According to parasite stress theory, we should see higher levels of collectivism in situations of higher pathogen stress, but not in response to other kinds of material insecurity. 

According to the material insecurity or institutional hypotheses, we should expect people to exhibit less collectivism and in-group loyalty when state-level institutions successfully meet people’s basic needs and guard against material threats.

Finally, the asocial life history hypothesis suggests that in situations where people have fewer opportunities to control risk, for example, in situations of greater mortality and economic uncertainty, they will avoid investments in anything but their own immediate reproduction (and thus eschew commitments to relationships and other social investments).

Another important distinction between these different theories is the feedbacks they posit.

Parasite stress and asocial life history theories both assume a relatively fixed environment to which individuals adapt.

The material insecurity or institutional hypothesis, on the other hand, assumes positive co-evolutionary feedbacks, whereby the existence of beneficial institutions can lead people to make further investments in those institutions to render them even better investments in the future. Thus, the material insecurity or institutional hypothesis can lead to novel social trajectories which are not purely driven by initial conditions—such as parasite levels—in a setting.…

Suggestive rather than conclusive, but interesting nevertheless.

Evonomics
A New Theory That Explains Economic Individualism and Collectivism
Daniel Hruschka | Associate Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University

Daniel Little — Fissioning community

What is a community, and what forces exist to either preserve the strands of community or to erode those strands? 

To start, a community is a population within a defined geographical space. It is a group of people who have their own interests, identities, and affinities. It is a group of people who act in a variety of ways — work, garden, vote in elections, raise children, join protest movements, support the government, steal cars, and attend public events. It is a group of people who are located within a space of social relationships — a set of social network graphs detailing their relations to family, friends, co-workers, fellow worshippers, fellow members of sports teams and civic associations. It is a group of people who have strong ties and weak ties to a range of other people and organizations. And it is a group of individuals who have ideas about how society should work, what is fair, who benefits from current social and political arrangements. 

What makes a collection of people into a community rather than a jumble of unrelated individuals? There needs to be something in common, something that ties individuals together so they are to some degree willing to act in consideration of others in the group—a set of values, a set of shared purposes, a set of shared commitments to rules and laws of action in society. A strong community demonstrates a high degree of common respect for these values, rules, and laws. A weak community is the society that Hobbes feared—an agglomeration of self-interested actors competing for power and wealth, in which life is nasty, brutish, and short.…

The fundamental weakens of any liberalism that takes the individual to be elemental and self-interest to be the determinative driving force.

Understanding Society
Fissioning community
Daniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor

Bill Mitchell — Neo-liberalism has compromised the concept of a citizen

This is the key failing of neoliberal capitalism, as well as any social, political and economic system based on individualism. The assumption of homo economicus as rational utility maximizer by nature is wrong. This assumption underlies the so-called "laws of economics" that are supposedly similar to the laws of (19th century) physics based on atomism. Human being are not like atoms and don't behave like atoms.

The more correct conception is homo socialis, in the Greek of Aristotle, zoon politikon, that was developed millennia ago. For Aristotle the end or goal (telos) of humans is living a good life in a good society. Then question becomes what is a good life and what is a good society, and how do they relate to each other to result in a full human life.

The rule of law and rights are fundamental to this, along with the recognition of universality along with individuality, that is, all people share the same nature as human persons even through each is unique as an individual.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Neo-liberalism has compromised the concept of a citizen
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at the Charles Darwin University, Northern Territory, Australia

Scott Keyes — 'Occupy' Group Houses Homeless Couple for Christmas—Plans to House More in 'Tiny Houses'

Innovative group builds tiny homes that cost just $3,000, paid for by donations.

AlterNet
'Occupy' Group Houses Homeless Couple for Christmas—Plans to House More in 'Tiny Houses'
Scott Keyes | Think Progress

See also Tiny House Communities: a Solution to Homelessness, Here's What Austin's Newest Housing For the Chronically Homeless Looks Like, Tiny House Community, Tiny House Living, and The Tiny House Blog.

David de Ugarte — Business models and their meaning for you, who lives to learn

Do you need to fit into businesses, or do you need to fit the business model into what you believe and what you want? Today, we’ll take a look at the the main models within reach, and their relationship with knowledge, conversation, and those things we value.

Las Indias in English
Business models and their meaning for you, who lives to learn
David de Ugarte

(h/t Shareable)

John Robb — Here’s How to Build an Engine of Prosperity in Your Community

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
Here’s How to Build an Engine of Prosperity in Your Community
John Robb

Link to makerspaces worldwide at bottom of post. There are a lot of them! Similar to makerspaces are tool libraries, which are now proliferating, too.

