Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
So economics isn’t a science. It also wasn’t founded by Adam Smith. What Adam Smith founded, rather, was political economy. You won’t hear much about that field of study these days, and that’s not an accident. Political economy, as the name indicates, explores the relations between wealth and power in a society.
In his book “The End of Normal” economist James Galbraith makes a compelling case that our search for a return to the fast rate of economic growth experienced in the United States from 1945 to 1970 has led to fraud–fraud enabled by government actions that sought to “free the economy” from the shackles of “overregulation” and update the regulatory framework to meet “new challenges” such as globalization.
The foundational industrial and productive, surplus-creating, part of the economy still exists—only now it is mainly out of sight.
Is conventional, free-market economic theory really up to the task of energy transition and combating climate change?
There isn’t much news in most community newspapers these days.
Brian Davey’s new book, Credo: Economic Beliefs in a World in Crisis, is an analysis of economic theory as if it were a system of religious belief.
Big business is the main destroyer of our environment. But companies—both small and big—may well also be the only entities powerful and creative enough to reverse this trend.
The cast of heroes and villains in Greece’s ongoing battle to save its economy varies depending on who’s telling the story.
If society does muster the political will in time, the great eco-economic leap forward in cultural evolution could be complete in as little as a generation.
Diminishing returns from oil limits are already beginning to hit, but the impacts and the expected shape of the down slope are quite different from those forecast by most Peak Oilers.
So, how’s the state of your Econ 101? I’m talking about those fundamental economic assumptions you took on board way back when, which are probably so comfortably settled in that you don’t notice them much any more.
Soddy was considered an outsider and a “monetary crank” by mainstream economists. Nevertheless, his views on money are sound and highly relevant to today’s financial debacle.
