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"The Politics of Consumption: an Interview with Juliet Schor" in Aurora Online Magazine

http://aurora.icaap.org/2004Interviews/JulietSchor.html

Excerpt:

Basically, the market sector has been cannibalizing the domestic sphere, sucking huge flows of labour out of the unpaid sector - labour that is absolutely essential to the preservation and reproduction of the social fabric.

I was thinking about this while I was visiting the OH's aunt at the hospital yesterday. There weren't enough staff there to give patients attention they could use. At the same time, there are lots of people out of work and people working in dead-end, minimum-wage-or-less jobs and kinda pointless jobs. (Technical editing, which is what I usually do for money, seems kinda pointless to me when I'm visiting a patient in a hospital.)

I know it's not a matter of snapping your fingers and reassigning people where they can be more useful, but I kind of wish it were. Or something.

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Social Architecture

[tedesson.livejournal.com]

http://www.cprn.com/en/theme.cfm?theme=28

A Canadian Think Tank, investigating Social Architecture. Download the most recent research report _Catching up with Reality: Building a Case for a New Social Model_.

From the foreword:
In every society, there are four sources of well-being for citizens: market income, non-market care and support within the family, state-sponsored services and income transfers, and community services and supports. The roles and responsibilities of actors in markets, states, communities and families vary considerably from one country to another, and they can change over time. Certainly all four sources of well-being have been transformed by economic, demographic, political and social trend both within and beyond Canada's borders in recent years.