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How to Grow a Local Job-Rich Economy
How to Grow a Local Job-Rich Economy
At a time when huge debates are raging over all the subsidies required by the 1 per cent of the business elite, Michael Shuman is working to shift public attention to the other, ultimately more positive, side of the picture – the sheer neglect of the 50 per cent of businesses that are local and independent, and don’t get much help from governments.
Shuman has long been an expert in the field of small, local and independent business, and has several excellent books to his credit. His latest, The Local Economy Solution, puts the issue of the 50 per cent versus the 1 per cent front and centre.
Half the population in North America works in public service or for large corporations, but half work in small and regional businesses. That half gets talked about a lot, but helped very little.
Shuman poses a choice that needs to be top-of-mind for people interested in the future of food, cities and regions. Victory for one side or the other will determine how food will shape the careers, lives, health and environment of the 50 per cent of the world population living in cities, as well as the 50 per cent of the world population living in countryside regions, where food security for entire nations comes from. From a city and food perspective, this book is about the 100%, not the 1% or the 50%.
A huge amount of taxpayers’ money hangs in the balance. According to Shuman, over 80 billion dollars a year now go to corporate boondoggles in the US that provide little in the way of jobs, community, public health or environmental benefits. In Canada, the level of annual corporate giveaways is even higher on a per capita basis. In 2014, the Fraser Institute documented a total expenditure of $684 billion over the years from 1981 to 2009.
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The Benefits of Localism
The Benefits of Localism
Could you talk about your background and how you became involved in the “buy local” movement?
Since 1982, after completing Stanford Law School, I’ve been trying to connect communities to the world. I spent my first ten years mobilizing cities to get involved in foreign policy through a nonprofit I started called the Center for Innovative Diplomacy. We published a Bulletin of Municipal Foreign Policy, which went to thousands of local elected officials across the United States, and showed how cities were promoting peace through nuclear-free zones, fighting apartheid in South Africa through divestment campaigns, and opposing the Contras’ war through Nicaraguan sister cities. With support of the Kellogg National Leadership Program, I began to see how these municipal tools could promote North-South development cooperation. I then studied the work of a group based in the Hague called Towns and Development, and wrote an evaluation of their work in a book called Towards a Global Village (Pluto, 1994). I was generally very enthusiastic about the European city-to-city movement, except that I felt that their theory and practice around sustainable economics fell far short of their (and my) aspirations. That led me to start thinking about community economics.
This was also around the time that I moved from San Francisco to Washington, and began working at the Institute for Policy Studies—first as a visiting fellow, then as a paid fellow, and then as director for six years. During this time, I wrote Going Local (Free Press, 1998), the first of four books on localization. Going Local laid out a theory of local economics. The next book, The Small-Mart Revolution (Berrett-Koehler, 2006) showed how local businesses were competing successfully against global corporations. I then concluded that the most difficult challenge local businesses faced was getting needed capital, so my next book, Local Dollars, Local Sense (Chelsea Green, 2006) focused on local investment.
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Is the Local Economy the Solution to a Post-Capitalist World?
Think local. Buy local. Support your local community. Community investment.
This all makes sense, right? Right. Then why do so many government-funded economic development programs get this wrong?
According to community economics advocate Michael Shuman, mainstream economic development today is a scam. States and local government agencies spend big money to lure corporations to their region but do little to stimulate the local economy or support local businesses. And those small businesses, not the chain stores, are often what give a neighborhood its unique identity and make it desirable to live in.
In his new book, The Local Economy Solution: How Innovative Self-Financing “Pollinator” Enterprises Can Grow Jobs and Prosperity (Chelsea Green, June 2015), Shuman debunks many of the myths around economic development—that tax breaks for wealthy corporations are beneficial for all, that only big businesses create jobs, that consumers only care about price, and that social enterprises can’t be self-financing.
Shuman, who has been a leader in the local economy movement for more than two decades, proposes low-cost pollinator businesses to stimulate the local economy through small business development. He defines a pollinator as a self-financing business with a mission of supporting other local businesses.
Unlike impersonal chain stores, local pollinator businesses foster more connection between consumers and retailers, food growers and customers, and businesses and their employees, resulting in a healthier, more equitable community, which translates into safer neighborhoods that can weather economic fluctuations.
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