Reminds me of the free universities in the Sixties when all sorts of free courses where given by volunteers.

Solidarity Economics

Defining Solidarity Economics

But what exactly is this "solidarity economy approach"? For some theorists of the movement, it begins with a redefinition of economic space itself. The dominant neoclassical story paints the economy as a singular space in which market actors (firms or individuals) seek to maximize their gain in a context of scarce resources. These actors play out their profit-seeking dramas on a stage wholly defined by the dynamics of the market and the state. Countering this narrow approach, solidarity economics embraces a plural and cultural view of the economy as a complex space of social relationship in which individuals, communities, and organizations generate livelihoods through many different means and with many different motivations and aspirations—not just the maximization of individual gain. The economic activity validated by neoclassical economists represents, in this view, only a tiny fraction of human efforts to meet needs and fulfill desires.

What really sustains us when the factories shut down, when the floodwaters rise, or when the paycheck is not enough? In the face of failures of market and state, we often survive by self-organized relationships of care, cooperation, and community. Despite the ways in which capitalist culture generates and mobilizes a drive toward competition and selfishness, basic practices of human solidarity remain the foundation upon which society and community are built. Capitalism's dominance may, in fact, derive in no small part from its ability to co-opt and colonize these relationships of cooperation and mutual aid....

At its core, solidarity economics rejects one-size-fits-all solutions and singular economic blueprints, embracing instead a view that economic and social development should occur from the bottom up, diversely and creatively crafted by those who are most affected. As Marcos Arruda of the Brazilian Solidarity Economy Network stated at the World Social Forum in 2004, "a solidarity economy does not arise from thinkers or ideas; it is the outcome of the concrete historical struggle of the human being to live and to develop him/herself as an individual and a collective. 

Similarly, contrasting the solidarity economy approach to historical visions of the "cooperative commonwealth," Henri de Roche noted that "the old cooperativism was a utopia in search of its practice and the new cooperativism is a practice in search of its utopia." Unlike many alternative economic projects that have come before, solidarity economics does not seek to build a singular model of how the economy should be structured, but rather pursues a dynamic process of economic organizing in which organizations, communities, and social movements work to identify, strengthen, connect, and create democratic and liberatory means of meeting their needs.

Success will only emerge as a product of organization and struggle. "Innovative practices at the micro level can only be viable and structurally effective for social change," said Arruda, "if they interweave with one another to form always-broader collaborative networks and solidarity chains of production-finance-distribution-consumption-education-communication."

This is, perhaps, the heart of solidarity economics—the process of networking diverse structures that share common values in ways that strengthen each. Mapping out the economic terrain in terms of "chains of solidarity production," organizers can build relationships of mutual aid and exchange between initiatives that increase their collective viability. At the same time, building relationships between solidarity-based enterprises and larger social movements builds increased support for the solidarity economy while allowing the movements to meet some of the basic needs of their participants, demonstrate viable alternatives, and thus increase the power and scope of their transformative work.

Dollars & Sense — Real World Economics
Other Economies are Possible!

Organizing toward an economy of cooperation and solidarity

Ethan Miller

Joel Dietz — How to Build a Vibrant Open Source Community

One of the important principles when considering open source projects and related communities is there needs to be an ecosystem around the project for the community to thrive. This is to recognize the fact that sharing is hard work, and that to share things well requires an additional degree of discipline that is often not present in other contexts. Although most of these guidelines are derived from experience in the software world, they're applicable in many other places.

Shareable — Community
How to Build a Vibrant Open Source Community
Joel Dietz

Cat Johnson — The Top 10 New Books about the Sharing Economy

Want to hunker down with some good, shareable nonfiction this winter? Classic titles of the sharing economy, includingThe Mesh and What’s Mine is Yours , are good places to start. If you’re ready for more, we’ve rounded up a collection of 10 new books (plus three bonus selections) for the hardcore sharer that delve into the inner-workings of collaborative consumption, sharing law, the cultural shift toward collaboration, the importance of community-building, and more.

Shareable
The Top 10 New Books about the Sharing Economy
Cat Johnson

Cat Johnson — The Rise of the Sharing Communities

“To me, the question is not so much about whether access is better than ownership,” says Ouishare co-founder Antonon Leonard. “It's about people. It's a change in culture. People have just started to realize that they have amazing opportunities to express themselves, be their own bosses, and start a new life.”

Leonard stresses that community “is everything” and that Ouishare is built around people who do things, not those who say they will do things.

