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Bristol Ideas shares 30-years' experience and inspiration on supporting the social and economic growth of a city.
The post Long-term cultural planning is vital to the vibrance and resilience of a place – Cambridge report appeared first on Bennett Institute for Public Policy.

Folks who know me as a facilitator know that one of my first and favorite questions in planning a meeting is "who's deciding?" It's a question that can be counter-cultural for groups that are unaccustomed to clearly defining the decision-making process. And yet, leaving the question unanswered or unclear is one of the fastest ways... Read More
The post The fastest way to kill collaboration? Obscure decision making. appeared first on Interaction Institute for Social Change.

This is not an attempt to diss a particular political party. It is, rather, to examine what is being proposed: Labour promises 1.5m more homes in its first term – affordable homes, social housing and new towns – with planning reforms to stop nimbys blocking building.We, of course, would be delighted if there were 1.5 million more homes. We'd probably mutter that if there were that many new ones then they don't, in fact, need to be affordable nor social. For if supply is increased that much then all homes will become more affordable. Rather the point of the exercise we'd hope.But OK, nice ambition. But we'd go that one step further in examining it. Given the current planning laws there is no possibility whatsoever of gaining that amount of new housing in one 5 year parliamentary term. For it takes about 5 years from gleam in the eye of a builder eyeing up a green field to the removal vans arriving with the new furniture. Which means that substantial reforms to the planning process are required to be able to do this.But if there are substantial reforms to the planning process to enable this to happen then the problem is already solved - we've reformed the planning system so that large volumes of new housing can be built. Huzzah!The British housing problem really does come down to that planning process. Reform that (we suggest blowing the entire system up, properly kablooie!) and the problem is solved. This suggested solution will require planning reform. So, good, let's do that, let's reform planning. Hey, we're even willing to consider that there might be some loose ends that will then also need tidying up. But let's crack that core problem first then see what else needs doing.

To help create community and social capital, planners and politicians should think about including skate parks in their planning; they are more valuable than many realize.
The post Skate Parks: Appreciating Another Third Place appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Pew is not one of those right wing and free market organisations over in the US. We'd put it, in British terms, somewhere between the Labour Party and Novara Media - that range between wrong but not mad and wrong but….well, you understand.They have just found out that:Pew has examined several jurisdictions that updated their zoning codes to allow more housing and found that this flexibility helped these jurisdictions add new housing stock faster than new households were being formed. And while rent remains detrimentally high in many communities throughout the country, this research shows that communities updating their zoning laws in this manner kept rent growth to less than 7 percent over the most recent six-year period, even as rents rose by 31 percent nationally.The solution to rising rents, to the price of housing more generally, is to build more housing.Note that the US doesn't have anything - not of any size - even vaguely comparable to council or social housing. Not since they reformed HUD they don't - they have Section 8 vouchers, akin to our Housing Benefit. The finding here is that building more housing - of any kind - moderates the price of housing. As, obviously is going to be true, increasing supply does that. Even if half this country is adamant that it won't. But, there we have it. If we liberate planning so that more houses are built then the price of housing will moderate. So, why don't we liberate planning? Blow up the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors. Proper blow up, kablooie.Let's house the nation, eh?

