By E.G. Nadeau
Available now through your local bookstore or on Amazon
Increasing the Role of Cooperation and Cooperatives in the World Economy in the Next Quarter Century
The primary theme of The Emerging Cooperative Economy is that the world today is characterized by concentrated economic and political power, extreme inequality in access to basic goods and services, and environmental devastation. However, we are not stuck with such a dysfunctional economy forever. During the coming decades, we can transition to an international economy based on increasing political and economic democracy, meeting human needs, and sustaining the environment. This book presents a possible path for moving toward a more cooperative society and economy by 2050.
Excerpts from the Introduction to The Emerging Cooperative Economy
I have been researching, promoting, writing, and teaching about cooperatives and cooperation for more than 50 years.
This book is about our economic past and present, and our potential to transition to a more cooperative world economy in the 21st century.
What do I mean by a cooperative economy? The short answer is: An economy that puts the well-being of the many ahead of the wealth and power of a few. This book provides a longer answer along with steps we can take to make the transition from an inequitable and unsustainable world economy to one based on meeting human needs and protecting the planet.
Recent scientific evidence indicates that homo sapiens or “modern humans” emerged as a species in Africa about 300,000 years ago. Since then, we have evolved to become the most dominant and invasive species on the planet.
How did we get from a few small, transient communities in Africa to more than eight billion people spread across the entire habitable world? Why is this human-dominated world so deeply flawed by the powerlessness and uncertainty that most of us feel, by the dramatic differences in the quality of our lives, and by the damage that we inflict on our physical environment? And what can we do to overcome these problems and transition to a more cooperative society and economy?
The purpose of this book is to suggest answers to these questions from an economic perspective. The word economy is derived from the Greek words “ecos” and “nemos” which together mean “management of the household.” Over time, the meaning of economy has evolved from meeting the needs of the household to those of the broader society and environment. I like both the origin and the historical evolution of the word economy. After all, the world is our home, and it is critically important that we learn how to better manage and sustain it.
Groups of humans have had millions of different economies over the millennia, and thousands today at local community, regional, national, and international levels. When I refer to the world economy in the book, it is essentially a summing up of all these economies and represents the dominant paradigm that characterizes them.
I have chosen to use the levels of political and economic democracy, quality of life, and environmental sustainability as a combined measure of a cooperative world economic paradigm. The primary purposes of this paradigm are: 1) to provide information on the evolution of human economies among local groups, and larger aggregations of us, all the way up to the world level; and 2) to make recommendations for transitioning to a predominance of cooperative economies in the world – with high levels of political and economic democracy, an adequate quality of life for all of us, and a sustainable relationship with the ecosystems that are, in fact, the households we inhabit.
The methodology of the book is to use both qualitative and quantitative information to describe the evolution of our diverse economies to date, and to propose a future set of more cooperative economies around the world. Much of the qualitative information is presented in the form of examples and stories.
Organization of the book
The first section of the book is Part I: Our Economic Past, which contains chapters on our chimpanzee relatives, human hunters and gatherers, the early stages of agriculture, and the rise and fall of empires leading to an increasingly integrated, but dysfunctional, world economy.
The second section of the book is Part II: Toward a Cooperative World Economy, with chapters on our current world of mixed economies, the seeds of change present in these economies, and four chapters on increasing political democracy and economic democracy, reducing inequality, and creating a more sustainable environment. The final two chapters present four scenarios for the world economy in 2050, and a strategy for transitioning to a more cooperative world economy by mid-century.