“We need complex solutions to solve complex world issues,” he says. “We bet that it's only by connecting people with different perspectives that we'll be able to bring sustainable change. Sharing is an amazing opportunity to build a community and you need to build a community in order to make sharing work.”

Shareable
The Rise of the Sharing Communities
Cat Johnson

Creativity is enhanced by creating information, emotion, and tool-rich  communities and environments.

George Monbiot — Romnesia: The Ability of the Very Rich to Forget the Context in Which They Made Their Money

A potent myth is being used to justify economic capture by a parasitic class.

Monbiot.com
Romnesia: The Ability of the Very Rich to Forget the Context in Which They Made Their Money
George Monbiot (published in the Guardian 24th September 2012)

(h/t AlterNet)

Resurgence of Community — "Life Is Cheaper -- And Richer -- In Co-Housing"

It's not just about saving money; it's also about re-creating the community and connection that we've been missing

Read it at AlterNet
Life Is Cheaper -- And Richer -- In Co-Housing
by Sven Eberlein | YES! Magazine

The co-housing movement is not new. See the Co-Housing Association of America web site.

Coliving resurrected

Well, coliving — pooling to share a commons — never died, but after the Seventies, it was largely an underground phenomenon that most mainstream people would have been unaware of. I lived in shared housing with other people as much in my adult life as not, and it began in the military, the US Navy to be exact. You can't find much more of a coliving experience than on a naval vessel, and several of the junior officers would pool to rent a nice beach house while we were on rotation in the the US. So it was good practice for things to come.

Communes and group living were widely associated with DFH's in the Sixties and Seventies, and there was a lot of truth to that. But there were also a lot of professionals from virtually all fields, in addition to the usual suspects like artists and musicians. At one time or another, I colived with professors of different disciplines, physicists, engineers, lawyers, artists, musicians, CPA's, physicians, IT professionals, business people, and assorted canine and feline companions. No economists or financial types, though, as far as I can recall. 

Pooling resources in a commons generates a lot of leverage, and cooperation and coordination allows for living way beyond one's individual means unless one is born to wealth. But it goes far beyond just sharing space and stuff as a type of alternative housing. It is really about creating community based on sharing in a commons that was intentionally constructed and nurtured.

In the following post, Jessica Reeder narrates how this lifestyle is again coming to the fore in a new generation.

Read it at Shareable | Work and Living

Hacking Home: Coliving Reinvents the Commune for a Networked Age
By Jessica Reeder

In 2006, Jessy Kate Schingler and four other young engineers landed jobs at NASA’s Ames Research Center. They suddenly needed a place to live in Silicon Valley, but rather than opt for cheap housing with a long commute, they pooled their resources and rented a palatial 5,000 square foot property in Cupertino. The Rainbow Mansion was born.

It was more than just a luxury home full of brilliant young minds. Dubbed “an intentional community”, The Rainbow Mansion was an experiment in a new type of cohabitation. The house began hosting hackathons and salons in its library, inviting Silicon Valley’s best and brightest to participate. “Right away it set itself in motion,” Schingler says. “It had this sort of accidental mystique about it." 

In the six years since, the Rainbow Mansion has housed 60 people from 12 countries, along with employees from Google, Apple and Tesla. One of Schingler’s cofounders, Chris Kemp, became CTO of IT at NASA. And Schingler herself has become an advocate of coliving, the practice of bringing extraordinary people under one roof to live, work and change the world together.

John Michael Greer — The Rumbling of Distant Thunder

Something has gone very wrong. That’s the message that’s rumbling like distant thunder through the crawlspaces of the American imagination just now. Something has gone very wrong, and those whose public claim to power is their supposed ability to manage things so that they don’t go wrong—the captains of finance and brokers of political power who move from photo op to press conference to high-level meeting and back again—don’t know how to fix it.

This post is "of interest" to generalists who attempt to discern obscure patterns and hidden influences of event in cultural and institutional frameworks, which are ever-shifting. Many people are beginning to see this as spiritual crisis and are talking with each other about it.

Read it at The Archdruid Report

The Rumbling of Distant Thunder

John Michael Greer | Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America
(h/t Lambert at Naked Capitalism)

 The second point that stands out is the extent to which people in that tribe—and, I suspect, across a broader spectrum of society as well—are hungry for meaningful discussions of one of the taboo topics of our age, the relation of spirituality to the shape of our future. That hunger came as a surprise to our hosts; Orren Whiddon, the founder and general factotum of the retreat center where the conference took place, responded with noticeable discomfort to my proposal to give a talk on peak oil and spirituality, and his mood was not improved when two of the other speakers, Carolyn Baker and Dmitry Orlov, wanted to address the same topic. Still, all three talks went forward; I talked about the lessons that traditional spiritualities offer for understanding our predicament, Dmitry discussed religion as a mode of social organization that can sustain itself for millennia, and Carolyn explored collapse as an initiatory experience—and all three talks drew large and enthusiastic audiences.

