“Economics and Economists Engulfed By Crises: What Do We Tell the Students?” by Kamran Mofid and Steve Szeghi

The recent global crisis has lead to questions about whether the kind of economics that is taught in universities was responsible for the crisis itself, or indeed for its widespread failure to predict the timing and magnitude of the events that unfolded in 2008. There are many reasons for such failure. However, whatever the reasons might be, we strongly believe that now is the time for us all to begin to debate this issue and to discover what is it that we should now teach our students.

While the global financial crisis is most surely a significant peril, it is not the most significant problem that human beings or this planet face. There are two larger crises of which it is a part and which grow in immensity and difficulty to solve by the day, and which were in turn caused by many of the same philosophies, misguided ethics, flawed economics and politics that helped to spawn the financial meltdown. These two larger crises, of which we speak, are the crisis of growing inequality, economic insecurity and social injustice and the crisis of the environment which imperils an abundant diversity of life on earth as well as human survival.

It is our hope that with this paper we may begin an open dialogue with all concerned – colleagues, students and others, so that together we can prescribe a working solution.

It is clear that some serious reflection is in order. Not to stand back and question what has happened and why, would be to compound failure with failure: failure of vision with failure of responsibility. If nothing else these current crises of finance, social injustice and environmental devastation present us with a unique opportunity to address the shortcomings of our profession with total honesty and humility while returning the “dismal science” to its true position: a subject of beauty, wisdom and virtue.

The Role of Energy in Production / Value Theory, Thermodynamics and Dialectics / “Debt Matters” by Prof Steve Keen

Reproduced from: http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2016/08/19/incorporating-energy-into-production-functions/ Incorporating energy into production functions By Steve Keen August 19, 2016 Debtwatch In my last post on my Debtwatch blog, I finished by saying that the Physiocrats were the only School of economics to properly consider the role of energy in production. They ascribed it solely to agriculture exploiting the free energy of… Read More

Embracing the paradigm shift – from the principalities of darkness to the principles that value life

I am a seeker of truth, a lover of wisdom and a crusader for social justice; three life assets in great demand but now in very short supply. There is a hefty price we are paying for this state of affairs in terms of life destroyed at all levels of discernment, including the life support systems of the planet and society that nourish us, sustain us and allow us to grow, develop and flourish.

This scarcity of truth, wisdom and social justice is not natural in the sense that it was not preordained by the physical laws of the universe or the workings of nature. This scarcity was manufactured by the hubris of a small group of people hell-bent on dominating and controlling the planet’s resources by using the methods and technologies of distraction, deception and deprivation to destroy the essentials needed to live a flourishing life.

As Professor John McMurtry laments:

The air, soil and water cumulatively degrade and disappear; the climates and oceans destabilize without connection; species become extinct at a spasm rate across continents; pollution cycles and volumes rise endangering life systems on all planes in synergistic despoliation; the world’s forests, meadows and fisheries are cumulatively destroyed by the profit drivers of globalization; food pollinators, songbirds, coral reefs and large animals crash in unconnected response; public sectors and services are defunded and privatized as tax evasion by the rich multiplies; the global food system produces more and more disabling junk and wastes; non-contagious diseases multiply to the world’s biggest killer; the global financial system issues money out of control while collapsing in productive investment; the vocational future of the next generations is erased across the world; official lies and corruption are normalized as public relations. All the trends are one-way, degenerate, and undeniable. – Winning the War of the World | Global Research – Centre for Research on Globalization by Prof John McMurtry

McMurtry has diagnosed this global systemic disorder as a cancer that invades its social life host without resistance from its social immune system, a causal explanation that moved me to study and take seriously given my expertise as a life-care provider. I see all too frequently the effect of cancer growth on individual patient’s lives as the life support systems within their bodies are systematically destroyed by the invading and metastasing cancer until the demise of the life host that “feeds” the cancer.

At the base of this global systemic disorder is a systemic value disorder. McMurtry goes into more detail in his books Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System (1998), The Cancer Stage of Capitalism First Edition (1999), Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy (2002), and The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure Second Edition. Basically he shows in pains-taking detail why the life predicaments we are in are fundamentally because money-value has trumped life-value in almost all of our deliberations and until we wake up to this realisation and put in life-value above money-value, the one-way degenerate and undeniable trend of life despoilation will not mend.

