Our founder, Joe Edelman, was asked today to provide some recommendations for Obama’s economic team. Here’s the three suggestions he made:
Until there are real extrinsic advantages to going green, only the most consumer-image related companies will do it. Although there are many marketing-related attempts to push companies and consumers in a green direction, that will not be enough. We need a growing pool of real assets (land, labor, or capital) that are only available to companies with a negative carbon footprint. As this pool grows, companies will be forced to migrate into it.
This approach can compliment cap and trade or cap and dividend. It is the “carrot” part of the carrot and stick. We need to fundamentally change the economics of going green if it is going to happen on a global scale.
As unemployment and an insufficient tax base hits America’s cities, mayors will be looking for solutions that don’t cost money. And they’re out there, from Worldchanging.org ideas to local mutual-credit and barter economies that can take up the slack when the money supply is insufficient to keep people helping each other out and using their skills. In order to prepare our cities for this situation, we need consultants in every city hall who have detailed knowledge of these solutions and can leverage urban designers, websites, and local alt-finance wizards to keep these communities alive and going as the money dries up. This could be a huge opportunity for our cities to upgrade to a 21st century form of social organization, but it will be missed without expertise in the right places, and the result could be tragic.
For some serial entrepreneurs, capitalism feels like a game. For most people, this game is too hard. Leveling up requires too much effort, teams are too hard to dynamically assemble, the scoring system for small tasks (spot work, employment) does not connect easily with the scoring system for large tasks (starting businesses or nonprofits).
We need to redesign the incentives, both financial and social, for taking on small local projects that pay off. We need to re-scale the way we as a society provision resources, so people who are successful at small entrepreneurial projects get to take one step up. Ideally, projects that can be done in a day should lead to an immediate increase in esteem and available resources.
One way to do this is through on-the-ground provisioning strategies like our Groundcrew (http://groundcrew.us). Another is with websites that build dynamic teams and create dynamic funding opportunities for small projects. A third is through more passionate engagement of local banks with small local projects