While I have not dug into the paper yet, if it's based upon the same reasoning as the blog post, given this is the author's promotion of it, I'm going to dismiss it as drek based upon, in his own...
While I have not dug into the paper yet, if it's based upon the same reasoning as the blog post, given this is the author's promotion of it, I'm going to dismiss it as drek based upon, in his own words, the gist of the arguement. He's arguing that there is essentially no reason we should be promoting co-ops over traditional ownership. I'm going to quote the key bit.
My point is that there are very few additional benefits, to society in general, above and beyond the benefits that are enjoyed by the members. Cooperatives are good for their owners, just as corporations are good for their owners, with the implication that neither is intrinsically better than the other. The appearance of superior virtue for the cooperative form is most often based on differential sympathy, and in particular, a rather striking lack of sympathy for investors as a constituency. If one adopts an impartial perspective, treating the economic interests of all individuals equally, there is no real basis for this asymmetry.
The problem with this dismissal of sympathy of co-ops is that, broadly speaking, the vast majority of people are not investors. Co-ops thus recieve more sympathy because they create investors out of laborers. So when you hone on the specific answer to the clickbait title:
My point is that there are very few additional benefits, to society in general, above and beyond the benefits that are enjoyed by the members.
It is easily dismissed by rudimentary logic.
Cooperatives are better for members than traditional companies
Members are people
People are part of society
Therefore, having all people being members of a co-op is better for society
Thus, we should promote cooperative ownership so more people are members
This does not dig into whether the co-ops will make more moral choices than companies, but if they are otherwise equal, there is still a net benefit to society. You could argue that it is not a net benefit because investors lose out, but you would be wrong because it's been proven time and again that societies with low income inequality provide a better quality of life.
I didn't read the journal article either, as the blog post didn't leave me wanting more. I'm not sure he's dismissing co-ops, I suspect he isn't. But then I don't see the value in the point that...
Exemplary
I didn't read the journal article either, as the blog post didn't leave me wanting more. I'm not sure he's dismissing co-ops, I suspect he isn't. But then I don't see the value in the point that both co-ops and corporations exist to serve their members (where members = investors). It's true, but only without context.
As you say, if a co-op is better for its members, and those members are part of society, then it's good for society. With co-ops the majority of customers are also members, with corporations, investors are a tiny minority of customers.
I think we can dig in to moral choices without getting too far into the weeds, simply put co-ops are highly incentivized by their nature to care about the communities they serve. Co-op investors are largely everyday community members. Corporations are highly incentivized by law, custom and enonomics to care primarily about investors. They have no meanful connection to any community outside of investors, except where they're forced to care for marketing or regulatory reasons. It's hard to pretend the two are comparable with a straight face.
On top of that, co-ops (of the sort the post seems to be referring to) don't exist to make large profits for their investors. They exist to sell their customer/investors things at fair prices. Whereas corporations exist to extract as much value out of communities as possible and ship a large part of that value off to investors who are not a part of the community. That might be better for society at large if the extracted value was benefitting a large part of society... but we know that most of that extracted value goes to less than 1% of the population.
I suppose the frustratingly obtuse and unsupported claim that the two entities are comparable could be the point of the post, as a way to get people to rage click to the journal article wherein they'll be surprised by the compelling nature of the arguments there... But I'll leave that discovery to someone else.
Strongly agreed, although I'd maybe add a point 2(a) along the lines of "There are more members per co-op than investors per corporation" - and since the author is so keen on impartiality, I'm...
Strongly agreed, although I'd maybe add a point 2(a) along the lines of "There are more members per co-op than investors per corporation" - and since the author is so keen on impartiality, I'm sure they'd agree that it's superior to benefit more people rather than fewer, after all.
I think the most revealing line about the author's attitude as a whole is this:
If one adopts an impartial perspective, treating the economic interests of all individuals equally, there is no real basis for this asymmetry.
For that to make sense, they're necessarily saying that it's "impartial" to disregard current wealth, and even if we ignore that they're also saying that it's somehow possible to consider the economic interests as "equal" whether a vast sum of money goes to a single person or is shared among hundreds of people.
Genuinely, the only way I can retrofit that to any definition of impartiality that I understand is if we're personifying the money itself and saying it doesn't care which bank account it sits in. With any sane reading, it sounds as if the author is using the language of detachment and scientific rigour to make what is, in fact, a very strongly opinionated point.
