Max-Neef’s principles for economics “which should be”

AMY GOODMAN: And if you’re teaching young economists, the principles you would teach them, what they’d be?

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: The principles, you know, of an economics which should be are based in five postulates and one fundamental value principle.

One, the economy is to serve the people and not the people to serve the economy.

Two, development is about people and not about objects.

Three, growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily require growth.

Four, no economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services.

Five, the economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible.

And the fundamental value to sustain a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life.

Chilean Economist Manfred Max-Neef on Barefoot Economics, Poverty and Why The U.S. is Becoming an “Underdeveloping Nation”

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…our 21st-century global computing platform is still running a 13th-century banking system, and the resulting performance sucks.

In any hydrodynamic system, the non-dimensional Reynolds Number characterizes the ratio between inertial forces (the result of mass and velocity) to viscous forces (the result of the inherent stickiness of the fluid). When the Reynolds number reaches a certain critical value, the system changes from laminar to turbulent flow. There is an equivalent to the Reynolds Number for an economic system: the ratio between the speed (and amplitude) at which currency is flowing through the system to the viscosity of the financial medium. The Reynolds number of our electronically-mediated economy has recently gone way up, with destabilizing results. The latest problem is that automated programs — the barnacles of the New Economy — are now trading *within* the frequency spectrum of the turbulent boundary layer. If this happens to a ship, it will slow down, and if it happens to an airplane, it will go into a stall. Where’s the anti-fouling paint?

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George Dyson

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To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There’s no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter that these people’s dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I—or does anyone else—have to destroy them?

At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?

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Derrick Jensen, Endgame

The economic jungle: How ecologists could save banking →

THE world’s financial system really is like a jungle - a realisation that may save it from disaster.

An ecological theorist and the Bank of England’s head of stability have teamed up to show that if you apply the mathematical models used in ecology to financial systems, they behave much like ecosystems - with similar risks of collapse. Worryingly, the models bankers now use maximise exactly those risks.

What is Money? →

Five reporters stumbled on what seems like a basic question: What is money? The unsettling answer they found: Money is fiction. 

A non-technical video designed for mass-appeal.

The AMERICAN DREAM is a 30 minute animated film that shows you how you’ve been scammed by the most basic elements of our government system. All of us Americans strive for the American Dream, and this film shows you why your dream is getting farther and farther away. Do you know how your money is created? Or how banking works? Why did housing prices skyrocket and then plunge? Do you really know what the Federal Reserve System is and how it affects you every single day? THE AMERICAN DREAM takes an entertaining but hard hitting look at how the problems we have today are nothing new, and why leaders throughout our history have warned us and fought against the current type of financial system we have in America today. You will be challenged to investigate some very entrenched and powerful institutions in this nation, and hopefully encouraged to help get our nation back on track.

An Irishman speaks his mind, you’d never see this on CNBC.  

Assigning Value to Nature - Value Beyond GDP →

Valuing ecosystems will strike some as a heartless utilitarian approach, tantamount to slapping dollar signs on species, soils, oceans, and air. What it presages, however, will be a change in the very shape of the global economic system: by valuing our landscapes and the services they impart, by recalibrating incentives toward their preservation, and by respecting the needs of communities most closely dependent on them. We will not just value what nature provides, but also reorganize around a new definition of what is valuable.

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If there’s one lesson to the financial crisis that we should learn, it’s that the real value created by banks from esoterically-valued securities who’s value rely on revenue streams from a credit/consumption/debt-based economy is negligible, while the risks are not.

The paternalistic government philosophy of central planning wed to protected industries that finance the plan have created a dangerous bi-partisan economic fabric that distorts incentives, concentrates wealth to favored groups and interests, and disperses wealth inequitably. This creates an interesting solution set to our problems, one that unfortunately entangles, and is guided by the still rigid interests of the perpetrators -more moral hazards are created and thus the fabric becomes ultimately weaker.

It’s not that I disagree with Obama’s policies specifically, I disagree with a broader line of Keynesian economic consensus think that has basically been unchallenged from a policy perspective. This is not because it won’t work, it’s what the people in charge, those that finance the operation, and massage its outcomes do not want. They do not want their benefits to be more inline with empiricism, because empiricism has shown that there are structural problems that should cause us to re-think the very way things operate from a fundamental level, the whole paradigm - fractional reserve banking, debt & credit, fiat money, central banking, the federal reserve, arguments are moving by observable evidence to and from different sides on many complicated financial topics by a variety of more fringe economic-thinkers. Real change would change the power and wealth structure as it should, but power and wealth are very sticky things and are hesitant to move.

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A Superpower in Decline →

An excellent, mostly objective article - 

America has long been a country of limitless possibility. But the dream has now become a nightmare for many. The US is now realizing just how fragile its success has become - and how bitter its reality. Should the superpower not find a way out of crisis, it could spell trouble ahead for the global economy

Taleb Says Fed Doesn’t Understand Risks of Quantitative Easing

Jeremy Grantham: "The Fed Has Spent The Last 20 Years Manipulating The Stock Market" →

Please watch this interview if you have 30 minutes to spare.  The Federal Reserve’s gross misappropriation of power and corresponding ability to blatantly manipulate markets have to be curtailed - this is the biggest contemporary domestic issue.  Jeremy is on the money about nearly everything here.