In my last blog I talked about Robby and Elena: two people both aged 24 but each having a completely different working life. Echoing the authors of “taking back the economy”, I wondered which bright ideas could help our Robby’s to earn a decent living and our Elena’s to achieve a better work-life balance. Based on your reactions and my thinking, I would like to argue there is a need for a changing value system in our economy. This could be done in many ways. And luckily there are already real life examples to proof this is an ongoing development. In this blog I will show a few of them.

Let’s start with Robby. He has a range of experiences and qualities. He is motivated to work for all jobs that he endorses. Yet he usually ends up with work which is not or very badly paid. His…

In Dutch we have the famous proverb: keep business and private life separately. But what if you plea for community building on every academic congress, but don’t even know your own neighbours? Or the other way around, what if you are very proud of the newly installed solar panels on your roof, while you work 40 hours a week for a company that invests in polluting energy? Is there not something strange here? In the book take back the economy they say: “Reframing the economy means taking notice of all things we do to ensure the material functioning and well-being of our households, communities and nations.” That’s a nice quote where not a lot of people would disagree with. But how can we do this if the companies we work for are mainly concerned with making a profit? How can we change our economy if most influential people still mainly…