We are experiencing an explosion of inequality to levels not seen since the darkest days of the nineteenth century, inequality, not just of wealth but, as George Monbiot suggested (The Guardian, 2nd April 2013), also of ‘decency, honesty and kindness’. His analysis is that the 99% have the virtues, while the 1% have the [...]
Advanced economies everywhere seem to be led by politicians who are media competent but practically inexperienced. They seem not to have learned from the experiences of 2012, but there are vital lessons to be learned and changes need to be made.
Recession: The much talked of double-dip morphed into talk of triple-dip and the [...]
An article in the current issue of Harvard Business Review notes that there has been a ‘multi-trillion dollar transfer of cash from US corporations to their shareholders over the past 10 years’ [‘What good are shareholders?’, Fox & Lorsch]. The City of London achieved similar disinvestment. But that’s not what stock markets are supposed to [...]
The public company, the corporate form that Chandler once described as the most powerful institution in the economy and which made industrialisation possible, is rapidly becoming an endangered species. Over the past decade the number of public companies in the UK has almost halved and declined by 38% in the United States. Similarly, the number [...]
Keynes referred to them as the ‘madmen in authority’, referring to the policy makers and top financial and business executives, who rule our world. Maybe ‘madmen’ doesn’t quite capture their essential characteristics today. After all, mainstream economists would argue they are not mad, but wholly rational in their unwavering pursuit of self-interest without regard to [...]
Management scholar, Sumantra Ghoshal, accused mainstream business schools and university departments of teaching ‘bad management theories’ that were ‘destroying good management practices’. His arguments were persuasive, both as to how bad the theories were and how effective they had been in destroying good management practice. The bad theory was that management had no other social [...]
The trouble with the provision of public services such as health, education and the police by private for-profit companies is pretty obvious. Successive governments from Thatcher on, have pursued this flawed policy which derives from a hopelessly simplistic ideology. Private providers, who are subject to the discipline of the market, are held to be more [...]
This book (http://www.gowerpublishing.com/isbn/9781409448303) is about a new direction for market capitalism, based on co-operation rather than the neoclassical idea of maximising self- interest. It is not argued from a moral or ethical standpoint, but has a hard-nosed foundation in economic theory. The Road leads from the predatory capitalism we suffer today to a co-operative and [...]
Mr Cameron really doesn’t understand what’s going on. When he talks of rebalancing the economy he appears not to have the faintest idea what has unbalanced it. He doesn’t understand the crucial difference between real markets and financial markets. Demand for real things is essentially finite – when you’ve had enough, you’ve had enough; [...]
The centrally planned socialist alternative has been tried and didn’t work. Even without the bureaucracy and corruption enabled by the communist system, central planning could never be as efficient or effective as a real market. But, as we are currently experiencing, unregulated markets can also lead to disaster. Most of our current trouble lies in [...]
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