Recently we discussed how a sewer system could be run without charging citizens a special sewer fee, just through the sale of recovered minerals like nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. A new scientific study confirms that recycling nutrients from human wastewater is an economically viable venture.
Category Archives: economics
Refuse-derived clothing
Two Italian fashion designers have developed a technique to make a silk-like fabric from citrus waste, called Orange Fiber. The orange juice industry produce a very large amount of waste in the form of peels. The use of citrus peels as a resource for the production of textiles, is interesting as it increase the value of citrus fruits and hence potentially increasing the income of citrus farmers.
Sewers and Taxes
Sewers are the summit of human civilization and taxation is the price of civilization. So we are supposed to pay sewer tax, right? No, not really. In this post I will explain how space settlements could fund a sewage and waste water treatment system without having to collect sewer charges. Continue reading Sewers and Taxes
Art and monetary policy
About twenty years ago Danish artist Lars Kræmer started the Artmoney project. His idea is for artists to make small, bank note-sized pieces of art with a fixed value of two hundred Danish Kroner. These pieces of arts can be then be used to pay for goods and services. According to Wikipedia about 1,300 artists in 40 countries participates in this project and there have been exhibitions of artmoney. Continue reading Art and monetary policy
Human Power Plants
A funny concept developed by artists Kris De Decker and Melle Smets is the human power plant. As the name suggests this is a power plant which converts human labour into electricity. Like many artistic projects, the main purpose of this project is to make people think about our energy consumption. Continue reading Human Power Plants
Bullshit guarantee… (?)
David Graeber, professor in anthropology at the London School of Economics has conceived the concept of bullshit jobs. He defines a bullshit as any job which would not be missed by anyone if those jobs would suddenly disappear. More over he classifies jobs as bullshit ones if the very people who do those jobs consider their work as useless. Continue reading Bullshit guarantee… (?)
On the capital-labour conflict
Australian economist Bill Mitchell is a known critic of basic income guarantee (BIG) programs and a support of a job guarantee (JG) programs. In this post on his blog, Mitchell presents the following argument against BIG: Continue reading On the capital-labour conflict
Robots or sweatshops?
In The Guardian a good opinion piece:
Worry less about robots and more about sweatshops
Not automation per se is a threat to workers, but exploitation of workers is the important issue at stake.
One side note: the author laments the decreased membership of trade unions. However, in the long run only worker cooperatives could end the exploitation of workers. It’s quite pity that those who claim to stand up for worker rights continue to fail to support the cooperative movement.
Non-Tax Revenue
We believe that governments should maximize their revenue from non-tax sources and should reduce their reliance on tax revenue. Here we will give a classification of several types of non-tax revenue. Continue reading Non-Tax Revenue
Why monetary reform?
Traditional economics believes that money is neutral. This means that the choices and preferences people make and have are not affected by the existence of money. According to this view it should not matter whether we use money or engage in barter trade. Continue reading Why monetary reform?