 Exactly a year ago, I had a post about a survey question from 1993 on whether members of Congress should follow public opinion or their own judgment when voting on issues.  I wasn't planning on marking the anniversary, but by coincidence I recently ran across other questions on the same issue, from 1939 and 1940.  They aren't identical to the 1993 question, but seem similar enough to be compared.  The overall distributions:            Own       Public     1939     38            59          A1940     32            64          A1940     35            39          B1993     23            70          CThe exact questions:A.  Should members of Congress vote according to their own best judgment or according to the way the people in their districts feel?B.  In cases when a Congressman's opinion is different from that of the majority of people in his district, do you think he should usually vote according to his own best judgment, or according to the way a majority of his district feels?C.  When your representative in Congress votes on an issue, which should be more important:  the way that voters in your district feel about the issue, or the Representative's own principles and judgment about what is best for the country?The percent choosing the "own judgment" option is substantially lower in the 1993 question than in all three of the 1939-40 questions. It seems to me that the addition of  "what is best for the country" in the 1993 question made the "own judgment" side sound more favorable, so if the differences in question wording mattered they probably understated the change.  In looking at the 1993 question, I had found that education didn't make much difference.  The 1939 and 1940 surveys didn't ask about education, but they had variables for occupation and interviewer's rating of social standing.  People of "higher" position were a bit more likely to say that representatives should follow their own judgement, but it was only a small difference.  I tried a few other demographic variables, which didn't make much difference.  So the major story is simply the difference in the overall distributions.  Of course, 1993 was 30 years ago, so we don't know what's happened since then.   It seems strange that no one has asked about the issue since then, so I'll make another attempt to find questions.The 1939 survey also asked about a question I've written about before "Do people who are successful get ahead largely because of their luck or largely because of their ability?"  The same question was also asked in 1970 and then in 2016.  My previous post on this question reported the distribution (16% said luck in 1939, 8% in 1970, and 13% in 2016), but didn't look at group differences.  In 1939, there were large differences by economic standing:                                         Luck     AbilityWealthy                           3%          97%Average +                       7%           93%Average                         11%          89%Poor+                             17%          83%Poor                                23%         77%On relief                         30%         70%Unfortunately, the individual data for the 2016 survey is not available in the Roper Center or ICPSR--I will try to track it down, although I think the odds are against me.[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Eighty years ago (on 10 March 1944) a short but hugely influential book was published: The Road to Serfdom. Written by the prominent economist, social theorist, and later Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek. It sought to explain how a civilized country could fast descend into a warmongering, totalitarian dictatorship, as Germany had done.The book certainly caught the imagination of a world still at war. A US edition came out six months after the British publication, then in April 1945, Reader's Digest published a condensed version that brought it to a mass audience. But The Road to Serfdom is much more than an explanation of what had gone wrong in the country of Goethe and Beethoven those eighty years ago. It is also a stark warning to future ages of how easy it is to stumble down a road to serfdom of their own — and a warning to us today that we may already have taken fateful steps in that direction.Probably nobody in a liberal society intends to turn their country into a tyranny like Hitler's Germany, or for that matter, Stalin's Soviet Union. But Hayek's shocking thesis is that public policies that are introduced for the most noble of reasons can, and often do, create the conditions that make this fate more likely.  Then, by the time people have come to understand what is happening, it is already too late.Even more shocking is his firm belief that it is the pursuit of social democracy that is responsible for this result. Social democrats, and centrists of many varieties, promote policies that they hope will reduce inequality and boost social welfare. Such policies usually demand greater government control over the economic system, the use of taxation to redistribute wealth and income and compensate for other inequalities, and the establishment of a comprehensive welfare state to provide essentials such as housing, education, healthcare, and social benefits. But these initiatives all require the creation of new levers of political power, and at least some curbs on people's economic and social freedom. Once those two things are in place, they can potentially be exploited by politicians — not just those trying to make the policies work, but less scrupulous ones who dream of power. Moreover, these policies also give rise to perverse incentives and inefficiencies that stifle individual initiative and undermine the dynamism of markets. The resulting economic stagnation generates calls for yet more, and tougher, central planning and government intervention to correct things — which makes the rise of those unscrupulous politicians more likely. Historians may argue that this is not exactly what happened in Germany. Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party came to be seen as an antidote to the economic chaos of the late 1920s and early 1930s. But it did not have all the instruments of power presented to it on a tray. It had to seize power. But the fact that so many people thought that more government was the answer made it easier for it to do so.Nor did the United Kingdom, its government now furnished with all the power required to win a war, find itself too far down the road to serfdom to turn back. Rather, it found itself on a long road to economic stagnation, inflation, unemployment and decline that made British people yearn for the kind of post-war economic miracle enjoyed by the country they had so recently pummelled into defeat. Their journey down the road to road to privation was halted only in the 1980s, with Margaret Thatcher's reforms. Yet still, much of the apparatus of government intervention, planning and control remained in place, slowing any advance in a better direction. That — and its baleful result — is nowhere more obvious than in Britain's hugely government-heavy planning system for land and property, a post-war creation which the Adam Smith Institute reckons to cost the economy £66bn a year, or 3% of GDP. And much of the other apparatus of government control — in education, healthcare, housing, pensions, transport and insurance — is still there and still holding back innovation and enterprise.Today, that continuing dominance of government in so many parts of life is seriously eroding individual freedom. The government may not own utilities, transport or manufacturing operations anymore, but through law and regulation it still controls them. And as Hayek pointed out in The Road to Serfdom, if a government controls the economy, it controls freedom itself. How can critical ideas be advanced when the government controls the dominant media outlets? Or when it controls what people can and cannot say in public? How can critical ideas even arise when it sets the school curriculum and when college teachers — along with a fifth of the working population more generally — owe their living to the state? How can people find suitable accommodation when national and local government own a sixth of the land and control every aspect of how the remainder is used? Such a country is free only in name.Hayek believed that the apparatus of a state was needed to maintain freedom and deliver defence and justice, and essential public goods and services. And these are no small tasks. But he also realised the danger that government could so easily grow into the destroyer of individual freedom. That policies that start with noble intentions — sparing people from hostile views, for example — can turn into something repressive —such as the shutting down of free debate. The road to serfdom is a slippery downward slope. And we appear to be a long way down it.

We are inviting abstracts for the IAG 2024 in Adelaide for our session on Energy Geography and Renewable Energy.
Energy Geography and Renewable Energy
Organised by: Gareth Bryant (USyd) gareth.bryant@sydney.edu.au, James Goodman (UTS) James.Goodman@UTS.edu.au, Lisa Lumsden (Next Economy) l.lumsden@nexteconomy.com.au, Sophie Webber (USyd) sophie.webber@sydney.edu.au
Sponsored by the Economic Geography Study Group and the Nature, Risk and Resilience Study Group
Transitions from fossil fuels to renewable energy are multilevel and transformative. Energy is rescaled, from distributed and household contexts to new greenfield or 'brownfield' wind, solar and storage utilities, regional renewable development modelling, national planning frameworks and global energy and climate policy-making. There is extensive scale shifting by renewable energy corporates and financial institutions as well as by critical climate NGOs and activist networks, that often leverage variations in regulatory regimes or in commitments to decarbonisation. Drivers of transition can be complementary, as 'co-benefits', but they can also collide. Much of the renewable sector is privately owned, albeit dependent on state authority, and the priority of maintaining investor returns can take precedence over emissions reduction. Efforts at maximising returns in neoliberal renewables can exacerbate social divisions, negate community or livelihood benefit and prevent wider democratic participation, involvement or social ownership. All these aspects pose problems for renewable energy legitimacy, driving new contestations and new forms of claim-making, including for social ownership and for socio-ecological priorities to take precedence over corporate interests. We seek papers that address how people interpret these and related transitions, how lives are re-ordered and how the meaning and potential of places is thereby transformed. We are especially interested in how the new socio-ecological geographies of energy can be generative, producing new capacity for climate agency and decarbonisation.
Interested presenters should send (no more than) 250-word abstracts, with title, keywords, authors and contact information to the session organisers by Friday March 22. We will notify accepted papers before the IAG deadline.
Cover image: Illustration by Matt Rota for The Transnational Institute
The post CFP IAG 2024: Energy Geography and Renewable Energy appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

John Naughton tells us that:We got to the point of thinking that if all that was needed to solve a pressing problem was more computing power, then we could consider it solved; not today, perhaps, but certainly tomorrow.There are at least three things wrong with this. The first is that many of humankind's most pressing problems cannot be solved by computing. This is news to Silicon Valley, but it happens to be true.It's also news to all those who would plan the economy. Allende was one of those who fell prey to this delusion - computers were going to run that Socialist Chilean economy. But it's been a phantasm all the way back to those first stirrings of scientific socialism. If only we could calculate then we'd be able to plan!No, actually, we can't. We do not have, cannot have, the information required to feed into the starting point of however much computing power we have available. While Hayek was right here, an excellent outlining of the problem in detail is this. The most important part of which - after the intractability of the actual computing problem - is what is it that we're trying to plan? We want to optimise some form of social utility function. OK, so what is that? The sum and aggregation of all of the individual utility functions, obviously. So, what are they? Well, we don't know. Because utility functions are something we back calculate. We observe what people do given what's available then write that down. But if we have to observe behaviour in order to work out what people want then we cannot plan what will be made available as we don't know what will maximise utility in that new situation created by the plan. We can't just ask people because that's expressed preferences and we know that doesn't define utility - revealed preferences do.Naughton is quite right, not all problems are amenable to more computing power. The direction and planning of the economy among them.

