Closing the Energy Efficiency Information Gap for Small Businesses

Small businesses are vital to the health of the United States’ economy. They provide essential goods and services, employ millions of Americans and generate half the U.S. nonfarm GDP (1). Businesses of all sizes prioritize cost reductions, but small businesses‘which lack the monetary, personnel, and technological resources of large corporations‘are often more sensitive to cost variability. This sensitivity to cost fluctuations is especially pronounced for energy expenditures, which cost U.S. small businesses approximately $130 billion each year (2). By decreasing energy expenditures, small businesses can increase efficiency across their operations, strengthen their financial prospects and minimize their impact on the environment.

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Too Much of a Good Thing: The Relationship between Money and Happiness in a Post-Industrial Society

By Alison Dalton Smith

Happiness is considered a universal human aspiration, but the means to achieving happiness has become inexorably entangled with gaining material possessions.  In common paradigms of economic development, Gross Domestic Product is used as a proxy for measuring the well-being of a nation’s citizens.  While this is often true in impoverished nations where basic needs are not met, there is a threshold point past which increasing economic gains no longer necessarily deliver increases in human well-being.  Beyond this threshold, economic measures are no longer adequate for accurate measurement of a nation’s human well-being. In fact, this myopic focus on economic growth has created an unsustainable way of life that is increasingly unfulfilling for those that are engaged in the cycles of consumption.  In this paper, I will address both recent patterns in human well-being in industrialized nations and more comprehensive indexes that quantify human well-being.

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