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The reason for this is that credit is merely one way by which a society manages the distribution of goods and services. . . . A credit collapse . . . doesn’t make the energy, raw materials, and labor vanish into some fiscal equivalent of a black hole; they’re all still there, in whatever quantities they were before the credit collapse, and all that’s needed is some new way to allocate them to the production of goods and services.

Better would be to have an alternative system in place and ready to implement before the boom drops.

On a national level, when the Wall Street credit system fails, the government can turn to the innovative model devised by our colonial forebears and start issuing its own currency and credit—a power now usurped by private banks but written into the US Constitution as belonging to Congress

Consequently, “society” (i.e., the rich) consisted almost entirely of rentiers living off inherited wealth

In recent memory, the way to get rich has been to do it yourself

Several new books on management focus on culture and process in place of predictive strategy

“do the right thing,” which can’t be stated in rules, because it always depends on context.

twice-a-year manager reviews by employees.

When you snap the bricks together, you don't need a ruler to play Lego; the geometry comes from the parts

first attribute is metrology that comes from the parts

digitizing composites into little linked loops of carbon fiber instead of making giant pieces

The curve indicates that while workers will initially chose to work more when paid more per hour, there is a point after which rational workers will choose to work less

"leaders" elsewhere will come and become your low-paid employees

At that point, the leaders are no longer leaders of a community, and they turn out to be suckers after all, working for pittance, comparatively speaking

accumulation of knowledge assets

a new class has arisen which controls the vectors of information

In terms of knowledge creation, a vast new information commons is being created, which is increasingly out of the control of cognitive capitalism.

Whenever a group of people depend on a resource that everybody uses but nobody owns, and where one person’s use effects another person’s ability to use the resource, either the population fails to provide the resource, overconsumes and/or fails to replenish it, or they construct an institution for undertaking and managing collective action.

Common-pool resources may be owned by national, regional, or local [1]governments; by [2] communal groups; by [3] private individuals or corporations; or used as open access resources by whomever can gain access

Based on her survey, Ostrom distilled this list of common design principles from the experience of successful governance institutions: Clearly defined boundaries. Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself. Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions. Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and/or quantity of resource units are related to local conditions and to provision rules requiring labour, material, and/or money. Collective-choice arrangements. Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules [how refreshing. Standing!]. Monitoring. Monitors, who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators. Graduated sanctions. Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offence) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both. Conflict-resolution mechanisms. Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials. Minimal recognition of rights to organize. The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities. For CPRs that are parts of larger systems: Nested enterprises. Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.