Greensboro Is Talking

The following from the website of Slivers of Time an Initiative getting legs in Great Britain.

In January 2010 the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published a paper commissioned from us. It details how policymakers could spread the benefits of new types of marketplaces to all citizens.

Summary of the paper

• Every day there are tens of millions worth of resources that don’t enter the economy. Overwhelmingly those resources belong to people who are not well off. There is demand for the resources, but no market efficient enough to trade them.

• The untraded resources are in sectors like: home helps, street cleaning, pet-walking, car valeting, babysitting, local deliveries, micro-loans, home-tuition, bike hire, odd hours of formal employment, hire of a video game console or rental of a personal vehicle.

• The private sector alone can’t deliver the very sophisticated marketplaces needed to unleash an explosion of new activity at the bottom of the economy. These complex, risky, low overhead sectors need a marketplace underpinned by government purchasing, official promotion, verification processes and dispute settling authority.

• Government could commit its official blessing to a new system of e-marketplaces. If they do it right, the private sector will then compete to build the new system. It should cost the taxpayer nothing. This is how countries create National Lotteries.

Potential impact of officially backed e-marketplaces

• Opportunities beyond jobs. Any citizen can sell in any market on their own terms at times of their choosing. There is no cost to entering unlimited numbers of markets. (They will need to prove any legal requirements are met.) Reliability commands a premium.

• Bottom up economy. Instead of services being delivered through centralised organisations, anyone can see their most lucrative local opportunities and sell competitively.

• National competitiveness. Could officially backed e-markets succeeded on the scale of National Lotteries? If they did, national workforces would become multi-skilled, more enterprising and booked by any buyer with a few clicks.

There is a lot of detail behind this proposal. The JRF paper outlines the key points. Download a copy here.  Can online markets tackle poverty? (641 kb)

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