Common Sense is now "Bold New Thinking!"

Why Building Community Wealth is a Key Challenge to Corporate Power

something new has exploded in America’s communities; “community wealth building”

So far so good.  Hope we can get over the surprise at such "boldness," and get back to viewing it as the obvious minimum?  The perennial springboard for exploring, not burying options?

Asking honeypots for grants of fiat currency?  Get real!  There's ALWAYS more where that came from.  Just grant some to ourselves.   Declare our own prizes.  Create our own jobs, and maybe even vote for our own representatives!!!  Why not just OpenSource everything, and re-distribute aggregate power?

In preparation, how about changing K-12 curricula, to incorporate 3 springboard themes?

1) Aggregate success tracks the quality and pace of distributed decision-making?

2) Aggregates generate pace simply by the act of distributing decision-making.

3) Highest aggregate return is always the return-on-coordination?

I mean, with those foundations in place, everything else - certainly macroeconomics & fiscal policy - are just incidental details.  In fact, politics itself would be just another Automatic Stabilizer, only reduced to a mobile app.

With that kind of effort in place, maybe we wouldn't churn out so many economists & bankers more interested in self & math than in welfare of the people and national capabilities.

ps:  Despite trying to sound politically correct, "exploding" might give DHS the idea that community wealth is dangerous, and even associated with terrorism.   Listen for the faint sounds of drones hovering.

A Free Beginner's Guide to the Sharing Economy by Paul M. Davis

Get it at Shareable — Sharing by design
A Free Beginner's Guide to the Sharing Economy
by Paul M. Davis

In Transition 2.0 — printing your own money, growing food, localising economies, and setting up community power stations

To mark the release of In Transition 2.0 — an inspirational film about communities printing their own money, growing food, localising their economies and setting up community power stations — I spoke to Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Network and Transition Totnes, about energy ownership, cooperative finance strategies, and how storytelling can change our expectations of ourselves and our communities.

Read it at Energy Bulletin
In Transition 2.0 — printing your own money, growing food, localising economies, and setting up community power stations
by Jonny Gordon-Farleigh

Charles Eisenstein — Re-Thinking Money: Is Real Wealth Currency? Debt? Or Community?

Our capital-based economy isn't working. David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years explains why, and points to what real wealth might look like.

Read it at AlterNet
Re-Thinking Money: Is Real Wealth Currency? Debt? Or Community?
by Charles Eisenstein

New Wave

Musings of visions and dreams of possible futures, speaking truth in a time of lies and pondering my place in the midst of this radical awakening and fall of the Empire.

Read it at Out on a Limb
The Gentle Economic Collapse of the Empire
by Mary Hall

Warning for economically straight folks: "Utopian socialism"

I would not call this collapse of the presently cresting wave, but rather would see it as a new wave swelling up.

As I see it, there are two major forces at work in creating a major trend that is developing, and both are libertarian-anarchistic. One is anarcho-capitalism, and the other is anarcho-communitarianism. These are manifesting socially and politically as the Tea Party, on one hand, and Occupy and the 99% Movement, on the other. The mainstream has not yet grasped the underlying structure and dynamic. Therefore, mainstream perception of both is mostly a caricature of the underlying reality, and so it misses most of the substance and interplay.

In most major fields a trifecta is operative. In socio-politics it is "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité," that is, freedom, equality, and solidarity or community.

Liberty involves individual freedom and protections, as well as self-determination. Liberty includes freedom from arbitrarily imposed constraint, freedom to choose as one wills, and freedom for self-determination and self-actualization.

Equality involves rights and responsibilities, the rule of law, equivalence of persons before the law, due process, and absence of privilege. Equality recognizes diversity of individual characteristics and circumstances. Equality holds that all humans are identical as persons while being diverse as individuals.

Solidarity implies community based on voluntary cooperation of self-sufficient individuals for mutual benefit in creating and administering institutions suitable for accomplishing tasks at hand, guided by natural leadership. Solidarity recognizes that relationships among individuals in social groups is as significant socially, politically and economically as individuals as members of the group. "No man is an island." Human beings are inherently social, which implies complex webs of relationship.

The various social, political, and economic positions approach resolving this trifecta differently. History is the dialectical record of interaction among these positions and shifts in which is "king of the mountain" where and for how long.