CELEBRATING THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF CSE IN GAVÀ

The Grandma arrives to the CSE, Gavà

Last November 21 evening, The Grandma assisted to an important event in Gavà, the 20th anniversary of the CSE (Centre de Suport a l'Empresa), a local centre that gives support to entrepreneurs, business and unemployed people. During the trip from Barcelona to Gavà, The Grandma started to read a new novel titled This Rough Magic written by Mary Stewart.

It was a beautiful act where the main protagonists of the CSE, the workers and users of this centre, talked about their experiences during these 20 years.

The Grandma spent a nice evening remembering how many wonderful people she had met in Gavà during her staying in the city these last years. She thanks the invitation and wishes the best for this institution, their workers and their users.

After the act, when The Grandma returned home by public transport, she was reading about General Economy, Local Purchasing and Circular Economy.

An economy (from Greek οίκος that means household and νέμoμαι manage) is an area of the production, distribution and trade, as well as consumption of goods and services by different agents. Understood in its broadest sense, 'The economy is defined as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with the production, use, and management of resources'.

Economic agents can be individuals, businesses, organizations, or governments.

Economic transactions occur when two groups or parties agree to the value or price of the transacted good or service, commonly expressed in a certain currency. However, monetary transactions only account for a small part of the economic domain.

Economic activity is spurred by production which uses natural resources, labor and capital. It has changed over time due to technology (automation, accelerator of process, reduction of cost functions), innovation (new products, services, processes, expanding markets, diversification of markets, niche markets, increases revenue functions) such as, that which produces intellectual property and changes in industrial relations (most notably child labor being replaced in some parts of the world with universal access to education).

Economy

A given economy is the result of a set of processes that involves its culture, values, education, technological evolution, history, social organization, political structure and legal systems, as well as its geography, natural resource endowment, and ecology, as main factors.

These factors give context, content, and set the conditions and parameters in which an economy functions. In other words, the economic domain is a social domain of human practices and transactions. It does not stand alone.

A market-based economy is one where goods and services are produced and exchanged according to demand and supply between participants (economic agents) by barter or a medium of exchange with a credit or debit value accepted within the network, such as a unit of currency.

A command-based economy is one where political agents directly control what is produced and how it is sold and distributed. A green economy is low-carbon, resource efficient and socially inclusive.

In a green economy, growth in income and employment is driven by public and private investments that reduce carbon emissions and pollution, enhance energy and resource efficiency, and prevent the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. A gig economy is one in which short-term jobs are assigned or chosen via online platforms and a programmable economy is the set of revolutionary changes taking place in the global economy due to technology innovations. New economy is a term referred to the whole emerging ecosystem where new standards and practices were introduced, usually as a result of technological innovations.

More information: Catalonia Trade & Investment

Today the range of fields of study examining the economy revolves around the social science of economics, but may include sociology (economic sociology), history (economic history), anthropology (economic anthropology), and geography (economic geography). Practical fields directly related to the human activities involving production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of goods and services as a whole are engineering, management, business administration, applied science, and finance.

All professions, occupations, economic agents or economic activities, contribute to the economy. Consumption, saving, and investment are variable components in the economy that determine macroeconomic equilibrium. There are three main sectors of economic activity: primary, secondary, and tertiary.

Due to the growing importance of the economical sector in modern times, the term real economy is used by analysts as well as politicians to denote the part of the economy that is concerned with the actual production of goods and services, as ostensibly contrasted with the paper economy, or the financial side of the economy, which is concerned with buying and selling on the financial markets. Alternate and long-standing terminology distinguishes measures of an economy expressed in real values (adjusted for inflation), such as real GDP, or in nominal values (unadjusted for inflation).

The Grandma & The CSE 20th Anniversary

As long as someone has been making, supplying and distributing goods or services, there has been some sort of economy; economies grew larger as societies grew and became more complex.

Sumer developed a large-scale economy based on commodity money, while the Babylonians and their neighboring city states later developed the earliest system of economics as we think of, in terms of rules/laws on debt, legal contracts and law codes relating to business practices, and private property.