Your rudimentary logic can be equally applied in the other direction by replacing members with shareholders (who are also people). The distinction needs to be the constituency of those groups,...
Your rudimentary logic can be equally applied in the other direction by replacing members with shareholders (who are also people).
The distinction needs to be the constituency of those groups, since while shareholders includes middle-class 401k owners, it's overwhelmingly dominated by a small number of the rich. An illustrative example is 100 people investing $1 each (either liquid or as labour) vs 1 person investing $93, 1 person investing $5, and then 2 people investing $1 each. Benefiting 100 people is obviously a greater benefit for society than benefiting 4 people (even though 1 of those 4 benefits a lot).
This may be valid from a pure economic extraction paradigm(I am dubious), but there are other considerations. What incentive does a 401k shareholder have to care about the working conditions of...
This may be valid from a pure economic extraction paradigm(I am dubious), but there are other considerations.
What incentive does a 401k shareholder have to care about the working conditions of the company they've invested in? Furthermore, what options does this shareholder have to direct their investments towards companies that align with their interests? There are, IME, very few retirement funds, 401 or otherwise, that give you any granularity in your choice of investments. It's just a pool of pre chosen market funds that you can put your money into. The lack of agency in this decision adds a layer of abstraction to whatever you're investing in and forces you to choose the investment which will maximize your return. In the handful of plans I've been a part of, I haven't seen a green energy fund, a unionized shop fund, or anything along those lines which to me would be more "virtuous".
There definitely are "socially responsible funds". Not an endorsement, due diligence green washing etc, but as an example (wealthsimple) and ESGs in general (Schwab) Edit: non expert advice. If...
EFT funds for [...] stocks that do not violate social and environmental values [...] Green and social bonds, which provide fixed income exposure and directly fund projects linked to environmental and social causes
Common approaches to ESG include:
Values-based investing, also called negative screening, which focuses on excluding companies from the portfolio. This approach appeals most strongly to investors who care about avoiding investments in companies that don't align with their values.
Integration, which attempts to improve the risk/return profile by considering environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks in the investment process. In this approach, portfolios are constructed by selecting companies that score well on material ESG issues that are important for those companies' sector.
Impact investing, which refers to explicitly deploying investment dollars in an effort to directly achieve a desired outcome. Impact investors are typically more concerned with making a difference in the world or environment through the companies they invest in.
Edit: non expert advice. If possible, I would encourage everyone to transfer, don't pull out, the funds from your company mandated packages, to funds that align with one's values. They do exist: access is behind platforms that cater to YOU as a retail investor instead of your employer. There are so many options, and some platforms now give small potatoes investors a lot of granularity and choice for even several hundred bucks of your portfolio, or lets you choose percentages and make adjustments throughout the year without penalties. Don't like this country? Pick an EX-[country/region] fund. Don't like these companies? Try this fund which excludes Nestle. They do exist, but most employees don't know how to get to them that's all.
This is all well and good, but my comment was limited to the context of access to funds within a retirement plan. Many(a majority I would posit) can't just pick any fund in the world to invest in....
This is all well and good, but my comment was limited to the context of access to funds within a retirement plan. Many(a majority I would posit) can't just pick any fund in the world to invest in. We are limited by the plans offered in the plan.
I would never dispute the existence of these funds, but access is limited. Most people don't hold any investments outside their retirement plansnand therefore are unable to choose their investments freely.
Agreed, and yea I hate how limited they are and how punishing they make it to transfer out. It makes me feel like part of a bundled product my company sold to these firms, rather than myself...
Agreed, and yea I hate how limited they are and how punishing they make it to transfer out. It makes me feel like part of a bundled product my company sold to these firms, rather than myself having any agency and being an actual customer.
One thing I didn't see mentioned in the blog post is sustainability. Cooperatives have a much higher potential to be sustainable, both in the economic and the environmental sense than...
One thing I didn't see mentioned in the blog post is sustainability. Cooperatives have a much higher potential to be sustainable, both in the economic and the environmental sense than corporations. Both types of entities have the potential to be extractive, but the severity of the extraction, whether it be economic(excessive executive compensation, dividends to shareholders, etc.), environmental (resource extraction, inproper waste disposal)- I would expect a co-op to have a greater stake in choosing the more sustainable option. Who would you expect to make better decisions where the competing interests are either maximize profits or have an environment that is livable?
