informal economy
sastyk | September 21, 2012Most of the comments people make about our slightly changeable and somewhat odd family are lovely. Like all parents my husband and I love hearing how beautiful our kids are, how well behaved (even when it isn't always true), how nice it is to see us all together, what fun it is to see a big family having a good time.
There are a few that trouble me a little, but I understand why people make those comments - our family is different and strange, and people are processing how to respond to it. I've made mistakes when in those kinds of situations too, so I don't mind it. I know some people get…
sastyk | May 30, 2012From The Nation, Laura Flanders has a piece on what happened to all those long-term unemployed people who have given up - with a flattering quote from yours truly (the quote is further along, to give you an incentive to read the whole thing ;-)).
Look around, it’s much more likely that the officially “unemployed” are busy, doing their best to make ends meet in whatever ways they can. Sex work, drugs and crime spring to mind, but the underground or “shadow” economy includes all sorts of off-the-books toil. From baby-sitting, bartering, mending, kitchen-garden farming and selling goods in a…
sastyk | November 10, 2011Here is the single biggest question to consider about the economic, energy and environmental unwinding we are facing - what will the economy look as we go? I get more questions about this than about anything else - what should people do for work, what should they do with savings, how should they begin to prepare themselves for a lower energy world. What I find, however, is that among both the prepared and the unprepared, there's a whole lot of people kidding themselves. There are those who imagine that there is no economy outside the world of the stock market and formal jobs - that a crash…
sastyk | October 27, 2011In _Depletion and Abundance_ I spend a lot of time talking about the ways that the informal economy is actually more robust in some ways than the formal economy, and the ways that informal economy activity can strengthen our home economies. I argue that in the Developed world, the informal economy is hidden or "housewifized" out of existance - we think of it as a small portion of our life, and not significant, but in fact, the informal economy is enormous and critical.
If you haven't read Robert Neuwirth's _Stealth of Nations_, you should, for a much more in-depth analysis of the role of…
sastyk | June 27, 2011As I gear up to finish my Adapting-in-Place book, I've been thinking a lot about the role of the informal economy in supporting a culture that can't keep growing and consuming resources at the same rate. As those of you who have been following my work for a while know, the informal economy represents the larger portion of the world economy (3/4 of all economic activity) and includes a wide range of important activities. When the formal economy fails, the informal economy is needed - and yet we have stripped the informal economy over the last decades. How to rebuild is a huge question - and…
sastyk | April 7, 2011I'm getting a lot of questions via email and comments about our experience entering into the foster parenting world, and I did want to talk about this. Some people are critical, and think we're nuts (quite possibly), some people want to watch because they want to try this too (cool), some people have been there themselves in some portion of the system - as a worker, parent or child and have a lot to teach us. I wanted to put up a post that tells more about where we are and what we're doing - and also includes an important caveat about what I will and won't be writing about.
What I Will And…
sastyk | November 10, 2010Local food is elitist! This trumpets from one paper or another, revealing that despite the growing preoccupation with good food, ultimately, it is just another white soccer Mom phenomenon. Working class people (who strangely, the paper and the author rarely seem to care about otherwise) can't afford an organic chicken or a gallon of organic milk! Ordinary people don't have time to make soup. Regular folk don't care about that stuff - that's for brie-sniffing folks, just the next rich people's food fad.
I can think of a few hundred refutations of this claim, of course. There are all of my…
sastyk | May 20, 2010Damn, I wish I'd written this! John Michael Greer takes up the Victory Garden, and puts it in its proper place - economically, politically, socially - and for zombie slaying. What's not to love? And I think he has it pretty much exactly right here - that while growing your own is never the solution to all problems, it often does mediate our potential suffering - which is why as long as there has been modernity it has been a solution to its difficulties. (Before the Victory Garden movement, there was the British cottage garden movement, a direct response to the disruptions of early…
sastyk | April 15, 2010As you know, Greer and I at times have our differences in perspective, but I think this week's column is particularly acute, and offers up two point that I think are really essential to grasp when thinking of the future.
The first is that technical feasibility is not all - that technical feasibility rests on a complex bed of other feasibilities. Thus, simply observing that it is technically possible, to, say, create zero impact cities or whatever does not usefully tell us whether we are going to do it. For example, it has been technically possible to eliminate most causes of death in…
sastyk | March 14, 2010First of all, may I ask which New York Times editor was responsible for permitting the coinage "femivore" to pass into language. Talk about illiterate (linguistically a "femivore" would be someone who ate women) and uneuphonious - yes, yes, I get that you want to get a Michael Pollan reference in there somehow, but come on... any writer worth her salt could do better than that.
Now to the meat of the thing - the essay, which profiles Shannon Hayes's book _Radical Homemakers_ attempts to argue that focusing on food has given women a new set of choices.
Hayes pointed out that the original "…