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I have been reading a little about the Word Social Forum specifically and Brazil generally. And this got me thinking about the future of economics and communities. Or at least what the future should be.

I think that we need to do away with the idea that we need some monolithic “ism.” We need to put both communism (authoritarian socialism) and capitalism in the history bin. And embrace the many wonderful alternatives that are already being developed. Things the like:

  • The Open Source model (currently used for software development perhaps useful elsewhere) and the related ideas of a Creative Commons
  • The Community Supported Agriculture model
  • Cooperatives and Credit Unions
  • Collectives
  • The Emili-Romagna region in Italy
  • Local Living Economies (David Korten's ideas and the BALLE movement)
  • Microcredit
  • Social entrepreneurship (Ashoka)
  • ParEcon

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