Film w/filmmaker on Economy at ReSources

What's the Economy for, Anyway? with filmmaker John de Graaf
Monday, May 17th
RE Sources' Sustainable Living Center
7:00 p.m.
Free

RE Sources hosts John de Graaf, filmmaker and National Coordinator of TAKE BACK YOUR TIME, an organization challenging time poverty and overwork in the U.S. and Canada. Mr. de Graaf will show his latest film, “What’s the Economy for, Anyway?” and be available for Q & A after the film.
You could call it Al Gore meets Stephen Colbert. Ecological economist Dave Batker presents a humorous, edgy, factual, timely and highly-visual monologue about the American economy today, challenging the ways we measure economic success—especially the Gross Domestic Product—and offering an answer to the question: What’s the Economy For, Anyway? Using Gifford Pinchot’s idea that the economy’s purpose is “the greatest good for the greatest number over the longest run,” Batker compares the performance of the U.S. economy with that of other industrial countries in terms of providing a high quality of life, fairness and ecological sustainability, concluding that when you do the numbers, we come out near the bottom in nearly every category. Batker shines a humorous light on such economic buzzwords as “productivity,” and “consumer sovereignty,” while offering ideas for “capitalism with a human face,” a new economic paradigm that meets the real needs of people and the planet.

“It’s completely great!” --writer and environmentalist, Bill McKibben