Pioneering Spirit

I've always believed that economic theory - particularly macroeconomic theory - and economic forecasting are not theoretical tools for the analysis and exposition of economic realities to the better of societies, but rather the disease that is the underlying cause of the seemingly endless cycle of economic failure that has beset the 'Modern World' since the onset of The Industrial Revolution. Historically, economic vicissitudes were trammelled by regulation and state intervention if things got too far out of hand: the lie of the 'free markets' was laid bare centuries ago, but here we are, in the age of the greatest quantity of information we've ever had widespread access to, and the markets - now simply practically unregulated global capital - aided and abetted by the wealthy, laissez faire politicians we deem fit to govern us, are allowed to run free to the benefit of an increasingly tiny minority of the world's population, at the expense of the rest of us. As I keep banging on about like a stuck record, if the ultra-rich and their allies keep on going down the path they're on, there will be no market left in which to trade because there will be no-one else left to participate in the economy; the majority of the world having been reduced to penury, with violent revolution the only foreseeable outcome.

This ridiculous philosophy of greed and neglect can be viewed in microcosm in the state of the UK's local councils. Underfunding from central government - a deliberate scam to fill in the gaps left in central funds due to the flawed economic and fiscal policies of a hands-off Tory government to whom the public's money is theirs to keep, like a twenty-first century Sheriff of Nottingham - and we see the slow death by strangulation of our villages, towns and cities. Public services - public life itself - have almost disappeared: dead High Streets, closed shops, pubs, libraries, swimming baths, sports fields, polluted rivers and beaches; you could go on. There seems to be a global malaise at work here: a lethargy of spirit that is blunting the forces of dissent against the status quo in the first world. Things will have to change before change is no longer an option: the hegemony of wealth accrual is all-powerful, but it carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. Unfortunately, that includes the collateral damage of the rest of humanity. Bottom-up reform is the only answer: from local communities do larger societies grow. It's been done before, and it can be done again: it just needs the will and a measure of bloody-mindedness to achieve such change.