economy

Diversity is Good for the Economy

- Adam Clare

The benefits of having a diverse workplace and a diverse community are obvious, but it always helps if some researchers back up these common-sense positions with helpful facts and demonstrated success. For those who champion diversity initiatives you’ll be pleased to know that a diverse workforce can mean $630 more per year per employee in a retail environment.

The study, co-authored by professors from Temple University, Rutgers University and Davidson College, studied 739 outlets of the U.S. department store J.C. Penney. According to the study, stores where the pool of employees mirrored the ethnic makeup of the communities they served earned an average of $94,000 more per year than stores in which staff wasn’t as representative of the wider community.

That figure averages out to $630 more per employee, and earned the company an extra $69 million last year, the study found.

Read more at The Star.

Economy Down, Happiness Up

- Adam Clare

It seems like the world has its own life-work balance and thanks to the fact that we’re (on average) working less we are happier!

The second conclusion challenges the received notions of mankind’s moods. A tenet of political science is that happiness levels rise with wealth and then plateau, usually when a country’s national income per head reaches around $25,000 a year. “The richer a country gets,” argued Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in “The Spirit Level”, an influential book of 2009, “the less getting still richer adds to the population’s happiness.” Many on the left have concluded that pursuing further economic growth is pointless. Even right-wing politicians such as Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, have set up projects to study “gross national happiness”.

Read the rest at The Economist.

Craft Brewers Revive Local Economies

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

A bunch of towns in the USA have had to close their manufacturing plants as free trade and the global economy transplant jobs elsewhere. This has left a lot of people unemployed and a lot of warehouse and manufacturing space open. The surplus of space has given a great opportunity to craft brewers whose sales are increasing in the ongoing American recession.

Craft brewers are using the space abandoned by the old manufactures and hiring people who lost their jobs. Instead of producing useless consumer goods they are now producing delicious beer. All the more reason to drink from your local brewery instead of the big beer conglomerates.

Many brewers large and small are already focused on making their infamously resource-intensive industry more sustainable. Vermont’s Magic Hat Brew Company recently installed a digester that produces natural gas from the organic waste products of beer production; even giant Anheuser-Busch captures waste heat from brewing and puts it to use. Many local brewers are community-minded; craft beer giant Samuel Adams rents its corporate headquarters at the old Haffenreffer Brewery in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, a space they share with light industry, a couple of restaurants, artists’ studios, a fitness club, and a variety of local nonprofits.

“Shoe Town to Brew Town” offers an opportunity not only to celebrate such initiatives, but forge relationships between brewers and experts to leverage the unique qualities of the craft-beer industry. For Jimmy Carbone and his fellow craft-brew enthusiasts, beer pairs well with a menu that includes sustainability, jobs, and vibrant communities.

Read the full article here.

Thanks to Mirella over at Beerology.

Soros Funding New Ways to Think About the Economy

- Adam Clare

Billionaire George Soros has provided $50 million to establish the Institute for New Economic Thinking that looks to rethink how modern economies work. Modern capitalism is need of a complete overhaul given the ongoing global struggles countries are having running and improving their economies – let alone improving the lives of their people.

It’s good to see that even the people who profited from modern capitalism see it’s failures and want to fix them.

What does the institute aim to achieve?

A radical reorientation of economic theory. Exactly what shape it will take is impossible to predict, but I hope it will recognise the fundamental uncertainties in our economic system. These uncertainties have been ignored for the past 25 years.

Wouldn’t it be better to eliminate the uncertainties, so we can avoid a repeat of the financial crisis of 2008?

We will never be able to do that. There will always be a threat of instability – it’s built into the market. You can’t avoid it, but you can be aware of it. Perfection might be unattainable, but we can become less imperfect by recognising the imperfections.

Tell me about some of the projects that have been selected for funding by the institute.

I am encouraged by the fact that INET is embracing multiple disciplines. The first round of grants have been given to people with backgrounds in law, history, medicine and science, as well as economics and finance. Several projects are taking concepts directly from science, such as the mathematics behind the spread of contagious diseases, and applying the principles to financial markets. During the financial crisis we saw instances of contagion – how a relatively small number of infected institutions made others sick.

Read the rest at the New Scientist.

Gross National Happiness Redux

- Fono

We’ve written about Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness before, but now that the new policy has been in place in a while, it’s a good time to revisit the topic.

First, Bhutan has very nicely posted all their research online.

Second, the good news is that Bhutan’s research is being applied elsewhere, within the rubric of the burgeoning happiness studies.

Studies of life satisfaction around the world are now enhanced by regular polling in many countries using a broad range of questions, and have led to consistent findings in recent years that the highest levels of satisfaction are found in such northern European countries as Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden—countries with a strong sense of social solidarity and attention to work-life balance, small income gaps, and—contrary to the thinking of American conservatives—high taxation rates.

These studies find that many relatively income-poor nations, such as Costa Rica and Colombia, also have high rates of life satisfaction, leading one group of British researchers to establish a “Happy Planet Index,” dividing life satisfaction scores by ecological footprints. They find that many so-called developing countries actually rank at the top of their index.

Read more at Worldchanging

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