I have been tweeting ten ideas from the great Geoff Mulgan, drawn from his new book, The Locust and the Bee. Here they are in a single blog:
1. Crises of efficiency become crises of interpretation – radical change happens not when things change but categories change
2. A predatory trade is one that is not reciprocal…economics has struggled to distinguish between profit and rent.
3. The economy needs care, which is why so many firms devote such efforts to create their own cultures, myths & meanings
4. The share of GDP due to the 1,000 largest firms across the OECD has risen from 31% to 72% since 1980
5. Human rights? Universal health care? These are examples of utopianism, the restless imagination of possible worlds.
6. Co-operatives and social enterprises bind their users and consumers into governance structures and prioritise values more easily
7. Human history is a drunkard’s walk where people learn from successes and failure, bumping into walls & then lurching forward
8. Education, as Roberto Unger puts it, is about providing children with “the means to resist the present”
9. Education today promotes competition between children. Tomorrow, it will place as much emphasis on co-operation.
10. We can judge any economy not just by its traditional resources but also by the complexity of its co-operative capacities.
You can purchase the Locust and the Bee (the simple conclusion of which is ‘be more like a bee’) from the tax-paying, democratic co-operative bookshop online, News from Nowhere.
Ed Mayo's Blog 