KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with Kimberley Palmer who writes about money – how to have more of it and how to manage the money you have. Her new book, 'The Economy of You: Discover Your Inner Entrepreneur and Recession-Proof Your Life' (January 2014, AMACOM), tells the stories of 100 successful side-giggers who built financial security by launching side-businesses. In addition, she writes about money as the senior money editor and Alpha Consumer blogger at US News & World Report. Palmer says she loves helping people make smarter money choices, especially when it comes to navigating big life milestones, from college graduation to parenthood to homeownership. In her first book, Generation Earn: The Young Professional’s Guide to Spending, Investing, and Giving Back, she covers many of those topics.

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For this week's KGNU programme, 'It's The Economy', Claudia Cragg speaks with Tim Harford. His first book, the global bestseller The Undercover Economist was a sensation – and has gone on to sell well over a million copies worldwide. In it, Harford looked at the world through the eyes of a microeconomist, from the changing cost of a cappuccino to how supermarkets choose to display the products on their shelves. Now, in a world utterly transformed by the global downturn, Harford is back.

In The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, he turns to the wider picture – to macroeconomics – to help us unpick and understand the complexities of major economies – which, he says, putting you (the reader) in the driving seat.

With a word of advice now and then, the Undercover Economist encourages you to run the show. Along the way you’ll discover what happens to inflation when you burn a million pound notes, why even prison camps have recessions and why Coke didn’t change the price of a bottle for seventy years.

According to The New Statesman's Felix Salmon, 

“Tim Harford is perhaps the best popular economics writer in the world… his new book is nothing less than the holy grail of popular economics.”

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This interview for #KGNU and 'It's The Economy' (a show produced by a team of the station's reporters) is a weekly radio economics and all-things-business program with international reach. This week Claudia Cragg talks to Gayle Avery about 'Honeybees and Locusts' and discusses why all of us in business and the world at large should adopt as many of the traits of the former as possible to discourage the continuing plague of the latter.

In this interview, Avery, who is one of the founders of the instituteforsustainableleadership.com, points out that if only the 23 main principles of SL had been followed into the run up to the Great Crash of 2008, it more than likely could have been avoided or at least significantly minimized. Furthermore, many very successful companies, like BMW for example, purposefully follow SL principles to their very evident and consequent bottom-line corporate advantage. 

The idea is that the honey bee creators, makers and providers lend valuable things for others” to an environment while the locust “takers and predators” are those who, says Avery, “extract value from others without contributing much in return”. The distinction comes from a so-called founding work of modern capitalism, Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (which first appeared as a poem in 1705).

The implication for those who may still believe that capitalism, as we see it today, is viable in the long term, is that the adoption of these principles encourages bee-like virtues and so discourages the locusts.

But is that what we see today? The nasty little secret of much of C21st business may be that capitalism not only comes with moral hazards (as often required to meet sometimes greedy and ultimately unsustainable $$$ stockholder demands) but may actually depend on that climate for much of its success.  

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According to Gar Alperovitz, never before have so many Americans been more frustrated with the economic system, more fearful that it is failing, or more open to fresh ideas about a new one. The seeds of a new movement demanding change are forming, he says, and it is this that he discusses here with KGNU's Claudia Cragg for 'It's The Economy.'

But just what is this thing called a new economy, and how might it take shape in America? In What Then Must We Do?, Gar Alperovitz speaks directly to the reader about where we find ourselves in history, why the time is right for a new-economy movement to coalesce, what it means to build a new system to replace the crumbling one, and how we might begin. He also suggests what the next system might look like—and where we can see its outlines, like an image slowly emerging in the developing trays of a photographer’s darkroom, already taking shape.

He proposes a possible next system that is not corporate capitalism, not state socialism, but something else entirely—and something entirely American.

Alperovitz calls for an evolution, not a revolution, out of the old system and into the new. That new system would democratize the ownership of wealth, strengthen communities in diverse ways, and be governed by policies and institutions sophisticated enough to manage a large-scale, powerful economy.

For the growing group of Americans pacing at the edge of confidence in the old system, or already among its detractors, What Then Must We Do?, Alperovitz believes, offers an elegant solution for moving from anger to strategy.

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In the week celebrating the 50th anniversary (January 8, 1964) since, in what many consider to be one of the most memorable ever State of the Union addresses, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his “War on Poverty” and introduced legislation that would expand the federal government’s role in poverty reduction efforts. This set in motion the creation of programs such as Head Start, food stamps (now SNAP), work study, Community Action Agencies, VISTA, Medicare and Medicaid. Our guest for this edition of KGNU's 'It's The Economy' is Jill Quadagno, author of The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty. 

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Here novelist James Scott speaks with KGNU's Claudia Cragg about 'The Kept'.

"In the winter of 1897, Elspeth Howell treks across miles of snow and ice to the isolated farmstead in upstate New York where she and her husband have raised their five children. Her midwife's salary is tucked into the toes of her boots, and her pack is full of gifts for her family. But as she crests the final hill, and sees her darkened house and a smokeless chimney, immediately she knows that an unthinkable crime has destroyed the life she so carefully built."

