Rottenomics: Replacing Economics - Tapa blanda

Since it was invented in the 1860s, Economics has been an exercise in imagination: what would it be like, if there could be a 'perfect' market, which met human needs as efficiently as possible? Bleakonomics explodes that fantasy. It is becoming increasingly well-recognised that tens of millions of British consumers now pay their electricity and water bills, train fares and the prices of most branded goods in the shops [net of retailers’ costs] to foreign firms that own those services and businesses. Thus the profits from those provisions, which should be available for re-investment in the development of the British economy, are allocated wherever the foreign companies that receive the revenue decide to put it. Economics is a confection of intellectual propositions about how an imaginary economy could work ‘perfectly’ that was developed in the eighteen sixties and codified in Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics [1890]. It does not describe the world that we live in, so no prescription for economic policy that is based on Economics has any validity in the material universe. A real-world disaster has been perpetrated on the British people by a succession of governments since the Second World War culminating in the socially divisive and economically ruinous Thatcherite, Blairite-Brownite and Cameron-Cleggish policies that have all leaned heavily on the delusions of Economics. David Bland claims no special intellectual attribute, except a challenge that has not been suppressed by half a century of exposure to the effusions of the self-styled ‘Economics Profession’. For decades he assumed that there must be hidden depths supporting the flow of assertions about the economy and how it can optimally be managed. Professors ‘peer-reviewed’ each other’s writings and so kept the ‘profession’ on the set track; thus it has become ever more incomprehensible to normal citizens. The vast majority of those who are paid fees or wages as ‘economists’ [and mostly have Economics degrees] are in reality working as statisticians, journalists, bank analysts and in other spheres where they can avoid citation of academic Economics for well over 90% of their time. Many such people are capable of being emancipated from the obligation to assume that there is deep sense in the formal subject. In this short book Bland takes the ultimate step of accepting that formal economics is just a fantasy that has gained good remuneration for its promoters from a purblind public for almost 155 years. Then he constructs a simple taxonomy of those things that comprise the economy, and sets out a few points about how the parts of the economy interact, and how government has an unconditional obligation to take a central and continuous role in the system. This understanding is mostly derived from the Political Economy that prevailed before Economics was invented, strongly affected by the dominating fact that intellectual property has become hugely important during the decades when it has been almost completely ignored in textbook Economics.