On September 28, CEGA hosted its annual Evidence to Action (E2A) conference, this year titled "Realigning Tech for Social Impact." It brought together researchers, policymakers, practitioners, funders, community members, and students to take stock of the benefits and harms technological interventions have had over the last two decades, with an emphasis on the experience of communities in low- and middle-income countries. Sean Luna McAdams, program manager for the Data Science for Development portfolio, shares key takeaways from the event.Carson Christiano (left), Executive Director of CEGA, and Mohamed Abdel-Kader (right), Chief Innovation Officer and Executive Director for the Innovation, Technology, and Research (ITR) Hub at USAID | Matt KrupoffNew technology benefits from a simple and powerful narrative: it can help solve complex problems, often by doing more with less. The printing press accelerated our ability to share information over long distances. Social media has made it nearly costless to communicate with anyone, anywhere in the world. But new technologies can have unintended effects. The cotton gin turbocharged an economic model that relied on enslaved African labor and ill-gotten land, with terrible consequences. More than one account at E2A emphasized this nuance of the effects of technological interventions.Over the course of the day, participants surfaced a set of complementary best practices when designing, testing, and integrating tech into existing policy, governance, and social welfare systems. The first speaks to the limits of expertise: a technically excellent product is necessary but not sufficient for social impact. Additionally, the ultimate goal of scaling a solution is often underspecified. Scaled by whom, for which communities, and at what scale (national, regional, global)? Making these answers explicit can improve estimates of the trade-offs to scaling and ensure the technological solution is the right fit for its intended problem.Beyond Technical ExcellenceAt E2A, the best examples of technology improving lives and achieving large-scale adoption in low- and middle-income countries relied on interdisciplinary teams, incorporated community input, and planned for maintenance and capacity building to ensure sustainability. Interventions developed with these elements can cultivate community trust, clarify their value proposition for potential users, and dynamically adapt and improve their product. Dan Fletcher, Professor of Bioengineering and Faculty Director at the Blum Center at UC Berkeley, reflected that the initial prototype of Cellscope failed during field testing despite its technical excellence because it was developed only by engineers. Subsequent iterations involved experts from the social sciences, improving the product and leading to greater success.Cellscope is a mobile phone-based microscopy tool that helps health workers identify a variety of pathogens to more quickly diagnose and treat those affected and test the potability of water. | Cellscope teamHowever challenging, collaboration across disciplines is essential for successful interventions. Mohamed Abdel-Kader, Chief Innovation Officer and Executive Director for the Innovation, Technology, and Research (ITR) Hub at USAID, reminded us of the value of proactively including people "whose lived experience can provide different perspectives." For USAID, this means ensuring that 25 percent of its funding is dispersed to local organizations. Daanish Masood, Advisor on AI Alignment at the UN's Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, echoed this call by highlighting the importance of "epistemological pluralism" to more effectively engage community members who often perceive and value their world using different frameworks. By bringing together multidisciplinary teams, innovators can develop technologies that will better meet the social reality in which they will be deployed.Not only does diversity make technology more effective, it also helps to minimize potential harm. For example, Josh Blumenstock shared how his team gathered input from rural communities in Togo to inform the development of a social transfer targeting software his team co-created with the Ministry of Digital Economy and Transformation. Zoe Kahn, a PhD student on Blumenstock's team in Togo, conducted ethnographic research to better understand how members of rural communities would interact, understand, and appraise the digital social transfer system they were building.Finally, technically excellent solutions must build the social consensus and requisite buy-in across different contexts to tailor and maintain these tools iteratively. This requires planning for the long-term, building in plans for deprecation, and creating institutions — whether private companies, volunteer-based organizations, or capacity-building initiatives — to maintain and update these innovations to make them sustainable over the long-run.What Does Success Look Like?We should not assume that we have the same vision of a successful technological innovation in the social impact space. We often tout "scaling" as the final life stage of tech; for many, it serves as the ultimate goal and proxy of