We will be filling these pages under the resource heading with articles, briefing papers, a glossary, maybe cartoons, and so on. Please tell us what YOU would like to a) help you understand the issues better and b) help you explain them better to friends, family, work colleagues etc.

Ethical Finance for a Steady State Economy.  A short report by Ben Irvine.

Image of visual record of Mark Burton’s Speaker’s Corner contribution at SURF’s Sustainable Stories event, November, 2012

Slides from Presentation delivered on Steady State Economy in Stockport.

And from outside SSM, some articles that we find helpful in thinking through what a steady state economy and society might involve:

Slides by Jules Bagnoli (thank you Jules for allowing us to post them):  The Deindustrialisation of Manchester’s food.  Presented at the Ragged University. Manchester’s Food De-industrialisation .pdf version
Manchester’s Food De-industrialisation .ppt version

The vivir bien/buen vivir philosophy from the Andean region – an introductory article from Guardian, based mainly on an interview with Uruguyan social ecologist Eduardo Gudynas.  And our collection of quotations to further explore this concept, more appropriately translated as ‘right livelihood’.  See our page on learning from other cultures.

An article on the German Mittelstand model of business – Guardian again.

An article from Soundings (part academic journal, part Jon Cruddas fanzine, part source of new thinking) on the Foundational Economy and the future for the regions.  By Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Mick Moran and Karel Williams.

From NEF a report on proposals for zero carbon economic plans for Haringey, London.  Well worth a read: “As the most unequal borough in London, the challenge for Haringey is a microcosm of the global sustainability challenge – to live within environmental limits while reducing inequality.”

Interview with Susan Kramer on new banking regulations that mean banks have to account for their investment decisions, and that also make it easier to establish small, alternative and community banks.   From CLES.  Also see this on local government pension funds, and this on municipal banks.   When I went to live in Brimingham in 1973 I was intersted to see the Municipal Bank buildings – HQ is featured in the CLES article, which then promptly merged into the Trustee Savings Bank – later carpet-bagged and absorbed into the Lloyds group – little different from Marx’s ‘primitive accumulation’.  All these CLES articles relate to ideas we float in In Place of Growth.

A useful report from Localise West Midlands, entitled Mainstreaming Community Economic Development.  January, 2013.  Or read the 6 page summary.

Two articles from the March, 2013 issue of open access journal Real-World Economics Review
1)  Reduced work hours as a means of slowing climate change  by David Rosnick

The choice between fewer work hours versus increased consumption has significant implications for the rate of climate change. A number of studies (e.g. Knight et al. 2012, Rosnick and Weisbrot 2006) have found that shorter work hours are associated with lower greenhouse gas emissions and therefore less global climate change. This paper estimates the impact on climate change of reducing work hours over the rest of the century by an annual average of 0.5 percent. It finds that such a change in work hours would eliminate about one-quarter to one-half of the global warming that is not already locked in (i.e. warming that would be caused by 1990 levels of greenhouse gas concentrations already in the atmosphere). The analysis uses four “illustrative scenarios” from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and software from the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change to estimate the impact of a reduction in work hours.

2) The veil of deception over money: how central bankers and textbooks distort the nature of banking and central banking by  Norbert Häring

This paper will argue that we are being intentionally and systematically mislead about the nature of money and about the role of central banks and commercial banks in the monetary system. We are led to believe by central bankers and by textbooks, like the ones of Krugman and Wells (2009) and Mankiw and Taylor (2011), that central banks have always been government institutions acting in the public interest. In reality, central banks’ historical origin and role had more to do with the desire of private bankers to control and coordinate the process of private sector money creation. That most money is created in the private sector is something that central bankers like to gloss over and textbooks “explain” in a distorted and unnecessarily convoluted way.