The Babylonians and their city state neighbors developed forms of economics comparable to currently used civil society (law) concepts. They developed the first known codified legal and administrative systems, complete with courts, jails, and government records.

The contemporary concept of the economy wasn't popularly known until the American Great Depression in the 1930s.

After the chaos of two World Wars and the devastating Great Depression, policymakers searched for new ways of controlling the course of the economy. This was explored and discussed by Friedrich August von Hayek (1899–1992) and Milton Friedman (1912–2006) who pleaded for a global free trade and are supposed to be the fathers of the so-called neoliberalism. However, the prevailing view was that held by John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), who argued for a stronger control of the markets by the state.

The theory that the state can alleviate economic problems and instigate economic growth through state manipulation of aggregate demand is called Keynesianism in his honor. In the late 1950s, the economic growth in America and Europe -often called Wirtschaftswunder (ger: economic miracle)- brought up a new form of economy: mass consumption economy. In 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) was the first to speak of an affluent society. In most of the countries the economic system is called a social market economy.

More information: Cambra de Comerç de Barcelona

With the fall of the Iron Curtain and the transition of the countries of the Eastern Block towards democratic government and market economies, the idea of the post-industrial society is brought into importance as its role is to mark together the significance that the service sector receives instead of industrialization. Some attribute the first use of this term to Daniel Bell's 1973 book, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, while others attribute it to social philosopher Ivan Illich's book, Tools for Conviviality. The term is also applied in philosophy to designate the fading of postmodernism in the late 90s and especially in the beginning of the 21st century.

With the spread of Internet as a mass media and communication medium especially after 2000-2001, the idea for the Internet and information economy is given place because of the growing importance of e-commerce and electronic businesses, also the term for a global information society as understanding of a new type of all-connected society is created. In the late 2000s, the new type of economies and economic expansions of countries like China, Brazil, and India bring attention and interest to different from the usually dominating Western type economies and economic models.

The economy may be considered as having developed through the following phases or degrees of precedence:

The Digital Economy

-The ancient economy was mainly based on subsistence farming.

-The industrial revolution phase lessened the role of subsistence farming, converting it to more extensive and mono-cultural forms of agriculture in the last three centuries. The economic growth took place mostly in mining, construction and manufacturing industries. Commerce became more significant due to the need for improved exchange and distribution of produce throughout the community.

-In the economies of modern consumer societies phase there is a growing part played by services, finance, and technology—the knowledge economy.

In modern economies, these phase precedences are somewhat differently expressed by the three-sector theory:

-Primary stage/degree of the economy: Involves the extraction and production of raw materials, such as corn, coal, wood and iron. (A coal miner and a fisherman would be workers in the primary degree.)

-Secondary stage/degree of the economy: Involves the transformation of raw or intermediate materials into goods e.g. manufacturing steel into cars, or textiles into clothing. (A builder and a dressmaker would be workers in the secondary degree.) At this stage the associated industrial economy is also sub-divided into several economic sectors (also called industries). Their separate evolution during the Industrial Revolution phase is dealt with elsewhere.

-Tertiary stage/degree of the economy: Involves the provision of services to consumers and businesses, such as baby-sitting, cinema and banking. (A shopkeeper and an accountant would be workers in the tertiary degree.)

-Quaternary stage/degree of the economy: Involves the research and development needed to produce products from natural resources and their subsequent by-products. (A logging company might research ways to use partially burnt wood to be processed so that the undamaged portions of it can be made into pulp for paper.) Note that education is sometimes included in this sector.

More information: OECD

Other sectors of the developed community include:

-The public sector or state sector (which usually includes: parliament, law-courts and government centers, various emergency services, public health, shelters for impoverished and threatened people, transport facilities, air/sea ports, post-natal care, hospitals, schools, libraries, museums, preserved historical buildings, parks/gardens, nature-reserves, some universities, national sports grounds/stadiums, national arts/concert-halls or theaters and centers for various religions).

