GEOG 352: Day 20Chapter 11

Housekeeping Items• We have two presentations today: Keltie and Bryce.

Diego will present on Tuesday due to an out-of-town game.

• I will also present on Chapter 11.• Here’s the schedule so far for the mini-

presentations on the case studies. We need more volunteers.

• You can use PowerPoint or not, though PowerPoint gives the audience more to fix on. Address the following in bullet form: what and where is the case? What does the case organization do? What organizational format (co-op, responsible business, etc.)? Forms of capital addressed? Strengths and weaknesses? Lessons and applicability (or not) elsewhere? Keep to 5-8 minutes + Q & A.

Schedule for Mini-Presentations

date nameKyle 13thSacia, Mike, Melany 18thSarah, Amy, Rob, Bryce, Keltie 20thZane, Jen, Diego, Jesse 25thEmmanuel, Maya 27thJordan?

Jayme?

Following Up on “Commons”vs. Open Access Systems

• Scholarpedia: From Fennell (2011): • “Open access vs. the commons. When

Hardin (1968, p. 1244) asked his readers to ‘[p]icture a pasture open to all,’ he was referencing an ungoverned open-access regime from which nobody could be excluded. Yet by calling the resulting collective action problem ‘the tragedy of the commons,’ the notion of common property became conflated with the lawless (or law-free) condition of open access.”

Following Up on “Commons”vs. Open Access Systems

• The distinction between open-access and common property was made decades ago by Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop (1975) and has been reiterated by Ostrom (e.g. 1999, pp. 335–336; see also Schlager and Ostrom 1992) and others (e.g. McCay 1996, p. 113; Dagan and Heller 2001, pp. 556–557; Eggertsson 2003, pp. 75–76).

• Elinor Ostrom, one of the world’s leading theorists and researchers on common property systems won the Nobel Prize in 2009 for her work.

• See also “The Tragedy of Enclosure” by George Monbiot: http://www.monbiot.com/1994/01/01/the-tragedy-of-enclosure/.

Chapter 11• The authors start out by arguing that small investors don’t

make much on their investments, due to the various service charges, whereas those who rake it in are the large investors who take in about 80% of all returns on investment.

• They cite commentators who argue that the financial sector, as it has grown in recent years, has ceased to perform a fully useful function and needs to be scaled back.

• Despite public outrage at the enormous bonuses paid to financial sector executives before and during the ‘crash’ of ‘07-08 and, despite the massive bailout of such firms by the public purse, the practice of self-bonusing continues.

• For quite some time, the financial sector was regulated, but much of that regulation disappeared in the neo-con revolution of the 1980s and after.

Chapter 11• The book discusses the disadvantages of hedge

funds and of private equity schemes gutting existing firms. In addition, many corporations hide their profits in off-shore banking havens so as to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

• For every dollar of “aid” that goes to developing countries, $7 comes back in the form of loan repayments and profits.

• In general, over the past 40 years, there has been a significant transfer of wealth from the bottom 50% to the upper 1%. Our speaker at the Film Festival, Matt Hern, claimed that the top 85 richest individuals on the planet have wealth equal to the bottom 3.5 billion people on the planet. I have not been able to verify that as yet.

• There are ways to spread the wealth out.

Chapter 11• One involves the mechanism of Employee Share

Ownership Plans (ESOPs) where employees own shares and share profits, which offers the additional incentive of encouraging greater productivity. I don’t know the exact mechanism of Harmac, but that is an example of a worker-owned mill that was rescued from oblivion when its former multinational owner wanted to shut it down.

• ESOPs, combined with financial mechanisms such as JAK, might help limit the rising tide of personal debt which threatens the stability of the economy. Government debt is also exacerbated by the cuts to corporate taxes and the avoidance of corporations paying taxes in the first place, which leaves less money for public and social infrastructure.

Chapter 11• There are lots of other examples of alternatives

in the book – the trusteeship model developed by Sismondi, Mill, Lewis, and ultimately Gandhi; Huey Long’s idea of minimum wages and maximum salaries; charging high resource rents on oil and gas as Norway does to pay for social programs and other government expenditures, and so on.

• What are your ideas? - - - - -