Tag: Capitalism

Economics ought to make sense?

Why economists seems just as confused as me.

We live in a world where finance and money play a hugely more important role in our everyday lives than, say, 25 years ago.  Well that’s how it seems.  Our energy costs don’t seem to be connected to supply and demand but more in the hands of the speculators.  Our house values have been greatly influenced, perhaps misaligned is a better word, by the availability of too easy money, resulting from exotic financial leveraging. Commodities are, like energy, traded for their own sake rather than to provide an efficient process of linking the grower with the consumer.  And more.

So it comes as a bit of a shock to read in a recent copy of The Economist that most of the theories and economic models are being ‘re-examined’ in the light of the current global crisis.  These theories and models are not esoteric ideas kept

The Economist July 18th 2009
The Economist July 18th 2009

within the scholarly walls of universities but used by Governments, investment institutions and banks so they affect you and I in the real world, big time!

They ought to work a great deal better than they do because they have the capability to harm, as millions have found out in the last 2 years.

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This crisis of Capitalism

Yesterday, a Post asked the question “Are we now living through a historic turning point in terms of attitudes and behaviours?”

Further browsing found a very thought-provoking article in The Guardian newspaper, online version, of the 6th May 2009.  Let me encourage you to follow the link and read the article by quoting the opening and closing paragraphs:

What do we want to see emerge from the greatest crisis of capitalism for 70 years? If I had to answer in a single phrase, I would say: new models for a sustainable social market economy. This requires us to change as well as our states.

And the article closes with this (my underlining):

What you end up with is not just a systemic conundrum but also a personal challenge to every one of us. The challenge is to find a new balance in our double-lives as producers and consumers, at the same time consciously contributing to a larger set of new international balances between economy and environment, oversaving east and overspending west, rich north and poor south. That, too, is what I mean by a sustainable social market economy.

By Paul Handover