Woody Tasch of Slow Money on VPR

In case you missed this, here is the head of Slow Money on VT Edition a few weeks ago.
http://www.vpr.net/episode/46653/

Slow Money Gathering

http://www.slowmoneyalliance.org/national-gathering.html
September 9-11 in Santa Fe. Wish this was closer to Vermont! Anyone going?

Commencement Address by Paul Hawken

Bill Ryerson of Population Media Center sent this out via his email listserv. I wanted to share as well. Get inspired and be proud and humbled by the work that you do and are getting prepared to do.
Paul Hawken’s Commencement Address to the Class of 2009 University of Portland, May 3rd, 2009. Paul [...]

CDAE Chair Jane Kolodinsky weighs in on bartering

http://www.vpr.net/news_detail/85168/
Jane Kolodinsky weighs in on the extent of, new developments in, and economic aspects of bartering with VPR’s Jane Lindholm on the June 15th Vermont Edition. Reminded me of the Morrill Money discussions and experiments we had earlier this year.

Refugees impact homelessness

This letter to the editor in today’s Burlington Free Press has been under my skin all day. The author discusses the five families he knows that have become homeless because of various reasons and points the fingers at incoming refugee populations in Burlington. I am crafting a response to the letter based on how during [...]

Economics of Sustainability

Listen in on the Economics of Sustainability lecture from March 17th.

Opportunity Costs, Choice Architecture & Careerism

I haven’t read anything in Behavioral Economics about the way we react to opportunity costs and so I’ll posit what I think is a serious influence on the way we make choices.  I was talking with a well-established professor and friend not long ago about careers and he was offering advice by reflecting on his [...]

Frederick the Great and Getting away from Mean Economics

I had a quote from Frederick the Great running through my head today.  I don’t remember where I heard it, but the wording is something similar to: “If you seek to defend everything, you defend nothing.” I was looking at some data while this idea was in my head and it became obvious [...]

Irrationally Obese

I was eating lunch today, an especially fatty one, and came across a quick theory on how the assumption of rational economic behavior is refuted simply by the way we eat. Traditional economic theory assumes that consumers are rationally engaged in balancing the costs and benefits of their actions to produce the highest amount [...]

Morrill Money: An Expirement in Local Currency

The CDAE grad students have decided to create a currency for the CDAE grad students. The currency, Morrill Money, will be issued to those grad students who opt-in to participate in this experiment on currency and locality. For no cost each participant will be given an amount of money that they can use [...]