This will be my last post about Making Mondragon, a book I have just read about the Mondragon cooperative complex (prior posts: I, II). I read the book hoping to clear up some confusions I had about how cooperative businesses could successfully handle certain problems. Here I address how Mondragon deals [...]
New post at policy shop. Excerpt:
Of course the fixation on stocks is rather predictable. All sorts of people hold stock, but the wealthy especially. According to the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances, while 17.9 percent of all families have stock holdings, 52.4 percent of those in the wealthiest 10 percent of families [...]
I am reading Making Mondragon right now, trying to answer some questions I have about how a cooperative business can succeed. Earlier I posted about the way Mondragon handles the owner part of the worker-owner mix, which answered my question regarding how you can manage the problems caused by incoming and departing employees. [...]
Some people like to use consensus decision-making processes. Some like it so much that they have declared that all other decision-making techniques are oppressive. When people are first confronted with the idea of needing unanimous support to approve of decisions, hypothetical problems immediately occur to them. What if you can’t get unanimous agreement? What do [...]
The College Board has figures for the median debt levels of people graduating college broken down by their family’s income. The full graphic with spreadsheet is at the College Board site, but here are two of them:
The bars on the left are for graduating students with family incomes [...]
New post at policy shop. Excerpt:
There are two conceivable paths to having a low post-T&T poverty rate, this again being the rate of most significance to people’s lived lives. A country can put a lot of effort into bringing up the market incomes of low-income people. Or it can compensate for those [...]
A while ago, I had a post with an animation showing how much countries reduce their poverty rates with taxes and transfers. I have recreated that animation with a new stock of data coming from the OECD for 2010. It features 26 countries.
Each dot represents a country (hover over to see [...]
I’ve written earlier that austerity does not appear to materially benefit anyone really. This was meant to raise a challenge to the claims of some that austerity is being pushed by a class of people who stand to benefit from it. Emails and comments and various other methods of communication flooded in, but [...]
The most interesting thing about libertarians is that their normative arguments fail on their own terms. Well-constructed theories only permit disagreement on the basic principle level. Excepting consequentialist libertarians, libertarian theories are so bad that their basic principles don’t even generate the conclusions libertarians claim they do. The arguments are internally contradictory on a scale [...]
Worker cooperatives are worker-owned businesses. The left likes them for two main reasons. First, workers capture the profits the business makes, not separate owners. This arrangement therefore eliminates exploitation in the Marxist sense of the word. Second, workers control the business, not separate owners. This arrangement therefore reduces alienation, at least [...]
