16396. (Michael H. Shuman) The Small-Mart Revolution ― How Local Businesses are Beating the Global Competition

I would like to see every­one involved with urban reform and with demo­c­ra­tic activism to read this book. There is a pow­er­ful under­cur­rent of change going on in both the Unit­ed States and Cana­da, def­i­nitely some­thing mov­ing up from the grass roots and ignored by both the media and the elite polit­i­cal drones. It’s some­thing far more cre­ative and sig­nif­i­cant than a mere flaky fash­ion for “anti-glob­al­ism” demon­stra­tions, with which the read­er might at first con­fuse it. It’s the fact that peo­ple — ordi­nary peo­ple — are start­ing to ques­tion the ortho­dox­ies they have been taught about how things “have to be”, and real­iz­ing that their self-inter­est, as well as their future, depends on re-invig­o­rat­ing local eco­nomic and polit­i­cal pow­er. You would nev­er guess it from fol­low­ing the media, but Amer­i­cans and Cana­di­ans are start­ing to shake off the pas­siv­ity and mor­bid fatal­ism that their rulers have ener­get­i­cally cul­ti­vated. They’ve begun to notice that Wal-Mart mov­ing into your neigh­bour­hood pro­duces pover­ty, not pros­per­ity, that North Amer­i­can soci­ety has been rapid­ly hemor­ag­ing cash into a “glob­al” empire of multi­na­tion­als-kings-dic­ta­tors, and that if they don’t do some­thing about it they are going to become help­less pau­pers. Shu­man describes some of the things that peo­ple have been doing, most­ly in small scale entre­pre­neur­ial and social action, to turn the tide. His analy­sis of the issues and process­es is not entire­ly accu­rate — he still suf­fers from the con­fu­sion of cat­e­gor­i­cal ter­mi­nol­ogy, such as the idi­otic “left-right” con­cept, that crip­ples reform think­ing — but he is def­i­nitely on the right track.

At the heart of his study are the premis­es that every con­sumer choice that prefers local sourc­ing over dis­tant sourc­ing increas­es the “mul­ti­plier effect” of trans­ac­tions in an econ­omy, and that import sub­sti­tu­tion is the engine of eco­nomic growth. He expos­es the dis­as­trous con­se­quences of lur­ing and brib­ing dis­tant cor­po­rate pow­ers into a local­ity, rather than cre­at­ing con­di­tions for organ­ic local eco­nomic cre­ativ­ity. These are argu­ments that Jane Jacobs out­lined decades ago, and which have large­ly been ignored by con­ven­tional econ­o­mists. Shu­man grasps that the “greater effi­ciency” of trans-nation­al cor­po­rate busi­ness con­sists entire­ly of col­lect­ing free mon­ey from tax­pay­ers, exploit­ing mar­ket dis­tor­tions man­u­fac­tured by gov­ern­ment, and deploy­ing crim­i­nal and destruc­tive strate­gies against peo­ple who have been stripped of defen­sive resources. The exam­ples he gives (such as the cor­po­ra­tion that received a quar­ter of a mil­lion dol­lars of free mon­ey from tax­pay­ers for every job it vague­ly promised to pro­duce in a city, and did not even do so) should wake up the read­er to the absur­dity of their gov­ern­ments’ poli­cies. He also grasps that those same gov­ern­ments will quick­ly “agree” with ratio­nal crit­ics and make a big, but entire­ly pho­ny, show of fol­low­ing the ratio­nal path, while chang­ing noth­ing. This shows that he has some real-life expe­ri­ence of try­ing to reform things. But he is at his best when he describes sit­u­a­tions where ded­i­cated peo­ple have actu­ally made advances in democ­racy and pros­per­ity, despite all the obsta­cles. The good news is that those advances are more numer­ous and vig­or­ous than one would guess. The media have no inter­est in telling you about them. To describe these suc­cess­ful ini­tia­tives, Shu­man coins the acronym LOIS (“local own­er­ship and import sub­sti­tu­tion”). The term is use­ful, and I’ll incor­po­rate it into my own discussions.

There’s noth­ing in this book that I haven’t been try­ing to talk peo­ple into for the last twen­ty years, but I’ve not been in the posi­tion to influ­ence very many peo­ple. Schu­man is bet­ter placed to do so. He relies, for the most part, on con­ven­tional ter­mi­nol­ogy to explain his points and out­line his rec­om­men­da­tions, rather than take the next log­i­cal step to the reform of ter­mi­nol­ogy and con­cep­tual frame­work that I feel is nec­es­sary. But any­one who reads and absorbs his mate­r­ial will be bet­ter equipped to take that log­i­cal step.

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