I also would like to know why the author chose this framing. Why is "virtue" the paradigm he chose to operate in, and not something more quantifiable? It smells like he had a conclusion and worked backwards from there. ED: I now see why he chose this framing, the author is not a sociologist or economist, but a philosopher. This sufficiently explains the framing for me. Shame on me for assuming bad faith.
You seem pretty sure about this, but how do we know that coops are more sustainable than corporations, on average? For example, I think that in the US, both credit unions and banks are pretty...
You seem pretty sure about this, but how do we know that coops are more sustainable than corporations, on average? For example, I think that in the US, both credit unions and banks are pretty long-lived, and I couldn’t say offhand which ones are older or how many of each have gone out of business. It seems like someone would need to do a study.
It would also matter a lot how one decides to do the comparisons. I would want to do comparisons within the same industry, at least.
Meanwhile, I would guess that there are a lot fewer coops than corporations in extractive industries like mining, but I’m not sure that a coop would necessarily make sense or do a better job. The customers of mines are businesses, so I’m not sure how it would work.
Look at the incentives. Where are the incentives of a corporation owned by private equity(now a majority of corps in the us) or publicly traded corporations? Do they align with environmental...
Look at the incentives. Where are the incentives of a corporation owned by private equity(now a majority of corps in the us) or publicly traded corporations? Do they align with environmental sustainability in the communities they operate in? Of course not. They're beholden to their ownership to maximize profits. Does that logic make sense to you?
Take consumer packaged goods like soap. Does Procter & Gamble have an incentive to use more expensive non plastic packaging that doesn't pollute the environment? Having trouble thinking of a co-op CPG company at the moment, but in my mind there would be more motivation in my mind to lessen environmental impact when the owners of the company are local to that company and would see the impacts first-hand.
You made two different claims (about economic versus environmental sustainability) that have different answers. For example, ExxonMobil (if you include its predecessors) is more than a 140 years...
You made two different claims (about economic versus environmental sustainability) that have different answers. For example, ExxonMobil (if you include its predecessors) is more than a 140 years old and shows no signs of disappearing. Whether a company is environmentally friendly isn't the same thing at all.
I don't think Procter & Gamble shows any signs of disappearing either?
I happen to belong to several co-ops, and personal anecdotally, (upon reflection, no,) they are not "better" for me as a member. Co-Op Pros Cons Overall subjective "better" Credit union Staff...
“it is a truism that cooperatives are better for their members – if they weren’t, then their members wouldn’t be their members”
I happen to belong to several co-ops, and personal anecdotally, my mileage very greatly varies, on if they're (upon reflection, no,) they are not "better" for me as a member.
Co-Op
Pros
Cons
Overall subjective "better"
Credit union
Staff recognize me, can transact without bringing in ID
I dread the day another East Asian moves into the community and they try to give them my money or vice versa
Not better
"
Walkable distance
worse interest rates, fees, speed of services than my virtual only bank
Not better
Grocery
short driving distance
much higher prices, plus $1 member share fee per week even when I don't go
Not better
Farm goods
no membership fees
no discernible difference from another farm store on same street except the co-op sells Irving brand wood shavings which are a total rip off
not better
Past credit union
funnier ads, friendlier looking Teller desks.
don't know me from Jack, worst rates and fees than virtual only, had a serious cyber security incident
not better
Housing co-op
very low cost rent compared to market rates
extremely rough neighborhood, scary level health concerns of units
Better *
why Housing was "Better"
The housing one, we were moving from one province to another. The co-op rep charged us a fee and sent pictures etc, and when we showed up to see it in person it was a shock. My friends who were driving us had politely expressed concerns over the area, which we nodded politely to. But the condition of the units was a shock: severe pest current infestation, unusable portions of unit, not working appliances, and doors that felt insecure for the area. To this day, I feel like the co-op rep did a good job bringing in additional income for its members, charging that fee (IIRC about 150-200) before showing us the unit. Probably a good revenue stream from people who then decide they can't live there. Good job. But having said all that: the rent would have been much cheaper than most places we saw, and I see their value. We were moving from one rough cheap rental to see this, and finally moved into another very sketchy part of the region, so we're not picky people who turn our noses up at pawn store / payday loan / soup kitchen / tent in park neighbourhoods at all. Still, we had a young child at the time and the pest issue wouldn't have been something we can overcome. I'm glad it was an option for folks who really super needed the cheaper rent though, so still **Better**, I would say.
