[I expanded the introduction to the original post and sent it to Real World Economics Review Blog, where it is now posted.]
The challenge, and reactions to it
Many economists, and more non-economists, agree that economics needs new ideas, given the comprehensive failure of the mainstream to foresee the Global Financial Crisis and its continuing failure to lift the US and Europe out of deep recession or depression.
How should non-Aboriginal Australians relate to our indigenous people and their culture? Should we bother? What should we “do” about Aboriginal “problems”?
I have learnt over a longish life that when we get to the essence of seemingly difficult or intractable issues there can be simple answers. Simple, though not necessarily easy. Challenging perhaps, but ways forward can be readily identified. So it is proving with my own, fairly recent experience with Aboriginal culture and people.
The main research windmills at NREL (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Renewable energy is expensive. It’s unreliable. There’s no way to store it. Anyway the scientists are still arguing about global warming, so why wreck the economy for something that might not exist?
We all know these things here in Australia, but here’s a weird thing. Those tree-hugging pixie-lovers the Germans are converting to renewable energy anyway. They plan to phase out nuclear power within a decade. The official target is to reduce fossil-fuel use by 80% by 2050, but many people think it will be reduced to zero before then. Already more than 25% of electricity comes from renewable sources.
The challenge for our generation is to create an enduring way of being, in Australia and around the world, so that our children may look forward to an indefinite future of healthy life in a healthy landscape. Appropriate economic and social processes will be essential to creating such a collective lifestyle, but our agricultural and other involvements in the natural world of course have an even more direct role.
This topic was raised in a commentary by Braidwood local Ben Gleeson that questions much official thinking about rendering the land “sustainable”. He champions the idea that our duality of productive farmland, on the one hand, and wild nature, on the other, is inappropriate. Before getting to Ben’s ideas, I want to set a broader perspective.
[In preparing a pitch to some possibly supportive people, I realised I have not spelt out in brief form the argument that economies are complex self-organising systems. There is a straightforward logic, it is not simply a preference pulled out of the air, or the depths of my psyche.]
Many economists, and more non-economists, agree that economics needs new ideas, given the comprehensive failure of the mainstream to foresee the Global Financial Crisis and its continuing failure to lift the US and Europe out of deep recession or depression. Yet few seem to know where to start, and there seems to be little agreement on how much the subject needs to change. When proposals appear that might begin to address fundamental problems, many economists seem to recoil, and others seem simply to fail to recognise that the proposals have any relevance.
[After a break for family business and time out, here is a bit of vindication.]
Olaf Storbeck is the International Economics Correspondent with Handelsblatt, Germany’s business daily. Based in London, he is writing about current economic research. Here he interviews Andrew Haldane.
Andrew Haldane is the Bank of England’s Executive Director for Financial Stability. I recently talked to him about the crisis of contemporary economics and the way forward.
You are vocal critic of mainstream macro economics. How does this square with the tradition of central banks who historically have been very conservative institutions.
[Complementing my recent posts on the Radical Right, The Rise and Failure of the Radical Right and subsequent posts, here is US conservative commentator DAVID BROOKS making his own distinction between conservative and radical right.]
When I joined the staff of National Review as a lowly associate in 1984, the magazine, and the conservative movement itself, was a fusion of two different mentalities.
On the one side, there were the economic conservatives. These were people that anybody following contemporary Republican politics would be familiar with. They spent a lot of time worrying about the way government intrudes upon economic liberty. They upheld freedom as their highest political value. They admired risk-takers. They worried that excessive government would create a sclerotic nation with a dependent populace.
But there was another sort of conservative, who would be less familiar now.
You may have read or heard that the shrinkage of the Arctic sea ice recently smashed the previous 2007 record low. You may not have heard of a new study that says we might, just, still have a chance of keeping global warming below 2°C. You may or may not have heard that some prominent climate scientists, including James Hansen, think 2°C is too high, and we need to keep warming below 1.5°C or even 1°C.
All this means we might still have a chance of avoiding “dangerous” global warming, but the chance is already small, and diminishing very rapidly. It also means we are not doing nearly enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even though there is a great deal more we can do at quite modest cost to our economies.
I will be speaking on the ANU campus this Wednesday 19th, 4-5 pm, on The Rise and Failure of the Radical Right.
Details: http://billboard.anu.edu.au/event_view.asp?id=95107
Venue: 204A Lecture Theatre – Innovation Building
It’s a public lecture, so you will be welcome if you can make it.
Update 20th: Here is a pdf (5.8 Mb) of the slides I used: RiseOfRight_Emeriti
[A shift of topic, of personal significance but also potentially of great significance to the state of our society.]
Midwife and Jessica Breese, a Certified Nurse Midwife from Colorado, pose with new mother Amy and her son Austin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There has been for some time a vigorous campaign to effectively ban home births in Australia, including crude scare-mongering based on extreme cases, such as a recent article by de Crespigny and Savulescu. However the ground from which these campaigners operate is shaky, because of a dramatic rise in hospital interventions in the birthing process, and because obstetricians have an obvious conflict of interest. Medical hostility to midwifery in general, not just to home birthing, seems to be driven by a spiral of fear, which is abetted by many obstetricians’ relative lack of the skills and experience of midwives.
BetterNatureBooks 