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Economic Theory
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Abstract
Nearly all money in the US, UK and many other countries is created by the private sector through lending. Private sector money creation provides many benefits, but also imposes large costs on society. Transitioning to public sector money creation can provide equal or better inflation control, economic prosperity, credit availability and monetary value stability. It... Read more
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A first systematization of new financial engineering that can hedge unchecked risks, enable unmet needs and finance our future.
Abstract
Cost analyses and risk assessments in the Anthropocene era need to differ from those of the past. Future developments now are determined by opportunity costs and planetary risks. We provide a first comprehensive systematization that can... Read more
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The last 60-70 years have seen the end of the industrial revolution and the rise of the post-industrial era. The way we, as humans, are treating our environment (and each other) is threatening our very existence on our planet. This becomes apparent when we examine the reality of climate change, pollution, destruction of biodiversity, inequality and more. We must... Read more
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Post-Keynesian and post-Kaleckian approaches, as part of the heterodox family, have been progressing fast in the last few decades. They have made important contributions to the socio-economic thought, providing necessary opportunities to alternative policies as well as significant stimulus for new areas of research. They are not immune to controversies and probably a... Read more
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The evolution toward a global human society depends on a variety of social movements. Parallelly, new societal paradigms emerge from time to time. The “Global Leadership for the 21st century” Project (GL21) is a catalytic initiative to create consciousness of high complexity of transformational processes. Implementation of SDGs will decisively be enhanced through creation of... Read more
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Economics is a science of context, the nexus of social conventions framing and directing the behavior of economic agents, while the economy is an aggregation of different forms of such behavior. The economy is a man-made system, highly nonlinear, with frequent paradigm shifts, with a set of rules explaining the behavior of economic agents.
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Abstract
Structural imbalances are the consequence of fault lines in the model of neoliberal capitalism as an extreme version of market capitalism. Economic system is over-financialized. A disproportionate share of value added created in financial sector leads to plutonomy. An overly financialized real economy has been extracting value out of companies by rewarding... Read more
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Abstract
The aim of this article is to underline that the core paradigm of mainstream economics, economics’ standard model (ESM), rests upon an explanatory theory that draws on deductive assumptions which are not supported by what observations of the reality of market economies show us; either in the present day or historically. A theoretical setting, therefore, fails to... Read more
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Abstract
“There is no way to solve the environmental and social threats within the capitalist framework .”
In these past two centuries, capitalism has driven substantial economic growth. However, this growth has not been responsible for the “thrivability” of our planet in terms of society and the environment. This economic model now threatens the continuation of the human... Read more
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Abstract
Structural crises of the past have had a significant impact on the world economy even before the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in 2020. The ongoing medical crisis exacerbates the double dip recession we have witnessed before. Challenges are consequential. By checking the pulse of the global economy, we see a high level of risk, fragile growth outlook, and increasing... Read more
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Abstract
Development needs have primarily been financed through private sector financing, conventional public sector funding and philanthropic commitment. These traditional sources are not sufficient in scale and speed to meet the pressing finance needs. The world community is too busy repairing, stabilizing and refunding the given to maintain the stability of the existing... Read more
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Abstract
This publication provides clues to the phenomenon of increasing social division within rich societies. At the same time, it refers to more recent insights of a partly empirical, partly mathematical type, which make it possible to describe the income situation of mature states/market economies solely by means of the so-called Gini coefficient. The Gini... Read more
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This paper will review the concept of the “open economic trilemma” between national sovereignty, global integration and democratic politics. It will introduce, as a possible solution, the concept of a parallel dual currency system operating through new monetary channels using distributive ledger technology. Although not apparent at first glance, this... Read more
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To measure the debt crisis in Europe in general, and in Greece in particular, there are different levels of analysis, rarely examined together: at the global, EU and the national levels. The global level involves the origins of the crisis in the infra-regulated practices of financial entities worldwide, whereas the EU level reflects architectural weaknesses... Read more
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Abstract
The anthropological literature has given us a key to understanding life in a very elementary community. Life revolves around human beings energized to satisfy human needs. Anthropologists also identify the structures that emerge from society which are specialized in whatever degree of efficacy to facilitate securing those needs. When we map needs onto... Read more
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The recent explosive development of new forms of digital currency opens up unprecedented opportunities and poses significant regulatory challenges. This new form of digital currency lowers the costs and other barriers to the global movement of money, international trade, foreign investment and speculation, while simultaneously enhancing the anonymity on which... Read more