Overall, I would say that my experiences with co-op are NOT better at all. But they have value in that they're not part of the oligarchy, that they represent a last bastion of choice for consumers. That's pretty marginal, and unlike the author I would say their benefits is only for society at large, as a source for alternative options, rather than for its members.
Great question. I remain a member of all of them except the housing co-op. The grocery co-op is our neighborhood's only option aside from convenience stores: many seniors solely rely on it, and...
Great question. I remain a member of all of them except the housing co-op. The grocery co-op is our neighborhood's only option aside from convenience stores: many seniors solely rely on it, and the co-op donates to our food bank when their stuff expires. So I feel the socially responsible thing is for me to continue my $52 annual fee as well as occasionally paying through the nose when the weather is bad enough I can't drive to the big box stores at the next town. It's not virtue though, I just want that option to keep existing....
The other entities don't actively cost me money to maintain so sure why not. I'll join as many non-oligarchy owned co-ops as feasible, if they're free above a certain low threshold of deposits or whatever and no ongoing fees. They offer no benefits to me as a member but I do believe in their existence has value on a societal level.
The article's author made a distinction between members and non-members, but there's often little difference between inactive members and non-members (particularly when it doesn't cost anything),...
The article's author made a distinction between members and non-members, but there's often little difference between inactive members and non-members (particularly when it doesn't cost anything), so I think that distinction fails.
For websites, that's why they use other metrics, like users who are active within the last week or month.
Also, I think your experience shows that some things (like location) are more important to customers than whether a firm is a co-op or for-profit. Particularly for other people you care about, like seniors.
I guess co-ops are more likely to get "donations" in the form of pricey memberships. Though, some non-profit music or arts venues do that too.
activity is hard to gauge, though, for example, a credit union has votes every now and then, and membership meetings. I attend / vote, but I don't really "contribute" anything. On the other hand,...
activity is hard to gauge, though, for example, a credit union has votes every now and then, and membership meetings. I attend / vote, but I don't really "contribute" anything. On the other hand, there's value, hard economic value, in money just sitting there, and an account that's "active" and accumulating interest. For example, loyalty programs don't even have members that vote, and are completely free, and yet they're worth billions of dollars.
Getting back to the article, the co-ops of the writer's youth provide very tangible benefits to active members in the form of purchasing discounts, or easier access to credit, or the ability to bring in farming products that the local community actually wants.
I guess I should be fairer to co-op here, and say that even though I derive little/no value from my co-ops, my community members super do: many of them might have a hard time building credit, qualifying for loans, recovering from debt, or being able to afford car trips to the big box stores. But that's because of the local-ness of these places, like you said, location, rather than the co-op structure. The local pharmacy allows community members to put groceries and medication "on the tab" until government cheques clear at the end of the month. There were informal co-op's in my parents' generation, where one can buy a cup of rice at a time or a quirt of detergent or to borrow a suit/watch for interviews/meeting the parents. Their very existence is antithesis to a world of multinational conglomerates, and their values are where these conglomerates have shortfalls.
In fact, I wonder if value of co-op isn't highly related to the financial mobility of an individual. A lot of the "nice" things that fancy credit cards and whatnot give to their customers are just things that used to be freely offered by one's community: ability to defer mortgage payments when you get fired, no foreign exchange fees, perks and discounts, notification for concerts, overdraft fees being waived, occasional interest forgiveness, preferred interest rates on loans, credit building etc etc etc. The evil part is that this is all for money now. But the less evil part is that money has evened out discrimination somewhat: these kinds of community perks weren't evenly accessible to everyone: communities can exclude and bully just as readily as they can help one another.
From the blog post, which links to a journal article with the same name: ...
From the blog post, which links to a journal article with the same name:
The status of cooperatives in Western Canada gave rise to one of the major points of divergence between the Canadian and British left in the 20th century. Whereas the U.K. Labour Party’s Clause 4 committed it to “common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange,” which was generally understood to mean public ownership, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in Canada distinguished itself by affirming a commitment to “social ownership,” which included both public and cooperative management of the economy. It was only much later, especially after the CCF was rebranded as the New Democratic Party (NDP), that unions came to play a more important role. Its primary impetus, in the early days, came from the cooperative sector – especially the tradition of mutual insurance among farmers.
