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Corporate banking transparency let’s us take back control
28 October 2024 To avoid any conflict with shareholders, corporate managers and employees are required to leave their values at the door and maximise profits. This fiduciary duty is an absolute legal priority, a singular and exclusive focus on their own self-interest that corporations only share with sociopaths. Joel Bakan’s The Corporation explains this really…
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What’s missing from this World View?
It is always possible to add more detail, so feel free to nominate something to remove which you think is less salient in society than what’s missing.
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Markets work, but not for poor people
This blog chalenges Adam Smith’s claim that markets benefit everyone, including the poorest.
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How to save hundreds of billions of pounds
To control inflation, central banks raise interest rates. The 5% increase since November 2021 has seen UK debtors pay a ballpark £450 billion in higher interest payments, worth about 20% of annual GDP. The banks keep a chunk and the rest goes to their clients, with taxes collected along the way. The average UK saver…
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Why make the World’s poor fight anew for rights we know they need
Some like to think that poor countries are simply behind us on some capitalist prosperity trajectory, with welfare as an optional extra or ultimate prize. Yet our history was bloody and violent, and why would we want that? Why make the World’s poor fight for the same rights that our ancestors desperately needed to protect…
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Democratising global trade: here’s how
6 Sep. 2024 Consumption drives the world eocnomy. The democracies still have about 70% of it, but this is set to decline. The proportion of people living in democracies has fallen below 50%. We should use our disproportionate purchasing power to promote democracy and human rights. By reforming/replacing the World Trade Organisation, we can give preferential market access…
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Free markets work; free trade only benefits tyrants
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath made me realise that the social and moral context of economics matters and that a novel is a great way to explore it. When I wrote the first draft of Creative Destruction in the late 1990s, the social collapse that triggers the novel was scheduled for a distant 2033. It went…
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Steinbeck made me an economist and economics made me a writer
I grew up under Reagan/Thatcher and believed in a left-right trade-off between social justice and economic efficiency. At the end of university, where I had dropped Economics for a Politics degree I found it so uninspiring, I went on holiday and read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The Joads were lured to California by a…