[Another of my letters to the Editor, challenging the confusion between growth and well being. Published 19 April. Again I’ll post any responses.]
The front-page report “ACT economy trumps states” (Canberra Times, 18 April) highlights the biased spruiking that commonly passes for economic reporting.
[Another instalment of The Nature of the Beast has been posted, Chapters 5-8. Here is a sample from Chapter 6.]
In 1987 Margaret Thatcher said during an interview
“… they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people … But it went too far. If children have a problem, it is society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society. There is a living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.”36
This was the origin of an infamous quotation: There is no such thing as society. Continue reading
[After a 6-month break I have returned to working on The Nature of the Beast. A new version of Chapters 1-4 is available for download and comment – use the links at the top. More will follow soon. To whet your appetite, here is a sample, from the Introduction.]
The Global Financial Crisis, also known as the Great Recession, is the biggest economic malfunction since the Great Depression. You might think that those in charge when it happened, and those who designed the economic system within which it occurred, would have been chastened and purged, to be replaced by those who saw the crash coming and those who warned that the design of the economic system was prone to such failures.
However few of those responsible have been purged, and few seem to have felt chastened. Rather, they claim that no-one could have seen the crash coming. If that were true, what exactly has the economics profession been doing for the past eighty years? Everyone knows there was a Great Depression. Would it not be a top priority to figure out how it happened, so we might see the next one coming, or better still avoid the conditions that would trigger a depression? One might think so, but that is not how the great bulk of the profession has spent the past eighty years.
Two lesser-known economic good news stories provide a revealing perspective on the mainstream economic paradigm, and on Australias current state.
The first economic miracle is Mauritius, brought to our notice by Joseph Stiglitz in the Guardian. Mauritius gained independence from Britain in 1968, and with few natural resources in its Indian-Ocean archipelago its economic prospects were rated as pretty dismal. Bucking the usual prescriptions of economists (sell your soul and your land to overseas investors and tourists), and despite per capita income of less than $400, Mauritius decided to invest in its one major asset – its people.
I just reviewed a small book by Geoff Mosley, Steady State: Alternative to Endless Economic Growth. Envirobook, Canterbury, NSW. RRP $21.95, 136pp, paperback. The review is for the newsletter of Nature and Society Forum, based in Canberra.
Scarcely a day goes by without news of some loss or degradation: a new invasive species, a habitat lost to fire or a shopping mall, a disintegrating ice shelf, a corner shop closing, rising obesity, on and on it goes. Behind much of this bad news is the relentless growth of our economies and populations. The casualties are in both the natural world and in our societies, affecting our health, relationships and communities, as I don’t have to remind this audience. Geoff Mosley argues that we must come to grips with economic growth if we are ever to stop the losses.
The obsession on both sides of politics with cutting the Federal Government deficit is not only short sighted in the context of the recovery from recent floods. It is also economically insupportable when private debt in Australia is more than twenty five times public debt.
I sent this letter to the Canberra Times this morning:
Two correspondents (CT, 17 Nov) raise concerns that are symptomatic of our modern condition. Laurie Quigg (Long waits) laments extremely long waits for services, and Chirs Ellis (Kicking toddlers) wonders what values lead the ACT to spend millions on football while firing five teachers who support children with special needs.
Laurie wonders if anyone can help. Yes, we can help ourselves, by changing our voting habits.
[I have been focussing on developing some models of how money works, after the manner of Steve Keen in The Roving Cavaliers of Debt. Until I get through that, here’s a vignette.]
One John Poole has been conducting a personal defence of “capitalism” in the Letters section of the Canberra Times. His argument is basically that markets always sort things out, that a system with markets is, necessarily, “capitalism”, and that anyone who disagrees is a socialist. Here is my own letter in response.
I have two manuscripts in the works. See the image in the left column, or the menu tag Books and Downloads at the top of the site.
Also you will notice I have changed the visual Theme of the site, and rejigged some things. Is it readable, pleasant, clear?
Extracts from Economia.
The writing of Economia was essentially completed in 2003. It was obvious then that the global financial system must come to crisis within a few years.
The Global Financial Crisis, serious as it is, is only part of a deeper crisis reaching to the core of how modern economies are conceived and managed. The problem is not just that financial markets have acquired excessive power and are greedy, corrupt, unstable and destructive. It is not even that the GFC has not yet shown us its worst, as Steven Keen argues (Declaring victory at half time). It is that mainstream economists have fundamentally mis-identified the nature of the beast they are dealing with.
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