Thomas Friedman, are you listening? FML - Huffington Post

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Thomas Friedman, are you listening?

by Frances Moore Lappe - Huffington Post

"I sure hope so. This week, a U.K economic research outfit flattened your "flat earth" myth.

Your 41-weeks-as-a-Times-best-seller The World is Flat celebrates revolutions in transportation and communications that have "leveled the playing field" so poor people are now rushing on to it. In this interconnected world, technology-generated economic growth is their salvation.

But an extensive New Economics Foundation study released to catch the eye of the uber-elites' World Economic Forum in Davos has demolished your thesis with one stunning finding: For every $100 of growth in per person income during the go-go 1990s a measly 60 cents ended up easing the plight of the world's poorest people. Compare this to the 1980s, supposedly a dismal decade for development and before your imagined "world flattening": Then, $100 in per person income growth meant $2.20 for the billion-plus people living on less than a dollar a day.

...... Skip

Poverty can be uprooted; it is being uprooted, but not by "growth" itself. Organized communities from Brazil to Bangladesh are creating new-rule economics that do work. New village-level worker cooperatives in India have benefited about ten times the number of households as the jobs spawned by India's high-tech industries. A borrower-owned bank and lending circles in Bangladesh have lifted roughly twice as many families out of poverty as the number of jobs, paying pennies an hour, in Bangladesh's export garment factories. Fair-trade networks are already lifting more than a million small coffee farmers out of poverty worldwide; and Brazil's landless workers, so far granted title to over 20 million acres of idle land, are now building their own farms and businesses so profits benefit their communities, not distant shareholders' bank balances.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frances-moore-lappe/thomas-friedman-are-you-_b_14552.html

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1. Good points. The real fear of corporations - what with the internet &

fast communications.. may very well be that corporations are archaic. They were invented to give groups some power in far away places that needed to be farmed & exploited. They were given endless lives. But what with the coop movement..are they needed always?

Certainly Iraq doesn't need a discount department store from the USA to go in and take all the profit. I'm sure some Iraqi somewhere is quite capable of buying shit from China themselves and paying locals poorly.

Is the one rule economic model just that? An attempt to prolong corporations beyond their best due date? (Leaving aside the unethicals)Corporations will never disappear. They are organizational marvels. The largest ones have economies of scale and efficiencies that are impossible to match. Drug companies, computer corporations, nanotechnology inventors, software producers, skilled services, biotech, arms manufacturers likely don't have to worry. But what of corporations where things are easier to get one's head around. But why can't a person in a market in India - log on and find the best place to sell themselves. Develop their own customer relationships. Find a buyer in another country and build trust.

Is this wrong? Is it un-economic? Doesn't the market work best "given perfect information". Doesn't the internet provide just that?