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Abstract
The current economic crisis can be explained but we must remember that the crisis is the product of human behavior, both theoretical and practical, and not the product of some force of nature or mathematical law. An economic system is based upon production and consumption. A crisis arises whenever there is an imbalance between these two activities. Until the... Read more
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We consider here the necessity of redefining the concept of economic value and the system of measuring the contributions to national wealth, to be included in a new paradigm in economics, whose application should guarantee constant improvement of human well-being. Such a paradigm should be based on an adequate cultural value system. We begin with a brief... Read more
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This paper has a specific focus on the core foundation of New Economic Theory. That is, the focus on human capital and its implications for the theory and method of the new form of political economy. The central issue that is underlined is the importance of scientific and technological innovation and its necessary interdependence on global values and value... Read more
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Abstract
Unequal distribution of societal power is to a large extent responsible for poverty, hunger, the destruction of nature, and inhuman living conditions. From the perspective of its redistribution, we distinguish three basic means of power: The ownership of material and immaterial properties, the kind of organisation and the values according to which properties... Read more
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The unprecedented opportunities missed at the end of the Cold War have come back to haunt and taunt us in the form of misshapen ideologies and misconceived policies. Discredited notions discarded by history once again raise their heads to be finally buried or bury us. Despite the rhetoric of the Washington Consensus, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse... Read more
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Over the past 15 years, sustainability has become mainstream in the corporate and financial sectors. But environmental and social conditions are declining rapidly in many regions. Nearly all corporate and financial sector sustainability strategies are focused on company-level activities, such as unilaterally mitigating negative environmental and social... Read more
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Abstract
When the World Academy of Art & Science (WAAS) was founded, it sought to address the gap between science and society, or rather the apparent unwillingness or inability of scientists to address their responsibilities as important members of society. This problem is related to the growing disparity between tool making and symbol making, those ancient skills... Read more
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This paper examines the foundations of economic neoliberalism and underlines the implications of the foundations of this economic theory in its reliance on economic value as ownership, property, and commodity which misdirects economic inquiry from the real value of human capital as the proper foundation of a viable economic system. It focuses on the role of a... Read more
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Abstract
Solutions to the major problems of our time require a radical shift in our perceptions, thinking and values. Post-normal times (characterized by complexity, chaos and contradictions), post-normal science (characterized by uncertainties, systems view of thinking, alternative perspectives, unknown unknowns, values) and human-centered economy are conceptions... Read more
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Abstract
The remarkable economic achievements of the past two centuries have cast an illusion of omniscience on the discipline of Economics, which even repeated catastrophic policy failures have still not entirely banished. The gap and disjuncture between prevailing economic wisdom and its effective application to promote human welfare and well-being are enormous and... Read more
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Abstract
There has been a total (public and private) debt bubble that has been growing since the 80s, accompanying an implicit promise of higher standards of living through large market deregulation experiments (capital markets deregulation and capital mobility being chief among them). The path chosen by conventional economics for delivering this implicit promise... Read more
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Abstract
In the first page of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith described an apparently trivial issue, the making of a pin. In his search for ways to effectively fight poverty, he formulated the basis for a new view of economy based on the Industrial Revolution. Two centuries later, the perspective he developed remains intact and is largely outdated. It does not... Read more
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Defining, assessing and valuing biodiversity and ecosystem services is an exemplary field, illustrating the necessity as well as the obstacles to interdisciplinary collaboration between natural scientists and economists. Despite the frequent use of identical individual motivations and similarities in the terminology, the discrepancies and misunderstandings... Read more
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Abstract
The Market can be understood as a self-organizing system that is constantly evolving. Like all social institutions, it is governed by principles and rules created by society, not by any universal laws of nature. If it does not work the way we want it to, we have the power and freedom to change its rules. However, prevailing notions about the market are veiled... Read more
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The future science of Economics must be human-centered, value-based, inclusive, global in scope and evolutionary in perspective. It needs to be fundamentally interdisciplinary to reflect the increasingly complex sectoral interconnections that characterize modern society. It must also be founded on transdisciplinary principles of social existence and human... Read more
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This the first of two articles that describe the development of a new generation of global modelling tools that was first proposed by the authors as members of a working group of the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome in 1993. This paper describes the underlying conceptual framework adopted by the group. The companion paper describes the Global Systems... Read more
