers to the process by which one new technology can prevail over another for no good reason other than circumstance and inertia.
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Published: Mar 20, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,369 words)
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Gram Junkies: In Transportation Design the Key Issue Is Not Speed, but Weight
Transport economist Chris Bradshaw wants planners and designers to respect what he calls “the scalar hierarchy.” This is when trips taken most frequently are short enough to be made by walking (even if pulling a small cart), while the next more frequent trips require a bike or street car and so on. “If one adheres to this, then there are so few trips to be made by car, that owning one is foolish.”
By John Thackara, Change Observer
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Transport economist Chris Bradshaw wants planners and designers to respect what he calls “the scalar hierarchy.” This is when trips taken most frequently are short enough to be made by walking (even if pulling a small cart), while the next more frequent trips require a bike or street car and so on. “If one adheres to this, then there are so few trips to be made by car, that owning one is foolish.”
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Published: Jan 12, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,527 words)
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