One place where Jon Elster's philosophical thinking intersects with empirical social science is in the field of institutional design. This involves an important question: What features of institutional design can be identified as having beneficent features of operation when exercised by normal groups of individuals?
This topic has cropped up several times in Elster's career. One important instance is the work he highlighted about alternatives to market society in Alternatives to Capitalism (Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds., 1989)....
This is a very interesting volume, for several reasons. The individual essays are very good, by experts like G. A. Cohen, Alec Nove, and John Roemer as well as Elster and Moene. But even more interesting is the shock value of its topic in the neo-liberal environment in which we have found ourselves for the past twenty years or so. To have serious scholars making careful, rigorous efforts to explore and evaluate "alternatives to capitalism" is very surprising in today's environment; and yet the essays were written as recently as the late 1980s. Plainly there was practical and political interest in the topic of alternatives to capitalism in those years that has largely disappeared in today's discourse. This suggests that somehow serious progressive thought has been muffled for the past twenty years. It is time to resurrect it.
All it takes to form a co-op is a small group of determined people all set on an idea to cooperatively own and operate a facet of the economy and allow them to make decisions in a democratic process. By democratizing society through housing and work, we can start a new revolution in our politics, our economy, and even our environment by choosing to consume sustainably and minimize our impact on the planet.Truthout
More people are taking action in their communities to meet their basic needs because of government corruption at all levels that protects the status quo when urgent change is needed. People are moving on many fronts to challenge the system and create the world they want to see.
On Earth Day, another step was taken to challenge elite rule. A new alternative government was announced. It is an extension of the Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala Green Party campaign for president and vice president. The Green Shadow Cabinet currently consists of more than 80 activists, scientists, lawyers, advocates, economists, health professionals, labor leaders and artists who are independent of the corporate duopoly and are actively working on solutions to the crises we face. These top-level people in their fields have taken on this responsibility as volunteers. (Full disclosure: Margaret Flowers serves as secretary of health and Kevin Zeese as attorney general, and both serve on the administrative committee of the Shadow Cabinet.)
The cabinet comes at a time when people are increasingly ready to leave the corrupt two-party system. With President Obama supporting cuts to Social Security and Medicare, drone-bombing countries with which we are not at war, and appointing Wall Street and other big business interests to his cabinet, many voters are searching for somewhere to go....Truthout | Op-Ed
Here’s something EVERY community should have, but almost none do.
This isn’t a picture of a factory or cubicles in an office building.
It’s a makerspace. In this case, it’s the Artisan’s Asylum in Somerville, MA.
What is a makerspace? It’s a place where people in the community can go to make things....Resilient Communities
One such is a group of intellectuals who go by the rather unwieldy name of Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales, or MAUSS, and who have dedicated themselves to a systematic attack on the philosophical underpinnings of economic theory. The group take their inspiration from the great early-20th century French sociologist Marcel Mauss, whose most famous work, The Gift (1925), was perhaps the most magnificent refutation of the assumptions behind economic theory ever written. At a time when "the free market" is being rammed down everyone's throat as both a natural and inevitable product of human nature, Mauss' work - which demonstrated not only that most non-Western societies did not work on anything resembling market principles, but that neither do most modern Westerners - is more relevant than ever. While Francophile American scholars seem unable to come up with much of anything to say about the rise of global neoliberalism, the MAUSS group is attacking its very foundations.In These Times
Government has finally abandoned the public interest for good, Kirkland says. He sees little potential for taking it back.
It’s now “about building self-sufficient communities that can support themselves without the government,” he said. “It’s no longer political. It’s social.
The Occupy movement, Kirkland says, teaches people how to cope with the absence of government. As social programs, school offerings and health and pension benefits get cut, working-class people will have to learn to take charge of their own communities.
Because of the movement, “they’ll be prepared for when there is no government to serve them,” he said.
Kirkland and Seidewitz do not agree with notions in the mainstream media that the Occupy Wall Street movement has died out.
“The parks were magical,” said Seidewitz, “but they served as a place where we all met each other.”
The encampments were educational. They helped people build connections and form social groups. But camping in a park and talking to like-minded people, she said, can only do so much.truthdig
“It’s now about creating alternative media sources, which is easier to do now that we have all these connections,” she said. “We’ve all woken up. So it’s not about a park anymore.”
