User:Kateeloop/The New Economics Institute (NEI)

The New Economics Institute (NEI) is a new think-tank, based in the USA, dedicated to forging a narrative and theory of a sustainable and humane economic system, and to make discussion of this new economic order central to mainstream debate in academic thinking and political action. It is a joint venture between the New Economics Foundation in London and the E. F. Schumacher Society in the USA, which will see the E. F. Schumacher Society transitioning to become the new NEI. It is due for launch in 2010.

Work
The New Economics Institute uses the tagline ‘A new economics for a new economy’ and aims to bring the experience and knowhow of both founding organizations to create a major challenge to the economic status quo.

It aims to draw together the strands of the emerging new economics, including Amartya Sen to Amory Lovins, from community supported agriculture to Slow Money and Transition Towns, from the Tobin tax to replacing GDP/GNP with better measures of prosperity, as well as the thousands of innovative new businesses, sustainable investors, and social entrepreneurs making local economies work, using resources in sustainable ways, and improving people’s lives, creating a new economic narrative that can challenge the old.

But it also aims to tackle the remaining practical and theoretical gaps that need to be filled around issues like supporting full employment in a slow-growth system; supporting sustainable development in for the ‘bottom billion’ of the world’s poorest; stretching short-run term business objectives to coincide with long-run term human goals; and creating a more humane interface between among global, national, and local economic systems.

The NEI’s strategy is collaboration. Presenting an academically and intellectually robust new economics will allow them to partner with mainstream businesses and financial services which are looking for ways to adapt to new economic mandates. They believe it will also allow them to bypass policy disputes between campaigning outsiders and innovative insiders by focusing on empirical solutions.

Programs
The work of the E. F. Schumacher Society will continue as programs of the NEI, including the respected lecture program, and their publication, the E. F. Schumacher Library, which houses Fritz Schumacher's personal books and papers and those of other new economic thinkers, and the BerkShares local currency program. In addition, key specific first-year projects will include: an ambitious project on both sides of the Atlantic to create a robust theoretical model for a sustainable new economics.

Leadership
The E. F. Schumacher Society is in the process of becoming the NEI. The key players are Stewart Wallis, executive director of the New Economics Foundation, a new board member and chair of the Society’s transition team; Susan Witt, executive director of the E. F. Schumacher Society; and David Boyle, fellow of the New Economics Foundation.

Other board members include Professor Gar Alperovitz, Jessica Brackman, Dr Neva Goodwin, Hildegarde Hannum, Eric Harris-Braun, Daniel Levinson, Professor Richard Norgaard, Professor David W. Orr, Connie Packard, Will Raap, Professor Gus Speth, Joe Stanislaw, and Professor Peter Victor.

Advisory board members include Peter Barnes, Merrian Fuller, Bill McKibben, Otto Scharmer, and Doug Tompkins.