SKAGGS
ISLAND FOUNDATION
Community Education & Information Systems for Sonoma Valley & the North Bay
HOME
PAGE
Other Skaggs Island Foundation Web Sites:
SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITY ECONOMICS
Hot Links:
THE DESIGN OF SUSTAINABLE ECONOMIC SYSTEMS IN A SERVICE ECONOMY
SUSTAINABLE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT for SONOMA COUNTY (Under Construction)
COMMUNITY SUPPORT DOLLAR (CSD) PROJECT WEB SITES
RESOURCES for HUMANISTIC & TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY
|
|
|
A network of professional community development resources and a model community development curriculum committed to applying human systems theory and depth psychology to sustainable and fulfilling community development.
Economic institutions and conventions are the glue that holds the postmodern world together. Globalization is promoted by communications and information processing technology because it creates the global village of shared images foreseen by Marshall McLuhan. But even more significantly at the practical level, globalization is promoted by the linking and acceleration of the economic transactions of trade and finance made possible by this technological revolution. For that reason, a basic understanding of economic institutions is a necessity for ordinary citizens, as well as for those who wish to promote positive community and social development.Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom of capitalism, as portrayed in the media as well as in most college economic courses, is one-sided. It focuses on the strengths of capitalist institutions--the market, free trade, supply and demand, and their enormous capacity to promote invention and growth--and ignores those aspects of wealth and well-being that these institutions do not manage so effectively--the common good, the environment, the quality of social life. These latter forms of wealth are as real and as important to the quality of life as material possessions. The imbalance in capitalist society's ability to manage public and private wealth led to the Marxist and socialist critiques of capitalism in the nineteenth century, as well as to the development of the modern welfare state as a way to ameliorate and control the dissatisfaction that this inevitable imbalance creates. In the postwar period, the liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith updated the analysis of this imbalance in The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1858). Unfortunately, we still do not as a society know how to find the proper balance.
This imbalance is a major challenge to those of us who would promote the development of healthy communities. Fortunately, the technology that is promoting capitalist global economic integration also offers resources for disentangling community and bioregional development from the webs of global finance, which unfortunately involve a large component of potentially destabilizing speculation, as well as a healthy capacity to promote technological innovation. Information technology provides local communities with the capability to track and manage information about local human and natural resource at a level of precision and reliability that was previously accessible only to large corporations with the capacity to employ squadrons of data processing accountants, bureaucrats, and middle managers. A community can measure the state of its wealth and well-being quite accurately, whereas in the past such measurements were limited to the very rough approximations of macro-economics.