success. Yet, Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink, Director of Product Impact at Google.org, distinguished two paths to integrating technological interventions: a tailored, individualized solution in close partnership with a decision maker and centralized, replicable systems that can be deployed across time and space reliably.Our Technology Adoption for the Public Good panel delved into the public sector's challenges and opportunities in helping to scale proven solutions. | Matt KrupoffShould a technological intervention in global development be global in scope? We need a better sense of the trade-offs in scaling up from local to global to answer this question empirically. Some systems may be better suited to function at national or regional scales. Collaborators should plan to measure performance reliably across scale to tailor solutions accordingly.As Jane Munga, Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, reminded us: even if we develop good tech solutions for citizens who have a mobile phone and access to the internet now, there is a sizable portion of the world's most underserved who would be excluded due to lack of access. We need to expand the size of the pie, improve the quality of its ingredients, and increase the diversity of the culinary team that bakes it. Digital technology has a role to play in achieving more equitable social and economic development world-wide. How transformative that development will be depends on us.Technology Is Not a Panacea, but It Can Help Solve Specific Problems was originally published in CEGA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the glories of the market system - even if here we are talking about across countries - is that different people try different things and thus we get to see the outcome of different actions and policies. The economy is a complex thing, it's not always obviously possible to work out the final effect from first principles. Actual experimentation is often necessary. So, an interesting result from the United States. Building more apartments lowers the rent of apartments. Something we can generalise out to building more houses lowers rents: Rents in August were just 0.28% higher than August 2022, according to real estate tech platform RealPage. Compare that to a year ago, when rents were posting 11% annual growth. With the exception of a very brief drop during the Covid lockdowns, rents have not shown negative annual growth in well over a decade. When they did, it was due to a recession hitting demand.That is not the case now. Apartment occupancies nationally are at a pretty healthy 94%, which is right along historical norms. High mortgage rates combined with high home prices and tight supply have kept more would-be buyers in the rental market. The issue instead is just a massive amount of apartment supply.This is not the result of building apartments for poor people, building apartments that are rent controled, affordable or even social. It's purely the effect of building more apartments: The number of new units being built is at a 50-year high, with more than 460,000 being completed this year alone. Over a million new units have been built in the past three years. That's a record, and much of that supply is on the higher end. Renters have more options, so landlords have less pricing power as turnover increases.While rents nationally haven't gone negative yet, they have in several local markets. Austin, Texas (-4.9%), Phoenix (-4.9%), Las Vegas (4.7%), Atlanta (-3.7%) and Jacksonville, Florida (-3.4%) are seeing the biggest drops.Build new apartments at the top end, this increases supply and all rents come down. This is now one of those things which is not arguable - we have experimental evidence. Increasing supply works at moderating prices. Who knew? This also tells us something about policy here in Britain. We can forget about affordable housing, council, social landlord, Section 106 and so on. All we need do in order to lower rents is build more houses. That's it, tout court, Le Fin, the end.So, you know, kill off all those varied constraints on who can build what and where and get on with it. Blow up the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors, proper blow up, Kablooie. When Britain builds more houses Britons want to live in where Britons wish to live then the price of desirable housing in Britain will come down.That supply and demand chart on pages two and three of every economics book ever works. Howsabout that then children?

Calls for a military response against Iran in response to this weekend's attacks in Israel are beginning to percolate in Washington, particularly among long-time advocates for regime change.
While Iran has provided funding and training for Hamas, the militant organization responsible for the attacks, Tehran's direct role in the attacks is not yet clear.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that Iranian security officials played an important role in planning Saturday's attacks in Israel, but many experts have expressed skepticism about the report. Both U.S. and Israeli officials have said that they have seen no evidence Iran was directly involved in this weekend's events.
