Robin Chase, founder and CEO of Buzzcar, says the new economy puts individuals, rather than corporations, at the center.
On any given day, millions of people around the world log in to
Waze,
a free GPS application, to contribute and access traffic data and
incident reports in a collaborative, peer-to-peer system that provides
real-time reporting on road conditions and routes based on user input.
This community-driven application is just one more sign that we’re
shifting away from an industrial economy and towards a more
collaborative model.
As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to protest record levels of wealth and income inequality, we turn to an author who says the U.S. economy might be becoming more democratic. Gar Alperovitz argues in an op-ed in today’s New York Times that we may be in the midst of a profound transition towards an economy characterized by more democratic structures of ownership. Alperovitz finds that 130 million Americans are members of some kind of cooperative, and 13 million Americans work in an employee-owned company. He says the United States may be heading towards something very different from both corporate-dominated capitalism and from traditional socialism. “I think we’re seeing a change in attitude — both increasing doubts about what’s now going on in the economy — deep doubts, very deep doubts: thanks to occupation it’s crystallized. But this other trend of saying ‘What do you want? Where are we going?’ In some ways to democratize the economy in a very American way,” Alperovitz says.