Web Site Scrapbook

Web Scrapbook

This small section of the site is intended for those who may be curious to get a jump on where we intend to develop it in the coming weeks and months. As it stands, and as you can well see, the site is still work in progress. Here are some of the points that we intend to address and try to integrate in the near future:

Web Site Housekeeping
- The Help Desk (Still needs work: detail and clarity)
- A careful introductory note on how to work best with electronic documentation such as this, including the various implications of the fact that it is interactive and hence perhaps not all that evident to many who come here.
- A note on the "ideal EcoPlan client" (What kind of person do we work best with and how do we best organize such cooperative efforts. This may seem like an unnecessary, gauche or trivial section, but it is our experience that these issues are best tackled before getting down to work. After all, what we do is team work and it matters how we and our clients/partners look at things.)
- Brackenbush, Panero, Riley, Schulz-Keil, Usui...
CRG - Chemicals Research Group:
- More on past projects.
- A note on how work is organized under this arm of the group, distinguishing it as a specialized business advisory "boutique" as opposed to a "supermarket".
- Eventual links to new chemicals journal that Hahn has created.
- More on Reference Tools section
- Usefulness of providing one or several sample reports or sets of extracts to help those who do now know our work make up their mind.
Energy, Environment, Economy:
The energy work and capabilities need to be developed into a major section of its own.
Extending Economics - New Rules:
Alfred Marshall, the father of neo-classical economics, the man who pinned the -ics (physics, mathematics, statistics) on the end of what was previously referred to as political economy, insisted in his work almost a century ago, that there was a lot more to an economy than the orchestration of "land, labor and capital", but somehow the mainstream of our discipline failed to get the message. And a century before him, Adam Smith had cautioned us:
The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of this mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life... But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.

One of the goals of Ecoplan is to work with our clients so that we can together develop an advanced understanding of what these new rules are going to be, together with the new opportunities (and problems) that are certain to open up in their wake. (You will see some of this thinking is several parts of The Commons, and in a somewhat more focused manner in the Rethinking Work site there.)
It is our belief here at Ecoplan that if you can manage to fine ways to stay abreast of developments at the leading edge of economic thinking, the important edge that is, you will be well aware that there is a major search for new rules that is going on, and behind that a nexus of complicated issues of economics, extended as it must be if it is to provide the needed metric for development and society in the new millennium. Do you need some names for this? Albert Hirschman. Joseph Stigler. Kenneth Arrow. Kenneth Boulding. Or, to sum up for now, Arthur Okun framed the challenge quite nicely when he wrote: "Two cheers for the market! Not three." That, in a nutshell, is what we now have to understand and get ahold of.
Systems Architecture:
How is how this aspect of our macro problem solving approach works: Set out to examine a very complex interactive system, don't flinch before the mass of details and apparent contradictions, and see if you can find the principal pillars and motives forces that make the whole thing somehow hang together in reality. And then... go on the hunt for the quirks, eventual pressure pints, policy angles, decisions, etc. that can somehow begin to move the whole construct in the direction of a more sustainable system (shorthand for economic and resource efficiency, environmental responsibility, social justice, quality of life and conviviality) (You may prefer to think of this as the search for the quark...)
A few concrete examples to be detialed and filled out:
- Rethinking Work
- Energy, Growth and Environment (Rogner and Britton)
- Future Prospects of the Fine Chemicals Business (Hahn, with Britton)
- Technology and Transportation (Riley, Papp, Britton)
- Access (Ekenger, Britton)
- Ciudades Accesibles (Murga, Britton)
- Ahmanson Ranch New Town (Brackenbush, Whitney, Britton)
- Bilbao Rethink/2nd opinion (Brackenbush, Scrafton, Murga, Whitney, Plowden, Britton)
- The Commons (including the 'Brains on the Knee' and 'People are Smarter than Governments' theses)

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