In trying to come to a better understanding of the root of this life injustice, a verse from Scriptures come readily to mind:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms…Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. – NIV Ephesians 6:12, 14-16

What I have learnt over the years in interpreting the scriptures in my pursuit for truth, wisdom and social justice, is that “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” are not without but exist deep within our psyche, within our individual and collective unconscious. Synchronistically, a few days ago, I came across an article by Paul Levy that connected McMurtry’s global cancer system with the unrecognised cancer within our psyche.

“Syntactical and Semantic Information Systems” by Reginald T. Cahill

The ongoing failure of physics to fully match all the aspects of the phenomena of time, apart from that of order, arises because physics has always used non-process models, as is the nature of formal or syntactical systems. Such systems do not require any notion of process – they are entirely structural and static. The new process physics overcomes these deficiencies by using a non-geometric process model for time, but process physics also argues for the importance of relational or semantic information in modelling reality. Semantic information refers to the notion that reality is a purely informational system where the information is internally meaningful. Hence the information is ‘content addressable’, rather than is the case in the usual syntactical information modelling where the information is represented by symbols. This symbolic or syntactical mode is only applicable to higher level phenomenological descriptions, and for that reason was discovered first. Read More

The Art and Science of Connecting the Dots of Life-Coherent Meaning and Understanding

The tour-de-force article by Fritjof Capra entitled The Science of Connection provides much food for thought and served as the catalyst to connect many narratives into an integral life-coherent unifying framework of meaning which I would life to share with you the readers. It connected for me Dan Siegel’s definition of the mind with John McMurtry’s fields… Read More

Why “The World is a Total Mess” and Money is at the Root of it All

How do we begin to explain the total mess the world is in, and why money is the root of it all?

Energy in living systems is all too often equated with money in economy, and vice versa. This has misled generations of biologists and economists alike. As we have seen, living energy transactions are always tied to real interactions and exchanges between molecules with minimum dissipation. For money to be equivalent to energy, it too, has to be tied to exchanges in real goods and services. Unfortunately, money has become more and more decoupled from real goods and services, and hence more like entropy than energy. It becomes entropy in unequal exchanges when the price paid is too low, as in exploitative labor or between currencies that are grossly overvalued on the side of the purchaser. The money market is especially entropic [25,44,48], because it is not based on any real-valued goods or services; furthermore, it artificially inflates the purchasing power of the rich, leading to greater exploitation of environmental resources. This becomes more explicit when the medium for energy exchange in the living system is considered.

A Collection of Articles on Structural Violence and its Impact on Peaceful Coexistence and Healthy Flourishing for ALL Life

Violence, Peace and Peace Research by Johan Galtung (1969) “…violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations… …Violence is here defined as the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is…… Read More

Watch “Why Monetary Reform Must Become Your Number One Issue” on YouTube

Published on Sep 29, 2013 Joe Bongiovanni discusses our monetary system and why fixing it is the single most important issue facing people and the planet. Joe explains how money is created as debt by private banks and how that system heavily favors principles and values that are in direct opposition to those who seek… Read More

Watch “Jeffrey Sachs | Keynote 1 | Subjective well-being over the life course” on YouTube

Jeff Sachs delivers one of the keynote addresses on “Economics for the Common Good” at the conference “Subjective well-being over the life course: Evidence and policy implications” held at the London School of Economics and Political Science on 12-13 December 2016.

The conference was organised by OECD, CEPREMAP, What Works Centre for Wellbeing , and the CEP.

Jeff Sachs is an American economist and director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he holds the title of University Professor. He is known as one of the world’s leading experts on economic development and the fight against poverty.

Why should governments care about people’s wellbeing? How would policy change if raising wellbeing was the objective?

Supported by the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, this event was a landmark conference reporting the first results from a collaboration between the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance, the CEPREMAP Wellbeing Observatory at the Paris School of Economics, the OECD, and an international consortium of researchers.

“The Monsters Within: Capital, Cancer, and Crisis” by Benjamin C. Wilson

Reproduced from: http://www.binzagr-institute.org/working-paper-no-114/ Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity Working Paper No. 114 October 2016 The Monsters Within: Capital, Cancer, and Crisis Benjamin C. Wilson Abstract This paper critiques Marx’s use of the vampire as a metaphor for capital, by suggesting that cancer offers political economists a more appropriate lexicon to describe capitalism’s exploitative and destructive nature.… Read More

Category: Philosophy