"Her lone comfort is her twelve-year-old son, Caleb, who joins her in mourning the tragedy and planning its reprisal. Their long journey leads them to a rough-hewn lake town, defined by the violence both of its landscape and of its inhabitants. There Caleb is forced into a brutal adulthood, as he slowly discovers truths about his family he never suspected, and Elspeth must confront the terrible urges and unceasing temptations that have haunted her for years. Throughout it all, the love between mother and son serves as the only shield against a merciless world."

"A scorching portrait of guilt and lost innocence, atonement and retribution, resilience and sacrifice, pregnant obsession and primal adolescence, The Kept is told with deep compassion and startling originality, and introduces James Scott as a major new literary voice."

More about James Scott at Grub St. 

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For KGNU's 'It's The Economy', Claudia Cragg speaks here with MIT's Ofer Sharone about latest work. In this, he discussed that today 4.7 million Americans have been unemployed for more than six months. In France more than ten percent of the working population is without work. In Israel it’s above seven percent. And in Greece and Spain, that number approaches thirty percent. Across the developed world, the experience of unemployment has become frighteningly common—and so are the seemingly endless tactics that job seekers employ in their quest for new work.

Flawed System/Flawed Self delves beneath these staggering numbers to explore the world of job searching and unemployment across class and nation. Through in-depth interviews and observations at job-search support organizations, Ofer Sharone reveals how different labor-market institutions give rise to job-search games like Israel’s résumé-based “spec games”—which are focused on presenting one’s skills to fit the job—and the “chemistry games” more common in the United States in which job seekers concentrate on presenting the person behind the résumé. By closely examining the specific day-to-day activities and strategies of searching for a job, Sharone develops a theory of the mechanisms that connect objective social structures and subjective experiences in this challenging environment and shows how these different structures can lead to very different experiences of unemployment.

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KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks here with the delightfully husky-voiced Angelica Cheung, editor-in-chief of Vogue China and, before that, editorial director of the Chinese edition of Elle and the editor-in-chief of Marie Claire Hong Kong where she also co-published several other fashion magazines.

Cheung says that in the early days of fashion shoots for Vogue China, Westerners thought only of “'cheongsams, opium beds and 'In the Mood for Love'”, but she had to let them know that was very patronising. She is not interested, she says, in being told what Chinese women should or should not do or wear. Through her work, she is trying she says to create an energy among her readers and while she is not what she terms a 'fashion feminist', she does cares about how her Chinese readers feel about their lives and being happy because “life is short”.

Born in 1966 Cheung recently took part in the International New York Times S.E.A. Of Luxury conference, @INYTLuxury, hosted by Suzy Menkes, designed the organizers say to “bring South East Asia out of the shadows with an agenda that looked at Asia both as as a luxury goods supplier, as well as a powerful consumer base”.

The daughter of a Chinese diplomat, Cheung graduated from Peking University in 1990 where she obtained degrees in law and English language and literature. She subsequently received an MBA degree from University of South Australia and then in 1993 took a position as a writer at 'Eastern Express', an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, She covered all aspects of life there in the run-up to the handover to China in 1997 and then, in 2001, was named editor-in-chief of Marie Claire Hong Kong and, in 2003,editorial director at Elle China in Shanghai. When publisher Conde Nast wanted to launch Vogue in China, the company asked Cheung to take the lead and since 2005 she has been editorial director.

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Speaking to KGNU's Claudia Cragg in person @INYTLuxury held recently in Singapore Livia Firth (yes, Colin IS her husband) says that girls or young women should wear their clothes thoughtfully, each piece at least 30 times, in the name of 'Sustainability'.

Because of her work with the GCC, Livia Firth was awarded in November 2012 the title of UN Leader of Change Award.

Firth is the brains behind the 'Green Carpet Challenge, a fast moving, dynamic project working to unlock “Sustainable Style” in the fashion industry. Since its creation in 2009, she and the GCC have blazed a trail working with A-list designers pioneering sustainability in brands at the world’s most high profile events. From the Golden Globes and Academy Awards to the Met Ball and Cannes Film Festival, the GCC has collaborated with all the iconic design houses in the world winning widespread critical acclaim and international media attention.

Most recently, with Chopard – one of the world’s largest privately owned luxury jewellery and accessory companies – we launched its journey to sustainable luxury by forging a philanthropic relationship with South America’s most influential mining NGO: the Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM). 

Previously in September 2012, the GCC created ‘The Green Cut’ – a unique exhibition pairing eight seminal fashion designers with eight iconic films to create a collection of striking gowns. The exhibition, which saw the British Fashion Council (BFC) and the British Film Institute (BFI) worked together for the first time, opened London Fashion Week and was celebrated at the London Film Festival, before being shown in Harrods. Read more here.

In March 2013, the GCC created the GCC Brand Mark and launched with Gucci a new frontier for sustainable style: the world’s first zero deforestation certified handbag collection from Amazon leather. Read more here.