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The New Economics
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The New Economics

A Bigger Picture

David Boyle and Andrew Simms
Earthscan, 2009
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9

Recommendation

Global financial crises provide opportunities to question the viability of a society’s operational economics, and the 2008-2009 recession is no exception. The myopic pursuit of the dollar (or euro, pound, renminbi or ruble) has left people exhausted, depressed and stressed. The cost of that quest is environmental and societal breakdowns. Perhaps the time has come to rethink the whole proposition, say David Boyle and Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation. Offering some alternative ideas for global capitalism, they demonstrate why money is a poor proxy for wealth, how happiness is more important than riches and how gross domestic product measures consequences that often are not in society’s best interests. The authors provide workable, real-life solutions for rebalancing economic life. So how do you get off the monetary hamster wheel and find contentment? The answer is closer to home than you think: Contribute financially, emotionally and socially to your neighborhood and community. getAbstract recommends this prescription for better economic well-being to policy makers, corporate heads and politicians who are eager for an expanded, humanistic view of the economic future.

Summary

Mickey Mouse Economics

When a bank issues a mortgage to a borrower whose application is signed “M. Mouse,” it’s emblematic of a surreal economic world gone horribly wrong. But the crisis that began in 2007 is only the latest example of the usual panic that follows a surge “as surely as night follows day”: from burgeoning radio stocks to the Great Depression, from junk bonds to the 1987 crash, from tech stocks to the dot-com collapse, from real estate to the recession. These boom-bust cycles are the inevitable result of a capitalism that sees growth and consumption as the only ways to advance society and that promotes money as the only yardstick for measuring wealth. This “ill-directed economic system” has generated some disastrous repercussions:

  • An “ecological crisis,” in that climate change threatens, to some degree, all life on Earth.
  • A “human crisis” of inequitable “distribution,” in which a billion people suffer hunger, 30,000 children a day die of “preventable diseases” and the income gap is exploding.
  • A “spiritual crisis,” where a sense of well-being is rare even for those with good incomes.
  • Modern society’s capitalistic “monoculture...

About the Authors

David Boyle, journalist and author, is a fellow at the New Economics Foundation, where Andrew Simms is policy director and head of the climate change and energy program.

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