"Iran is a major player but we can't yet say if it was involved in the planning or training," said an IDF spokesman on Monday.
Nonetheless, many hawkish voices are already floating the possibility of a military response against Tehran.
"How much more death and destruction does the world have to take from the Iranian Ayatollah and his henchman before they pay a real price?" Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) wrote on the social media platform X. "If this 'Israel 9/11' - in which American citizens have apparently died - was in fact authorized and planned by the Iranian regime that would more than justify the use of military force to deter future aggression."
On Monday, during an interview on Fox News, Graham went a step further, saying that he was "confident" regarding Iran's involvement, and that it was "time to take the war to the Ayatollah's backyard."
Nikki Haley, former ambassador to the United Nations and current presidential candidate, said in an interview on Fox News that her message to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was: "Finish them. Hamas did this, you know Iran's behind this. Finish them."
"What happened to Israel could happen here in America," Haley said in a separate interview. "I have been terribly worried about the fact that Iran has said that the easiest way to get into America is through the Southern border … we don't need to wait for another 9/11." Washington-based advocacy groups have also been calling for war with Iran in response to the Hamas attacks on Israel..
"We call on our government in Washington, together with Israel, and our allies around the world to launch strikes against military and intelligence targets in Iran, including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) sites, and missile and drone bases, where Iran's proxy and partner network is trained," said United Against Nuclear Iran chair and former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman and the group's CEO Mark Wallace in a statement. "If we do not stop Iran now, its threat will only grow more lethal."
"The Israeli response must be overwhelming and aimed not just at Hamas but at the head of the snake inside Iran," added Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu himself notably did not mention Iran in his address to the nation on Monday.
Many other members of Congress have stopped short of explicitly calling for a military response, but rather placed responsibility for the attacks squarely on Iran. This rhetoric opens the door for escalation that risks bringing the United States into the conflict.
"From a US perspective, it is critical to help prevent further escalation since a direct Israeli-Iranian confrontation will very likely drag the US into yet another major war in the Middle East," says Trita Parsi, executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute. "The US simply cannot afford such a war in the midst of the conflict in Ukraine and the risk of conflict with China over Taiwan."
Others claimed the Biden administration's recent decision to release $6 billion in Iranian funds held by South Korea as part of a prisoner exchange agreement helped fund the Hamas attack.
The White House has pushed back against these accusations, maintaining that the funds were transferred to Qatar and have not yet been spent. "[W]hen it is spent, it can only be spent on things like food and medicine for the Iranian people," wrote National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson on X. "These funds have absolutely nothing to do with the horrific attacks today and this is not the time to spread disinformation."

Robert Colville picks up on a point we've made more than once over the years. We can't ask government to do anything more for us. Because we've already spent all the money: "The UK's ageing population will effectively confront policymakers with a choice in coming decades," wrote the authors. "Increase levels of tax substantially to fund higher spending or substantially reduce the scope of the public services that the British state provides."We've already promised ourselves that the State will support us as we dodder to the grave. Therefore we simply cannot have anything else from said State - all the money's already been promised to pay for that doddering. So what can we actually do about it? Well, part of the problem is that most previous attempts to restrain spending have been fiscal rather than philosophical — that is, they have started with the amount we need to save rather than asking the question: should government actually really be doing this?That's true. If we were to bin many of the things currently done then we could free the resources for that social state we've promised ourselves. Strip government back to the FCO - J Foreigner's still going to be there whatever - and the MoD - J Foreigner etc - and the chequebook to pay for the social. Simply stop doing everything else. We have to admit that we'd not be averse to such an outcome. We might be argued into police and courts as well. But culture, energy, communities, education, planning and on and on as central powers they're to go.Quite joyous actually. However, there is an alternative to stripping back to a dotagewatch state. Which is to get richer and so be able to afford all these things - if that is indeed what we desire. The trick there will be to stop government actively preventing us from getting richer. Sam Dumitriu's recent finding that the paperwork application for a tunnel was one page of bureaucratese for every 2.5 inches of tunnel (yes, we have checked the orders of magnitude there, that is correct) is a useful example here.That is, let's have that Singapore on Thames that so horrifies all too many. At the 3 and 5% growth per annum possible when we've not got the State deliberately killing off initiative then we can have nice things. We could even point out to Polly that this is the way Sweden does it. More free market, more capitalist, than even the US let alone the UK - but with a swinging slice of those riches taken for said nice things. Now, we would prefer that minimal state simply because we insist that leaves more room for liberty and human flourishing - the two things we think important in this world. But the important insistence is that even for those who don't want that, who want that larger state which can deliver more pressies, we still must have that free market vibrancy. Because that's the only way to produce the growth which will pay for it. Get the State out of the economy and it might be possible to produce the money to pay for the rest of the State. There are three viable choices. We go bust trying to pay for what we've already promised ourselves. We strip the State back to only paying for those promises. We strip the State of power and influence over the economy - go wildly free market and capitalist - and thereby generate the wealth to pay for it all. There are alternatives, indeed there are, but the status quo isn't one of them.

