Marshall Ganz on Making Social Movements Matter
BILL MOYERS: We need a new story?
MARSHALL GANZ: We need a new story. But it's also a new way of describing our economic challenges and our political challenges that emphasizes not this idea of what each individual competes with, each other individual as the answer, but the ways in which we cooperate and collaborate with one another as the answer.
You know, Albert Hirschman, the development economist wrote this book a number of years ago, I'm sure you know about it, “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.” And sort of the idea was, okay, so you got an institution. And it's screwing up. And so one way to fix it is to exercise voice. The other way is you can exit. The market solutions are all exit solutions.
BILL MOYERS: Explain that to me.
MARSHALL GANZ: Well, so you don't like the way the schools work, exit, make your own over here. And that way you exercise choice. You don't like the way public health works, exit, over here, make your own. Now the only problem is you can only exit and make your own if you got the money to do it. And so the result is that you create these parallel systems of elite systems that are, you know, that fragment the whole.
The public gets poorer and poorer and poorer, and you create all these little isolated golden ghettos all around of privilege. And the focus is on how do we find market solutions, market solutions, market… when we should but saying, how do we find more effective ways to exercise voice? How can we have more, more effective public deliberation? How can we bring more people into the process? How can we create the venues where people can actually learn and deliberate with one another?
I’m graduating in May and as a sort of physical documentation of my undergraduate career (i.e. slow descent into madness), I’m photographing my notebooks and inflicting them on you. This one is from 2011.
I was going through a pascal’s triangle phase …
Kowloon Walled City | A population density nightmare
Kowloon Walled City was a largely ungoverned Chinese settlement in Kowloon, Hong Kong, comprising of 350 interconnected high-rise buildings where 33,000 residents lived within a plot measuring just 210 meter by 120 meter. Originally a Chinese military fort, the Walled City became an enclave after the New Territories were leased to Britain in 1898. Its population increased dramatically following the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II and reached a peak of 33,000 residents in 1987. When it was demolished in 1993-94, it was thought to be the most densely populated place on earth.
Astronauts who have gone on spacewalks describe the smell of space as an “acrid aroma of seared steak, hot metal and welding fumes”. They can’t smell it while they’re out there as space suits are (obviously) airtight. But when they return and take off their helmets, this is the odor that greets them.
NASA has actually recreated the aroma for training purposes, and Steven Pearce, a chemist involved in the process has suggested that the metallic aspect of the scent may come from high-energy vibrations of ions.
whoa now man
