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CWA Blog
A Bit Rich?NEF (The New Economics Foundation) is an independent think-tank with a difference, as you might guess from their strapline: "economics as if people and the planet mattered".
NEF’s latest publication: "A Bit Rich"* calculates the value to society of a number of different jobs, whilst challenging and demolishing ten myths about pay and worth. The headline conclusions are that childcare workers and recycling workers generate benefits to society well in excess of the financial rewards the workers received, whilst top advertising executives and tax accountants destroy this social value at an extraordinary rate.
This, however, is only scratching the surface of a more thorough, and ultimately devastating critique of how the national economy values individuals and their work, and it’s a argument that holds more than passing interest for the world of community woodlands. Most if not all community woodlands are explicitly managed to produce a mix of benefits - social, environmental, economic - yet increasingly, only the last of this triumvirate is considered to matter by those who hold the purse strings.
The tension between sustainable development and economic growth is at the heart of both debates over value : wages and woods. Unfortunately at the moment the latter has the upper hand: having splurged untold billions on bailing out the bankers, our leaders don’t seem to have anything left to save the planet from climate change. Let’s hope (and campaign) for a change of heart - unless we all start do economics (and everything else) as if people and the planet mattered then we really are doomed…
* The report can be downloaded in pdf format (900 kb) from
http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/bit-rich
Next entry: Do quangos dream...?
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A couple of recommendations from the NEF report resonate particularly with community woodlands, and their social and environmental values:
"Redistribution, particularly of assets and land, is an effective way both to offset inequality and to reward jobs that the market does not", and
"Mutually owned building societies, co-operatives and land trusts are all models in which ownership takes a more collective form, and benefits are more evenly shared"
Have we asked whether NEF would like to join CWA yet?!?