...
I have absolutely no doubt that cooperatives provide enormous benefits to their members (as I put it in the paper, “it is a truism that cooperatives are better for their members – if they weren’t, then their members wouldn’t be their members”). Thus there is good reason to ensure that the law is neutral between different organizational forms. We do not want people to be stuck transacting with a corporation when they could be better off organizing a cooperative. My point is that there are very few additional benefits, to society in general, above and beyond the benefits that are enjoyed by the members. Cooperatives are good for their owners, just as corporations are good for their owners, with the implication that neither is intrinsically better than the other. The appearance of superior virtue for the cooperative form is most often based on differential sympathy, and in particular, a rather striking lack of sympathy for investors as a constituency. If one adopts an impartial perspective, treating the economic interests of all individuals equally, there is no real basis for this asymmetry.
That’s the gist of the argument. The details are more complicated, which is why it’s a journal article and not a blog post.
While I have not dug into the paper yet, if it's based upon the same reasoning as the blog post, given this is the author's promotion of it, I'm going to dismiss it as drek based upon, in his own words, the gist of the arguement. He's arguing that there is essentially no reason we should be promoting co-ops over traditional ownership. I'm going to quote the key bit.
The problem with this dismissal of sympathy of co-ops is that, broadly speaking, the vast majority of people are not investors. Co-ops thus recieve more sympathy because they create investors out of laborers. So when you hone on the specific answer to the clickbait title:
It is easily dismissed by rudimentary logic.
This does not dig into whether the co-ops will make more moral choices than companies, but if they are otherwise equal, there is still a net benefit to society. You could argue that it is not a net benefit because investors lose out, but you would be wrong because it's been proven time and again that societies with low income inequality provide a better quality of life.
I didn't read the journal article either, as the blog post didn't leave me wanting more. I'm not sure he's dismissing co-ops, I suspect he isn't. But then I don't see the value in the point that both co-ops and corporations exist to serve their members (where members = investors). It's true, but only without context.
As you say, if a co-op is better for its members, and those members are part of society, then it's good for society. With co-ops the majority of customers are also members, with corporations, investors are a tiny minority of customers.
I think we can dig in to moral choices without getting too far into the weeds, simply put co-ops are highly incentivized by their nature to care about the communities they serve. Co-op investors are largely everyday community members. Corporations are highly incentivized by law, custom and enonomics to care primarily about investors. They have no meanful connection to any community outside of investors, except where they're forced to care for marketing or regulatory reasons. It's hard to pretend the two are comparable with a straight face.
On top of that, co-ops (of the sort the post seems to be referring to) don't exist to make large profits for their investors. They exist to sell their customer/investors things at fair prices. Whereas corporations exist to extract as much value out of communities as possible and ship a large part of that value off to investors who are not a part of the community. That might be better for society at large if the extracted value was benefitting a large part of society... but we know that most of that extracted value goes to less than 1% of the population.
I suppose the frustratingly obtuse and unsupported claim that the two entities are comparable could be the point of the post, as a way to get people to rage click to the journal article wherein they'll be surprised by the compelling nature of the arguments there... But I'll leave that discovery to someone else.
Strongly agreed, although I'd maybe add a point 2(a) along the lines of "There are more members per co-op than investors per corporation" - and since the author is so keen on impartiality, I'm sure they'd agree that it's superior to benefit more people rather than fewer, after all.
I think the most revealing line about the author's attitude as a whole is this:
For that to make sense, they're necessarily saying that it's "impartial" to disregard current wealth, and even if we ignore that they're also saying that it's somehow possible to consider the economic interests as "equal" whether a vast sum of money goes to a single person or is shared among hundreds of people.
Genuinely, the only way I can retrofit that to any definition of impartiality that I understand is if we're personifying the money itself and saying it doesn't care which bank account it sits in. With any sane reading, it sounds as if the author is using the language of detachment and scientific rigour to make what is, in fact, a very strongly opinionated point.
Your rudimentary logic can be equally applied in the other direction by replacing members with shareholders (who are also people).
The distinction needs to be the constituency of those groups, since while shareholders includes middle-class 401k owners, it's overwhelmingly dominated by a small number of the rich. An illustrative example is 100 people investing $1 each (either liquid or as labour) vs 1 person investing $93, 1 person investing $5, and then 2 people investing $1 each. Benefiting 100 people is obviously a greater benefit for society than benefiting 4 people (even though 1 of those 4 benefits a lot).
