Economic Development
As part of a much bigger programme looking at the impacts of government policy and spending on poverty and inequality in the UK I recently had the opportunity, with Alex Fenton and Amanda Fitzgerald, to review Labour’s record on neighbourhood renewal in England between 1997-2010.
Benita Matofska founded The People Who Share in 2011 to co-ordinate the global sharing movement and take it into the mainstream. Here she talks about how the simple act of sharing is having a huge impact on both local economies and global problems.
In your State of the Sharing Economy report it said that the sharing economy will be bigger than the industrial revolution? Can you explain?
There are periods when the world has fundamentally changed. Look at the industrial revolution and what it meant in terms of our economy and for society. Things never looked the same afterwards. We’re going through something similar now with the impact of technology coupled with the fact that levels of consumption are not sustainable and thus the need to make a cultural shift towards sharing. There are two things we can’t change: the fact that the planet has finite resources and that the population is growing. We have no control over those things but we have unlimited potential to share. As well as that the collapse of economy has affected everyone at every level of society and people have had to rethink their lifestyles. But a whole generation has grown up with sharing their experiences via social media and whole industries have been changed through technology.
