I watched a show on bottled water on the BBC last night about how business were able to create an industry and grow it to make billions of dollars a year (Foods That Make Billions http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00w8cll ).
According to the BBC, Margaret Thatcher is responsible for the rise of bottled water in the UK because she started making people pay for water instead of having it freely available. The consumers, then, had an interesting choice, pay for tap water or pay for bottled water. The marketing campaigns that came out for the bottled water persuaded many to choose bottled water.To me, this shows that structures are really in control of our choices. The BBC implied that without Thatcher's charge for water, the bottled water industry would not have had it so easy.
But there's more to the story that simple 'consumer choice' - when Coca-Cola launched Dasani in the UK, it was leaked that they were purifying tap water (as well as adding a few chemicals to give it a certain taste) and selling it. Dasani soon folded as no one was buying 'bottled tap water'. Interestingly, this is the same process that Nestle uses for it's 'Pure Life' water, but people still buy this bottled water. What's the difference? People's perceptions of the products are very different - the BBC nightly news outed Dasani as tap water (and other news media followed), but Nestle seems to have avoided media attention. The social pressure to boycott Dasani worked well to shut down the brand 5 weeks after it opened. I'm not sure if it came back, but it's a great example of the influence social pressure and social perceptions have on our lives.
'One' water was mentioned as an alternative to the big companies' water brands. One influenced the other brands to build wells in developing countries, which is helpful. I haven't had time to look into it, though, but does anyone know if they (One, Volvic, or other companies donating wells) provide maintenance for the wells or only use local materials and technologies that are easily maintained locally?
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
Tuesday, 16 November 2010
Alternative Currencies, or Pondering Funny Money
When trying to think up a complementary currency, I fond I was constrained by the current money system we have. The current system is so pervasive in my life that it is difficult to think of a different way of doing things. I realize that there are flaws in the current system, but it seems that it'll take someone much more clever than myself to think up a new system.
I suppose though, that a recession is a great time to launch alternative currencies - more people need money, so they would be more likely to consider something different. Do we know if many have been launched in the recent economic crunch?
What I've learned about complementary currencies is that its complicated. There doesn't seem to be a simple solution since the current monetary system is so ingrained into our societies. In this regards, though, it builds nicely off structure theory and Practice theory. How we use money is a practice. Approaches that focus on individuals' behavior will not be able to change the monetary system. The 'infrastructures of provision' seem to circulate around money, so change needs to happen at the macro-level; the structures in which we live need to be altered. How does one fathom such a change. I'm not sure that any of the complimentary currencies we designed in class during Monday's seminar moved past the individual-behavior-change level. This is not a criticism of me and my classmates, I only mention this to make the point that the current monetary system is truly ingrained.
Calling them 'complimentary currencies' seems to suggest that a grand change to the system is not possible - that these currencies will need to exist along side the current monetary system. A gradual take-over of the monetary system seems to be suggested by the term 'complimentary currency'. I suppose, though, that with so many economies interconnected a large-scale over-haul of the monetary system in one country would cause too much disruption to the global system.
It's interesting to think about having multiple types of currencies on a global scale - one for spending and one for storing. I would guess that global trade would be done in the storage currency, while intra-national trade would be in the spending currency. Would they be pegged to one another (like the US Dollar to the Hong Kong dollar, with 1 USD fixed between 7.5 and 8.5 HKD) or would they float free, like the exchange rate between the USD and the British Pound? If fixed, how would one compute value for each? If floating, this might encourage use of the spending currency, but would it end up with a confusing system in order to manage two currencies? Again, for me it's an interesting though exercise, and a valuable one for those who know what they're talking about, but I have no idea how these changes could actually be put into practice.
I suppose though, that a recession is a great time to launch alternative currencies - more people need money, so they would be more likely to consider something different. Do we know if many have been launched in the recent economic crunch?
What I've learned about complementary currencies is that its complicated. There doesn't seem to be a simple solution since the current monetary system is so ingrained into our societies. In this regards, though, it builds nicely off structure theory and Practice theory. How we use money is a practice. Approaches that focus on individuals' behavior will not be able to change the monetary system. The 'infrastructures of provision' seem to circulate around money, so change needs to happen at the macro-level; the structures in which we live need to be altered. How does one fathom such a change. I'm not sure that any of the complimentary currencies we designed in class during Monday's seminar moved past the individual-behavior-change level. This is not a criticism of me and my classmates, I only mention this to make the point that the current monetary system is truly ingrained.
Calling them 'complimentary currencies' seems to suggest that a grand change to the system is not possible - that these currencies will need to exist along side the current monetary system. A gradual take-over of the monetary system seems to be suggested by the term 'complimentary currency'. I suppose, though, that with so many economies interconnected a large-scale over-haul of the monetary system in one country would cause too much disruption to the global system.
It's interesting to think about having multiple types of currencies on a global scale - one for spending and one for storing. I would guess that global trade would be done in the storage currency, while intra-national trade would be in the spending currency. Would they be pegged to one another (like the US Dollar to the Hong Kong dollar, with 1 USD fixed between 7.5 and 8.5 HKD) or would they float free, like the exchange rate between the USD and the British Pound? If fixed, how would one compute value for each? If floating, this might encourage use of the spending currency, but would it end up with a confusing system in order to manage two currencies? Again, for me it's an interesting though exercise, and a valuable one for those who know what they're talking about, but I have no idea how these changes could actually be put into practice.
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