This may be valid from a pure economic extraction paradigm(I am dubious), but there are other considerations.
What incentive does a 401k shareholder have to care about the working conditions of the company they've invested in? Furthermore, what options does this shareholder have to direct their investments towards companies that align with their interests? There are, IME, very few retirement funds, 401 or otherwise, that give you any granularity in your choice of investments. It's just a pool of pre chosen market funds that you can put your money into. The lack of agency in this decision adds a layer of abstraction to whatever you're investing in and forces you to choose the investment which will maximize your return. In the handful of plans I've been a part of, I haven't seen a green energy fund, a unionized shop fund, or anything along those lines which to me would be more "virtuous".
There definitely are "socially responsible funds". Not an endorsement, due diligence green washing etc, but as an example (wealthsimple) and ESGs in general (Schwab)
Edit: non expert advice. If possible, I would encourage everyone to transfer, don't pull out, the funds from your company mandated packages, to funds that align with one's values. They do exist: access is behind platforms that cater to YOU as a retail investor instead of your employer. There are so many options, and some platforms now give small potatoes investors a lot of granularity and choice for even several hundred bucks of your portfolio, or lets you choose percentages and make adjustments throughout the year without penalties. Don't like this country? Pick an EX-[country/region] fund. Don't like these companies? Try this fund which excludes Nestle. They do exist, but most employees don't know how to get to them that's all.
This is all well and good, but my comment was limited to the context of access to funds within a retirement plan. Many(a majority I would posit) can't just pick any fund in the world to invest in. We are limited by the plans offered in the plan.
I would never dispute the existence of these funds, but access is limited. Most people don't hold any investments outside their retirement plansnand therefore are unable to choose their investments freely.
Agreed, and yea I hate how limited they are and how punishing they make it to transfer out. It makes me feel like part of a bundled product my company sold to these firms, rather than myself having any agency and being an actual customer.
One thing I didn't see mentioned in the blog post is sustainability. Cooperatives have a much higher potential to be sustainable, both in the economic and the environmental sense than corporations. Both types of entities have the potential to be extractive, but the severity of the extraction, whether it be economic(excessive executive compensation, dividends to shareholders, etc.), environmental (resource extraction, inproper waste disposal)- I would expect a co-op to have a greater stake in choosing the more sustainable option. Who would you expect to make better decisions where the competing interests are either maximize profits or have an environment that is livable?
I also would like to know why the author chose this framing. Why is "virtue" the paradigm he chose to operate in, and not something more quantifiable? It smells like he had a conclusion and worked backwards from there. ED: I now see why he chose this framing, the author is not a sociologist or economist, but a philosopher. This sufficiently explains the framing for me. Shame on me for assuming bad faith.
You seem pretty sure about this, but how do we know that coops are more sustainable than corporations, on average? For example, I think that in the US, both credit unions and banks are pretty long-lived, and I couldn’t say offhand which ones are older or how many of each have gone out of business. It seems like someone would need to do a study.
It would also matter a lot how one decides to do the comparisons. I would want to do comparisons within the same industry, at least.
Meanwhile, I would guess that there are a lot fewer coops than corporations in extractive industries like mining, but I’m not sure that a coop would necessarily make sense or do a better job. The customers of mines are businesses, so I’m not sure how it would work.
Look at the incentives. Where are the incentives of a corporation owned by private equity(now a majority of corps in the us) or publicly traded corporations? Do they align with environmental sustainability in the communities they operate in? Of course not. They're beholden to their ownership to maximize profits. Does that logic make sense to you?
Take consumer packaged goods like soap. Does Procter & Gamble have an incentive to use more expensive non plastic packaging that doesn't pollute the environment? Having trouble thinking of a co-op CPG company at the moment, but in my mind there would be more motivation in my mind to lessen environmental impact when the owners of the company are local to that company and would see the impacts first-hand.
You made two different claims (about economic versus environmental sustainability) that have different answers. For example, ExxonMobil (if you include its predecessors) is more than a 140 years old and shows no signs of disappearing. Whether a company is environmentally friendly isn't the same thing at all.
I don't think Procter & Gamble shows any signs of disappearing either?
