In Praise of Fallow Fields: An architect embraces the slowdown — The economic downturn hit my architecture business hard. For years, I had a running list of clients waiting for me to design their projects, but now the backlog is gone. I live and work only in the present tense, unsure of the outlook next year or even next month. This loss can be awkward to discuss with friends and colleagues. I see pained looks flicker across their faces when I answer “How’s business?” with an unequivocal “Really slow.” For my part, though, I am learning to embrace the slowdown for its cathartic qualities. The stillness holds another kind of wealth—one of reflection, grounding, and opportunity. I have come to appreciate the fallow period.

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Immunity and Impunity in Elite America:

As intense protests spawned by Occupy Wall Street continue to grow, it is worth asking: Why now? The answer is not obvious. After all, severe income and wealth inequality have long plagued the United States. In fact, it could reasonably be claimed that this form of inequality is part of the design of the American founding—indeed, an integral part of it.

Income inequality has worsened over the past several years and is at its highest level since the Great Depression.  This is not, however, a new trend. Income inequality has been growing at rapid rates for three decades.

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Fair Trade is a Better Brew for Anti-Capitalists: Remember when buying fair trade meant something revolutionary? These days, purchasing fair trade products is about as subversive as wearing a Rage Against the Machine t-shirt. Heck, you’ll even be able to add “one-of-a-kind handicrafts made by artisans in developing countries” to your online shopping cart on WalMart’s website, according to Huffington Post.

Coffee was one of the first—and most effectively marketed—fair trade products. As I write this, I’m finishing my fourth cup of fair trade coffee this morning—we usually brew two massive pots every day at the Utne Reader office. But fair trade coffee, a certified product meant to supplant the neo-colonial exploitation of farmers in the global South, has done little to impress free trade skeptics and anti-capitalists.

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The data on the poor in this country announced Tuesday by the Census Bureau was not good, and due to measures already taken by Congress and those likely to come, the outlook doesn’t provide much reason for hope. Read what commentators at Mother Jones, In These Times, The Take Away, City Limits, and The Atlantic have to say about it …

secretrepublic:

The Suburbanization of Poverty: An Infographic

(via ziatroyano)

Economic equality equals happiness. So suggests a new study to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science. In order for Americans to be truly blissed out, it finds, we need to close the gap between our wealthiest and poorest citizens.

“In 1980, the average American CEO’s income was 40 times higher than that of the average worker. Today, it is well over 300 times higher,” writes Carmen Sobczak in YES! Magazine. “Over the past four decades, according to the study, the American people have been the least happy in years when there was the widest gap between rich and poor.” Keep reading …

(via Designboom)

The Walker [Art Center] presents the latest phase and first us exhibition of Baby Marx, an ongoing project by Mexican artist Pedro Reyes that looks at the potential for mass entertainment to operate as a radical educational tool. An architect by training, Reyes works across platforms and disciplines—including design, installation, and video—to explore sites and scenarios of collective interaction. Originally conceived for television, Baby Marx is set in a small town library where a group of precocious children have brought Karl Marx and Adam Smith back to life by zapping their influential books in a glitch-prone ‘smart-o-wave’ microwave oven. The founders of communism and the free market confront each other and their legacies, haunted by the twin specters of Joseph Stalin and Bernie Madoff, as well as the latest global economic crisis.