Capital Institute Blog

Chet Baker’s warm, presencing voice and trumpet ushered in the inaugural event of Demos’ “Sustainable Progress Initiative” at the public policy research and advocacy group’s Manhattan offices on the night of October 6. The Initiative’s new senior policy analyst Mijin Cha and its director Lew Daly introduced best-selling author and economist Juliet Schor and her plenitude model, and the evening (which was cosponsored by the World Policy Institute)…

Twitter went aflutter this week with late-breaking (two years late) news in Smithsonian Magazine that Australian physicist Graham Turner had compared the findings of the landmark Limits to Growth report to actual recorded data from 1972-2000 and the Limits to Growth model held up remarkably well. Turner’s report, titled “A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of…

Twitter went aflutter this week with late-breaking (two years late) news in Smithsonian Magazine that Australian physicist Graham Turner had compared the findings of the landmark Limits to Growth report to actual recorded data from 1972-2000 and the Limits to Growth model held up remarkably well.  Turner’s report, titled “A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality,” finds…

In researching our soon-to-be-released Field Guide study of the Manufacturing Renaissance Council we discovered an illuminating 2011 Brookings Institution white paper, “The Federal Role in Supporting Urban Manufacturing,” co-authored by Joan Byron and Nisha Mistry. The paper focuses exclusively on the emergence of Small Urban Manufacturers (SUMs) as a trend that is transforming the American manufacturing landscape. SUMs are defined…

Capital Institute’s work on financial system reform is very much driven by the concept of system resilience. In an email exchange last week Bill Rees, co-creator of the “ecological footprint,” fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute, and professor at the University of British Columbia, invited us to look at resilience from a perspective we often fail to consider. As he explains…

A report commissioned by the Global Alliance for Banking on Values and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, published in March, shows that over the 2007-2010 period, 17 values-based banks outperformed 29 leading mainstream banks by a number of key measures, including loan and deposit growth, capital strength, and return on assets. The values-based banks, which include Triodos, VanCity, New Resource…

A research report by The European Association of Cooperative Banks, “European and Cooperative Banks in the Financial and Economic Turmoil: First Assessments,” delineates five characteristics of the European cooperative banking model that have contributed to its resiliency. These are strong capitalization, a business model that puts members and customers first, built-in anti-cyclical behavior, tight bottom-up control mechanisms, and a democratic…

The Limits to Growth co-author Jorgen Randers recently released 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next 40 Years that attempts to project global economic and ecological trends for the next forty years based on similar thinking to that which underpinned the controversial Club of Rome report.  Capital Institute agrees with the scale of the challenge Randers presents. But we take…

The new documentary “The Economics of Happiness” draws attention to the ills of globalization in both the developing and developed world, and features a number of friends of Capital Institute, including Juliet Schor and Bill McKibben. The director, Helena Norberg-Hodge, a champion of the localization movement, is the founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture. The…

Capital Institute is now acting as content advisor to “Money & Life,” a documentary in progress that asks profound questions about the purpose of money. Directed and co-produced by Katie Teague, the film invites viewers to examine their own attitudes toward money, explores innovations such as complementary currencies, and profiles businesses that are facilitating new relationships to money. The film…

Shift Change: Putting Democracy to Work, a documentary film in progress by award-winning filmmakers Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin, tells the stories of employee-owned businesses, and highlights, among other projects, Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives. Young and Dworkin’s recent film,  Good Food was broadcast on PBS in 2010, and also 4 previous productions.  WithShift Change, scheduled to be completed in time for the…

James Galbraith and Dean Baker have praised Eric Laursen’s new book, The People’s Pension, for its riveting account of the history of the social security system and the ongoing wars around it. But what caught our attention at Capital Institute was Laursen’s intriguing argument that social security should be viewed as a living and ever evolving program that can be…

I read Gus Speth’s The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and the Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability(2008), before I met the man. I recall it ending on something of a down note, with an acknowledgment that the environmental movement had in many ways failed to fulfill its mission and a sense of “over to you…

A year and a half ago when we spoke to Gar Alperovitz for our Braintrust series on thought leaders who have most influenced us at Capital Institute, he began the conversation by asking, “If you are not a fan of either socialism or corporate capitalism, what are your alternatives and how do you get there?” Gar’s new book, What Then…

I first “met” Dan O’Neill in the spring of 2009 when I was researching an article for the New York Society of Security Analysts about Herman Daly and his groundbreaking vision of the steady state economy. At the time Dan was the European director of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) and a postgraduate research student…