Colleen Hroncich


"I'm not happy in my position as an educator at a school, and my son's not happy going to school." When Iman Alleyne realized this, her next thought was "What can we do?" This question ultimately resulted in Kind Academy, a microschool in Coral Springs, Florida.
Iman had looked for a play‐​based preschool for her son without much success. "I chose the closest thing that I thought was play based," she recalls. "But even there, developmentally, there were moments where I saw things that just didn't make sense—like forcing three‐ and four‐​year olds to write three sentences before they could go play."
Similarly, she saw things she disagreed with at the school where she was working. She was particularly troubled by mandatory silent lunches and kids losing recess for misbehavior. To Iman, these were the kids who really needed recess for a chance to burn energy during the school day.
She pulled her son from his school at the end of the school year and began homeschooling him. "I started getting into the homeschooling groups, and I quickly recognized that this is the way education should be done. The kids were interested. The parents were engaged in their kids' learning. Everything was very passion based," says Iman.







Since she'd been conventionally trained, Iman was shocked by some of what she learned from the other homeschoolers. "They would tell me things like 'you can just do school for an hour a day, maybe 45 minutes for kindergarten.' My mind was blown by the things that these homeschoolers were doing," she says. But Iman's experiences were also beneficial to the homeschoolers, and some started asking her to help them plan their children's educational paths. Before too long, Kind Academy was born.
In creating Kind Academy, Iman incorporated the best parts of what she'd learned in her education career and from homeschoolers—and left out the parts she found objectionable. There's also a strong Montessori influence. Children are in mixed‐​age classrooms with a good degree of choice and freedom of movement throughout the day as they learn through discovery.
The school day generally starts with unstructured social time and then moves to a morning meeting where they discuss their goals for the day and what's happening that week. They also talk about the character trait they're focusing on that month. "We focused on assertiveness during the last month of school—learning how to speak up and how to ask for things, but in a way that is appropriate," Iman explains.
The students then shift to academics, with every student working through an individualized learning path. "In the beginning, they take a diagnostic so we see where they are. So no two kids are really doing the same thing. Even the curriculum might be different for different kids," says Iman. "We also put them in small groups where they'll do personalized learning—it might be a one‐​to‐​three or one‐​to‐​four ratio with kids who are doing similar things for math, writing, and reading."







After academics, they do project‐​based learning, which is usually an enrichment activity in things like nature, art, play, science, or stem. The children take a field trip nearly every day. They usually go to a nearby park, but they've also visited forests, wetlands, and a nature preserve. To wrap up the day after the field trip they have quiet time, which usually means reading, puzzles, or games.
To support parents and kids during COVID-19, Iman started offering virtual classes. "Probably within a week we went online. First we started teaching our circle time online, and then within about two weeks, we started sending out kits to everybody. We put all of our sensory, nature, art, play, math activities, and reading activities into a box, and we shipped it to parents or they came and picked it up," Iman says.
