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Ben Hecht
President and CEO at Living Cities

Enough already. Time to act at scale. In 2016, the net worth of the typical white household was $171,000, almost ten times the $17,600 in wealth held by the typical black household. on.epi.org/2Dp8BoL #NewUrbanPractice http://ow.ly/i/BDCLU



Burgess COMMENTARY
This has been reasonably well known for a good many years, but I don't hear much from anyone about meaningful ways to change this situation. 50+ years ago getting skills training and getting a well paid job had working class families increasing their wealth year after year, but since the Reagan years wages have flatlined and all the productivity gains have been skimmed into profits and wealth gains for those in the ownership class. There have been failures in many areas ... unions, politicians,, academics, business leaders, activists ... in fact, almost everyone. I am arguing for better metrics that put as much weight on social and environmental progress as on profit progress. This can be a game changer. When you change the way the game is scored, you change the way the game is played!
Matthew Haas
Do you think equity will improve under Guilded Age of Corporate Republic of America and under recent tax reform?

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Peter Burgess
The world needs tax reform, but the recently passed US Tax Bill is really not tax reform, but merely a serious weakening of the Federal US regime that may have catastrophic consequences. There is a huge amount of liquidity in the global system already, mainly in the hands of the financial sector and corporations (often overseas) but almost every government on the planet does not have the revenues to support essential services. Rich economies like the US, the UK and many others should be increasing tax revenues at this time in order to fund major improvements in social status and long term environmental efficiency.
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Jasmine A. Lomax, LEED GA, CGP
USGBC-LA Board of Directors Member | Senior Project Engineer | Sustainability Consultant | LinkedIn Coach | LEED GA |CGP



Cities in Scotland to Start Universal Basic Income Trials http://bit.ly/2Cd3NVU Select residents of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Fife, and North Ayrshire will soon begin receiving unconditional monthly payments as part of a Scottish universal basic income experiment. Universal basic income (UBI) is a policy that offers unconditional income for all citizens to ensure that everyone benefits from a basic standard of living. UBI is currently being tested in Scotland, as well as countries like Canada and Finland, and has attracted £250,000 (~$334,500) in public funding for feasibility studies. The selected cities must submit their plans for locally implementing the basic income program by March 2018. Proponents of a basic income claim that it will be necessary to implement UBI in some form in order to compensate for the major economic disruption and potential job losses from increasing automation due to advanced artificial intelligence. While the idea is still controversial, it is being increasingly taken seriously in cities and countries around the world. The idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is vital in order for the global socio-enviro-economic system to work in a reasonably equitable fashion, but it cannot work until there is a fundamental shift in how money is created. The powers that be created multi-trillions of new money when the banking system was in crisis a decade ago, but there are draconian constraints on additional money/credit to fund important programs for social success (like UBI) and for essential remediation of the environmental damage that has happened and is ongoing. A better system architecture is possible with metrics that take into account ALL the capitals and ALL the actors. Peter // http://truevaluemetrics.org