Articles: Economics for a Round Earth – the book
Interest Rates and Ratio Distortion
It is necessary for a lender of money to charge interest because the purchasing power of each money unit is generally expected to fall with time. This has been the trend historically and the very operation of the economy tends to make it so. … Read more
Ratio Distortion and Consumption
Before and during the Great Depression there was under-consumption due to chronic under-payment of workers – fewer goods and services were being consumed than available workers and plant could structure. But what of the stagflationary situation, when chronic overpayment of workers was the distortion affecting more perfluent economies? … Read more
Digression – Thrift versus Spendthrift
Merely transferring money into the wages channel, increasing the spending power of consumers without forcing them to borrow, is of course not enough; the spending power must be translated into effective demand, with increased spending and consumption actually taking place – the more the better. … Read more
Left, Right and The Environment
Another misleading idea used to be that capitalism and communism represented opposite extremes, opposite poles of economic theory and practice.
Proponents of communism used to believe, inter alia, that if only the world were communist there would be no more environmental degradation, no more pollution, no more problems in that area. … Read more
Non-renewable Resources – Leave Them in the Ground?
The principle of consuming resources at a rate no faster than their rate of renewal appears to be untenable in the case of resources whose renewal rate is almost zero, as is true of fossil fuels, gas, oil, and coal, also fissile uranium and thorium. … Read more
Who needs the Snail Darter?
A subtle, indirect but nevertheless important further way in which environmental depletion damages economic health is through the extinction of species.
A particular species may not be throughput directly in the sense that a particular economic activity is based directly on that species. … Read more
The Throughput Chain
The throughput chain comprises several “links”, different processes that follow one another but do not all necessarily take place at the same rate. The processes commonly are: the extraction or controlling of wealth; its rendering or structuring into saleable goods and services; the sale of those goods and services; and their subsequent degradation into waste matter from which wealth may be renewed. … Read more
Concepts and Terms – What is ‘wealth’?
The world economy isn’t working as well as it should and could. Some countries that enjoyed for some years near full employment, low interest rates, and a bearable rate of price increases, with fast-rising material living standards, all achieved without anything like current high levels of government and private debt, do so no longer. … Read more
Evolution Not Revolution
Achieving a sustainable world economy would be nothing less than a great step in human evolution, comparable with the mastery of fire or the development of settled agriculture as opposed to hunting and gathering. It concerns the whole world and needs to be tackled on a world, not just a national, basis. … Read more
Digression: Government Expenditure – Government Employees
Any employee of government would be familiar with the problems peculiar to their area – the “walking dead”, the top-heavy hierarchy, the frequent and prolonged breaks. But it is a mistake to state sweepingly that “all civil servants are slackers”. … Read more