When she began offering classes on Outschool​.com, Iman says it took off. "We went global, where we had families coming in from all over the world and seeing what we did. We did a lot of our same classes that we were doing in person, but then we started doing a lot more for older kids. Middle school is where we exploded." At its peak, she had 3,000 kids from around the world taking Kind Academy classes during COVID-19.
Iman now offers Kind Online School as well as individual classes on Outschool. She's also started a "Launch Your Kind" program to help education entrepreneurs open their own Kind Academies. Through that, she offers support with curriculum, marketing, enrollment, payment systems, and more. She currently has 10 "baby" Kind Academies planning to open for the upcoming school year—seven in Florida and three in other states.
When asked what advice she has for others considering a similar path, Iman points to the three Ps: passion, purpose, and a plan. On the planning front, she says, "Try to find a way to make an income. A lot of people jump into it right away and don't have any sort of idea of how they're going to earn income. In Launch Your Kind, I always stress budgeting—going in there and understanding that it's going to cost money to do things."
Iman has a new Launch Your Kind cohort starting July 27, 2023, so it's a great time to check it out if you've been considering starting your own microschool.

 Two years ago, I posted about the lessons I learned in the first year of the pandemic. Quickly two years flew by, two years of vaccinations and folks railing against the vaccines, two years of death and two years of anxiety, stress, and "are we there yet?"  Sure, I marked last year's anniversary as well, noting the anger and frustration, so I am now struggling to figure out what I have learned as people start talking "post-pandemic"as if covid is gone.More than a few relatives have been hit by Covid twice.  The only
exception to all of this is my mother, who has been entirely covid-free.  Good
thing given she is now over 90.  There is significant variation among my friends and family now.  Before, they all vaxxed and they all masked and most avoided most travel.  Now?  All are still getting boosted, but the mask and travel thing is now much more of a mix.  I just came back from a big family event in that hotspot of hotspots--Florida.  I saw a fair amount of masking, but very little at the big party.  My own approach: damned if I know.  I tend to mask up when I am shopping, going to the movies (I keep on making mine Marvel!), teaching.  But receptions? Not so much because it is hard to do that networking/conversing thing behind masks.  So, I did duck out of one massive reception in Ottawa a few weeks ago.  For me, it is about risk mitigation.  I am going to a rock concert next week--which could be a superspreader event, so I am wearing a mask.  For less risky stuff, for outdoors stuff, I don't sweat it as much.  I am guessing that the vaccines have worked most of the time I have been exposed to covid, with that one exception from last summer.   I have been and will keep on skiing.  It is really the best anti-covid sport--distances between people outdoors, wearing stuff on one's face--with the only risky part the travel and the apres-ski.   My baking has slowed down, but when the occasion calls for it, I still bake up a storm.  I will be making cookies and/or brownies for next week's ISA convention in Montreal.   I have been adding new recipes at a slower rate.  Much of my time now is on planning the big kitchen renovation, which I wish we had done before the pandemic.  Anyhow, back to the lessons of the past year.  I think the learning curve has flattened.  Most of the lessons were in the first two years of this thing.  Some of those have deepened--that leadership or its absence matters a great deal; that most politicians are craven as they are unwilling to impose any restrictions during new waves because of resistance they experienced before; that the anti-vaxxers who scream about freedom are mostly interested in dominating others; that people really are social so the mild lockdowns North America faced did leave some scars; that elections, yes, have consequences; that as long as the deaths are not so visible, they can be tolerated by the political system; that prevention remains much harder to get folks to support than response; and so on.The biggest lesson I mentioned before remains: that COVID reveals not just pre-existing conditions in the bodies of its victims, but it reveals the flaws in our political and social systems.  It did not have to be this way--it did not have to be so partisan, that vaccines did not have to become so politicized and become an identity thing, that provinces and states could have spent money on improving health care, but many chose not to because they were led by people who want government to fail.  Not only did this ultimately kill and disable more people than could have been the case, but it means that we are all less likely to be prepared for the next pandemic AND that we are unlikely to have politicians take the necessary steps next time.  So, yeah, either the learning has stopped or the unlearning has begun.  Damn.