I happen to belong to several co-ops, and personal anecdotally,
my mileage very greatly varies, on if they're(upon reflection, no,) they are not "better" for me as a member.why Housing was "Better"
The housing one, we were moving from one province to another. The co-op rep charged us a fee and sent pictures etc, and when we showed up to see it in person it was a shock. My friends who were driving us had politely expressed concerns over the area, which we nodded politely to. But the condition of the units was a shock: severe pest current infestation, unusable portions of unit, not working appliances, and doors that felt insecure for the area. To this day, I feel like the co-op rep did a good job bringing in additional income for its members, charging that fee (IIRC about 150-200) before showing us the unit. Probably a good revenue stream from people who then decide they can't live there. Good job. But having said all that: the rent would have been much cheaper than most places we saw, and I see their value. We were moving from one rough cheap rental to see this, and finally moved into another very sketchy part of the region, so we're not picky people who turn our noses up at pawn store / payday loan / soup kitchen / tent in park neighbourhoods at all. Still, we had a young child at the time and the pest issue wouldn't have been something we can overcome. I'm glad it was an option for folks who really super needed the cheaper rent though, so still **Better**, I would say.Overall, I would say that my experiences with co-op are NOT better at all. But they have value in that they're not part of the oligarchy, that they represent a last bastion of choice for consumers. That's pretty marginal, and unlike the author I would say their benefits is only for society at large, as a source for alternative options, rather than for its members.
Did you remain a member of any of these? If so, why, if there are better alternatives?
Great question. I remain a member of all of them except the housing co-op. The grocery co-op is our neighborhood's only option aside from convenience stores: many seniors solely rely on it, and the co-op donates to our food bank when their stuff expires. So I feel the socially responsible thing is for me to continue my $52 annual fee as well as occasionally paying through the nose when the weather is bad enough I can't drive to the big box stores at the next town. It's not virtue though, I just want that option to keep existing....
The other entities don't actively cost me money to maintain so sure why not. I'll join as many non-oligarchy owned co-ops as feasible, if they're free above a certain low threshold of deposits or whatever and no ongoing fees. They offer no benefits to me as a member but I do believe in their existence has value on a societal level.
The article's author made a distinction between members and non-members, but there's often little difference between inactive members and non-members (particularly when it doesn't cost anything), so I think that distinction fails.
For websites, that's why they use other metrics, like users who are active within the last week or month.
Also, I think your experience shows that some things (like location) are more important to customers than whether a firm is a co-op or for-profit. Particularly for other people you care about, like seniors.
I guess co-ops are more likely to get "donations" in the form of pricey memberships. Though, some non-profit music or arts venues do that too.
activity is hard to gauge, though, for example, a credit union has votes every now and then, and membership meetings. I attend / vote, but I don't really "contribute" anything. On the other hand, there's value, hard economic value, in money just sitting there, and an account that's "active" and accumulating interest. For example, loyalty programs don't even have members that vote, and are completely free, and yet they're worth billions of dollars.
Getting back to the article, the co-ops of the writer's youth provide very tangible benefits to active members in the form of purchasing discounts, or easier access to credit, or the ability to bring in farming products that the local community actually wants.
I guess I should be fairer to co-op here, and say that even though I derive little/no value from my co-ops, my community members super do: many of them might have a hard time building credit, qualifying for loans, recovering from debt, or being able to afford car trips to the big box stores. But that's because of the local-ness of these places, like you said, location, rather than the co-op structure. The local pharmacy allows community members to put groceries and medication "on the tab" until government cheques clear at the end of the month. There were informal co-op's in my parents' generation, where one can buy a cup of rice at a time or a quirt of detergent or to borrow a suit/watch for interviews/meeting the parents. Their very existence is antithesis to a world of multinational conglomerates, and their values are where these conglomerates have shortfalls.
In fact, I wonder if value of co-op isn't highly related to the financial mobility of an individual. A lot of the "nice" things that fancy credit cards and whatnot give to their customers are just things that used to be freely offered by one's community: ability to defer mortgage payments when you get fired, no foreign exchange fees, perks and discounts, notification for concerts, overdraft fees being waived, occasional interest forgiveness, preferred interest rates on loans, credit building etc etc etc. The evil part is that this is all for money now. But the less evil part is that money has evened out discrimination somewhat: these kinds of community perks weren't evenly accessible to everyone: communities can exclude and bully just as readily as they can help one another.
From the blog post, which links to a journal article with the same name:
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