Tag Archives: sustainable world economy
Notes on Evolution Not Revolution
First, it will be noted that things that common sense tells us are always good, such as efficient government or nuclear disarmament, or always bad, such as strikes or cartels, may actually be bed sometimes and good other times depending on the circumstances. … 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
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
When will the Economy get Back to ‘Normal’?
Someone asked me the other day if I thought the world economy would get back to ‘normal’ this year.
By ‘normal’ this person meant the familiar unsustainable economic pattern of ever-growing consumption. I explained that this might well happen for a while, but because it was not sustainable it would run into trouble and be stalled again in some way, as it was late in 2008 and has been before in recent history. … 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”. What usually happens is that a fraction of the employees do most of the work and could hold their own in the most competitive private company. … Read more
A Better Wage-fixing System
A preliminary point is that wage fixing must be taken away from the arena of conflict among stronger and weaker unions, stronger and weaker companies, and political ideology and vote-catching. High unemployment is such a serious social blight (as Keynes knew, but too many people seem not to recognise) that wage fixing should not be left to the vagaries of human nature but must be the sole province of an independent objective authority assisted by the best information technology and given legal power to obtain any and all statistics relevant to its work. … Read more
The Effect of People’s Expectations
The factor of people’s expectations, left out of this discussion so far, would change the outcome somewhat.
The effect of rising expectations would be to stop the “boom” and return to “stagflationary” conditions sooner than if resource depletion alone were the depressing factor. … Read more