-The private sector or privately run businesses.

-The social sector or voluntary sector.

More information: Economics Discussion

Local purchasing is a preference to buy locally produced goods and services over those produced farther away. It is very often abbreviated as a positive goal, buy local, that parallels the phrase think globally, act locally, common in green politics.

On the national level, the equivalent of local purchasing is import substitution, the deliberate industrial policy or agricultural policy of replacing goods or services produced on the far side of a national border with those produced on the near side, i.e., in the same country or trade bloc.

Historically, there have been so many incentives to buy locally that no one had to make any kind of point to do so, but with current market conditions, it is often cheaper to buy distantly produced goods, despite the added costs in terms of packaging, transport, inspection, retail facilities, etc. As such, one must now often take explicit action if one wants to purchase locally produced goods.

Local Purchaising or Local Economy

These market conditions are based on externalized costs, argues local economy advocates. Examples of externalized costs include the price of war, asthma, or climate change, which are not typically included in the cost of a gallon of fuel, for instance.

Most advocates for local economics address contracting and investment, as well as purchasing. Agricultural alternatives are being sought, and have manifested themselves in the form of farmers' markets, farmed goods sold through the community cooperatives, urban gardens, and even school programs that endorse community agriculture.

The argument that buying local is good for the economy is questioned by many economic theorists. They argue that transportation costs actually account for a fraction of overall production prices, and that choosing less efficient local products over more efficient nonlocal products is an economic deadweight loss. Moreover, the community as a whole does not actually save money because consumers have to spend so much more on the more expensive local products.

Similarly the moral purchasing argument has been questioned as more and more consumers consider the welfare of people in countries other than their own. Most buy local campaigns rely on the implicit assumption that providing jobs for people in the consumers' own country is more moral than in foreign countries. They also imply that money going to foreign countries is worse than money staying in the consumers' own country. Increasingly, these campaigns have been called out as paranoid, jingoist and even xenophobic.

Additionally, organic local food tends to be more costly so this is not an appealing option to consumers who are shopping on a budget.

Small-scale farmers do not receive government subsidies and are not able to support their business on prices comparable to those of industrial-scale food production, so they must sell at higher prices to make a living.

Therefore, in order for the appeal of the local agriculture movement to overcome the economic cost, people must be willing to invest in it, which is unlikely when apparently similar products are available in grocery stores for a lower cost. Despite this, distribution costs of expansive food trade must also be factored in; with increasing gas prices, it becomes more expensive to ship food from outside sources.

More information: Time

A circular economy, often referred to simply as circularity, is an economic system aimed at eliminating waste and the continual use of resources.

Circular systems employ reuse, sharing, repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing and recycling to create a close-loop system, minimising the use of resource inputs and the creation of waste, pollution and carbon emissions.

Circular Economy

The circular economy aims to keep products, equipment and infrastructure in use for longer, thus improving the productivity of these resources.

All waste should become food for another process: either a by-product or recovered resource for another industrial process, or as regenerative resources for nature, e.g. compost. This regenerative approach is in contrast to the traditional linear economy, which has a take, make, dispose model of production.

Proponents of the circular economy suggest that a sustainable world does not mean a drop in the quality of life for consumers, and can be achieved without loss of revenue or extra costs for manufacturers. The argument is that circular business models can be as profitable as linear models, allowing us to keep enjoying similar products and services.

Intuitively, the circular economy would appear to be more sustainable than the current linear economic system. Reducing the resources used, and the waste and leakage created, conserves resources and helps to reduce environmental pollution. However, it is argued by some that these assumptions are simplistic; that they disregard the complexity of existing systems and their potential trade-offs. For example, the social dimension of sustainability seems to be only marginally addressed in many publications on the circular economy. There are cases that might require different or additional strategies, like purchasing new, more energy efficient equipment.

More information: Ellen Macarthur Foundation

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment;

it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment

for the individual to explore, in his own way.

Noam Chomsky