Newsletter No. 47 - May 2014
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CONTENTS
EDITORIAL
This newsletter is about the need to shake off the groupthink about the future from which many people in the world now suffer, and how we should set about it. It raises questions about the relation between understanding and action, and between knowledge and ethics.
Item 1 is about the recent publication of conclusions by researchers in the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the Bank of England, and an article by a leading economics columnist in the Financial Times. They all support the need for a radical reform of the way the public money supply is created and managed.
This proposal for reform is deeply resisted and deliberately ignored by people and organisations that profit from the status quo. Most other people take the status quo for granted. They have no time to question it; and, even if they do, they may not feel able to find the extra time and energy needed to support reform actively.
So what can we do to make the reform actually happen? What situation might provide a "tipping point" that would finally defeat the obstacles to the reform, and how might we help to bring it about? (A tipping point is defined by Malcolm Gladwell as "that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire" - see www.gladwell.com/the-tipping-point.)
There may be other tipping points that could make implementation of the desired monetary reform irresistible, but Item 2 below identifies one that could arise from the Scottish Independence Referendum later this year.
Item 3 is on another aspect of thinking and doing.
(a) Do the activities of economists and journalists lead to enactment of necessary reforms that might not happen without their activity?
(b) Or may action to enact them be delayed by too much thinking and writing and talking and arguing?
That issue is raised by Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century on the systematically increasing inequality imposed by our present money system.
Item 4 instances Hazel Henderson's work as a combination of practical achievement with far-sighted analysis; Item 5 questions the assumption that work must be paid employment (following Item 2 on the liberation of work in my April newsletter); and in Item 6 Fred Harrison concludes that democracy must be a therapeutic process to escape from a global civilisation based on a culture of greed.
