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Are you interested in how worker cooperatives interact with a capitalist economy? Are you tired of people saying clearly false things and claiming “it’s Econ 101?” Do you love worker cooperatives and also often-oversimplified graphs? This class may be for you! In this short three-session class, we’ll apply some of the tools of economic theory to questions about worker cooperatives.Participants are encouraged to attend all three sessions, but they’ll be designed to stand on their own for folks who want to or can attend only one or two.
Session 1 (January): Some Economics Basics
In this session, we will introduce some basic concepts from "economics 101" that will help set the foundations for a discussion of how economics applies to worker cooperatives. We plan to discuss demand-supply models, the economic concepts of surplus and efficiency, and standard assumptions about markets and market actors. For participants with a background in economics, this session is likely to be a review.
Session 2 (February): Workers in Cooperatives
This session will focus on what economics can (and can't) help us understand about how the experiences of workers in cooperatives are different from workers in standard capitalist firms. Topics will include wage and employment decisions, distributions of returns to capital, and questions about why cooperatives are not more prevalent.
Session 3 (March): Cooperatives in Society
In our final session, we’ll look at what impacts economic theories predict that the presence of worker cooperatives will or may have on the broader community and markets around them - in particular, in what ways they may be experienced differently than capitalist firms by workers in other firms or by consumers of their products.
Free RSVP! https://withfriends.co/event/22626859/the_economics_of_worker_co_operatives_a_short_course#
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
3128 Greenmount Avenue, Baltimore, MD, United States, Maryland 21218
