Well, I had forgotten one of the major drawbacks of school – being constantly judged. One would think, it being such a major component, that it would be impossible to forget about it, but somehow I managed it. After getting a C+ back on one of my papers, I remembered why it was that I didn’t try all that hard in high school or college – I really hate getting bad grades, at least if I feel that I’ve put real work into them. This being grad school, and pretty much everyone here being as smart or smarter than I, I guess I’ll just have to get used to it, and keep on working. There is a distinct advantage to being in a class with a bunch of really bright people – group projects are great. The two I’m doing right now I have a pretty optimistic feeling about.
Something I had thought grad school would change was the whole “random ideas popping into my head” phenom – I was wrong, of course. It just means that my ideas are more closely related to what I’m studying, and I don’t have time to think about them for very long. The earlier post about education is good example, and I’m about to throw up another, so if longwinded explanations of theoretical programs or political changes bore you, now is a good time to stop reading.
We had a lecture about NGOs in one of my Intro to Planning classes, which was all about economic development and reinvestment of income. Given it was in a third world context, but it got me thinking about development in rural America. The traditional way in the U.S. to make your income grow (substantially, insteady of insanely slowly) is by investing it in the stock market. The trouble with this is that most companies in which one may invest don’t really represent a “local investment”. You might work at GM and have stock in the company, which in some ways is a further local investment of money. The problem is that GM is a global company, and so your dollars are going all over the world instead of increasing local capital. A solution might be to set up very small scale rural stock markets for local businesses. I’m not sure that this could work at the city level. Small towns are just too small for a stock market to be stable, I would think. Maybe the better approach would be at the county level, or associations of townships. Either way, I think that this could be a great way for people to 1: reinvest money in the local economy; 2: provide an alternative to banks and credit unions for supplies of money for developing small businesses; 3: create a more healthy economy by providing customers frustrated with poor service provided by a local business to shift resources to a better competitor.
I have to wonder if someone has already thought of this; if so it has probably already proven itself a bad idea and failed, as I have never heard of it. It could be risky, especially because of the small size of the market involved. I think that a good way to minimize risk would be to adopt a couple of rules, more stringent than those on a standard market. First, provide that the originator of the business must always either have half or more of the shares of the company, or always have more shares than any single stockholder. This way hostile takeovers are limited or eliminated, which is important because that kind of economic strategy could be devastating on the social well-being of a tight-knit small town. The first condition would be ironclad protection against takeovers, but would limit potential investment in a business. The second would be much more flexible and allow a far greater amount of investment, but stockholders would have far greater say in how the business was run. The second condition would be to limit how quickly shareholders could purchase and sell shares, to prevent catastrophic changes in available capital for local businesses. If at any time all of the available money could be withdrawn, and the shareholder pool is small enought (and the local rumor mill strong enough) to make instant selling of shares possible, local economies could be completely devestated by panic (think mini-1929s).
I wonder if this idea has any viability at all. It may be completely off the wall.