STWR - Share The World's Resources

The writings of University of Chicago economists led to a liberation of greed in the name of freedom. Now, the finanical crisis should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism: an indictment of ideology, argues Naomi Klein. 

The most unnerving fact about the financial crisis is that it started in the world’s strongest economy, the US. However, the crisis could have a silver lining: a wiser, more nimble US could emerge from the chaos, writes Branko Milanovic.

The global financial crisis provides a unique opportunity to change, quickly and profoundly, the way the majority thinks and feels and acts. I can see only one way out: the coming together of people, business and government in a new incarnation of the Keynesian war economy strategy, says Susan George.

While 9/11 changed the way we view the world, the current financial crisis has changed the way the world views us. And it will also change, in some very fundamental ways, the way the world works - what historians might deem a true global watershed: the end of one period and the beginning of another, says David Rothkopf.

The truth is now in plain sight: there was no invisible hand! Money has been confused with real wealth: educated healthy citizens and the basic productive eco-systems of our planet. Happily, there are ample alternatives to the Chicago Boys' version of free market capitalism, says Hazel Henderson.

The World Bank's revised international poverty line of $1.25, which on many counts reveals a negligible difference in reducing poverty since 1981, raises legitimate questions about the assumed success of globalisation, writes Adam W. Parsons.

The Chicago School has moved beyond a movement of economic theory into an aggressive agent of intellectual imperialism - but the collapse of market fundamentalism in economies everywhere is putting its theology on trial, writes Henry C K Liu.