Our current way of measuring economic health based on growth and consumption fails to include most
valuable, meaningful human activities – the real stuff of our lives.
Isn't it time for deeper conversations about the kind of economy that we really want? By Tim Malnick.
The interlinked crises of food, finance and climate change illustrate the weaknesses of our current economic system. It is possible to integrate selflessness into a market long dominated by the selfish pursuit of profits, says Muhammad Yunus.
Given the need for
global legitimacy to promote their interests in a world where the
balance of power is shifting towards the South, western elites might
find more attractive an offshoot of European Social Democracy and New
Deal liberalism that one might call "Global Social Democracy", writes Walden Bello.
The financial crisis is a consequence of the pervasive impact of
market-driven ideology and policy on political, economic and social
life across the globe. The profound consequences demand a rethinking of the role of the state in modern societies, says George Schöpflin.
'Well-behaved' markets should not only be more stable, they should be
more morally acceptable. Rejecting the inevitability of market-based globalisation would not
necessarily be harmful - especially if it were accompanied by a
reassertion of democracy at a national level, argues Robert Skidelsky.
It is not true that a study of markets and economic
theory should count for nothing - but neither should Homo economicus, a man motivated solely by self-interested desire, count for absolutely everything. Our lives
consist of much more than buying and selling, says Ernest Partridge.
The financial crisis presents the opportunity for
the renewal of national, popular, democratic alliance of working
classes, or the move from a pattern of capitalist
dependent development towards an
alternative pattern of inclusive development - in other words, "delinking", says Samir Amin.
The risk today is that the new Keynesian doctrines for financial regulation will be used and
abused to serve some of the same interests. Have those who pushed
deregulation ten years ago learned their lesson? Or will they simply
push for cosmetic reforms, asks Joseph Stiglitz.
Business economic and political power has become firmly entrenched in establishment
thought and practice over the past thirty years, thanks to the unduly influence of Alan Greenspan and other key advocates of neoliberal ideology and policy, writes Edward S. Herman.
The global financial crisis exposes anew the flaws of a British polity that
resists democratic modernisation, illustrating that the United Kingdom remains 'unfit for purpose'. We now need a new approach to the state that ends the fusion between money and politics, say Anthony Barnett and Gerry Hassan.