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This article addresses the discussion proposed by the World Academy of Art & Science (WAAS) about the need to build a new paradigm to confront the challenges of the global society and to move across to a New Society discussing specific problems related to economic globalization and proposing changes. The ways in which economic orthodoxy and heterodoxy... Read more
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This paper tries to find an answer to the question of how to finance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that the world has just decided to implement. I argue that besides the existing wealth of proposals, mainly along the lines of better governance and co-financing strategies, we need a complementary approach: parallel Quantitative Easing (QE) for SDGs... Read more
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The call for a new humanism in the 21st century roots in the conviction that the moral, intellectual and political foundations of globalization and international cooperation have to be rethought. Whilst the historic humanism was set out to resolve tensions between tradition and modernity and to reconcile individual rights with newly emerging duties of... Read more
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The world we live in is a product of the way we think. Our conception of reality determines what we see and what we achieve. The Greek crisis is not simply a case of high public debt, economic mismanagement or weak political will in Greece or the Eurozone. It is underpinned by economic premises, constructs and resulting practices that promote exactly the type of... Read more
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Life is filled with seemingly intractable problems. But life wisdom affirms that if there is a problem, there must be a solution. Or better yet, the solution to the problem lies within the problem itself. Problems have their roots in disharmony. Disharmony arises when a part separates itself from the whole and acts independently of the wider reality of which it... Read more
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Abstract
The need for a paradigm change in economic thought has been well established, but the contours and fundamental characteristics of a new paradigm in economic theory are yet to be worked out. This article views this transition as an inevitable expression of the maturation of the social sciences into an integrated trans-disciplinary science of society founded on... Read more
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After the very long cycle (about 10,000 years) of societal and economic development based on agriculture, followed by a short cycle in which the industrial revolution became the prime mover (for less than 3 centuries), the world has entered a phase marked by the growing and determining importance of service activities (both monetarized and non-monetarized) .... Read more
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The prevailing economic paradigm has fallen short as a guide to policy making in this era of global economic crises. Numerous efforts are underway to revise it or replace it with a science of society that integrates intellectual disciplines. This paper makes a contribution to those efforts by arguing that the economic concept of externalities is no longer... Read more
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T.R. Malthus' "An Essay on the Principle of Population" (1798) was one of the first systematic studies of the problem of population in relation to resources. It was the first such study to stress the fact that, in general, powerful checks operate at all times to keep human populations from increasing beyond the available food supply. In a later edition, published... Read more
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The remarkable achievements of one of the world's greatest entrepreneurs offer profound insights into the fundamental nature of economy and essential missing links in prevailing economic theory. The career of Steve Jobs dramatically illustrates the central importance of human capital in modern economy and the almost incalculable contribution that a single... Read more
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Beyond Capitalism, Socialism, and Other Old Isms
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Old economic approaches are not capable of meeting our economic, environmental, and social challenges. To effectively meet these challenges, we need a perspective that goes beyond the conventional capitalism vs. socialism debate. This paper places economic valua- tions in their social context from the perspective... Read more
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Insights from Trieste
The Trieste Forum in March 2013 marked a significant milestone in the effort of the World Academy to evolve a comprehensive, integrated, transdisciplinary perspective for addressing global challenges. An initial presentation on the physics of Dark Matter aptly illustrated the need for new thinking in the social sciences. If the most mathematically... Read more
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The body of macroeconomic theory known as the neoclassical-Keynesian synthesis, hereafter mainstream macroeconomics, has dominated the practice of economics since the middle of the twentieth century and is largely unchallenged in institutions that teach economics. Not only does mainstream macroeconomics underlie monetary and fiscal policies intended to promote... Read more
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This is Part 1 in the Money Series. Part 2 "Multiplying Money" is available here.
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Although we all use money every day, the nature and functioning of money seem shrouded in commonplace myths and ancient mysteries. Money plays a central role in economics today, yet rarely do we come across a serious, informed discussion of what money really is and what role it plays... Read more
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A Report from the Club of Rome – EU Chapter to Finance Watch and the World Business Academy
By Bernard Lietaer, Christian Arnsperger, Sally Goerner and Stefan Brunnhuber Triarchy Press 2012
This report by WAAS Fellow Bernard Lietaer and his associates addresses important theoretical and practical issues regarding modern monetary systems. The central thesis of the report is... Read more
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Piecemeal fragmented strategies cannot address the pressing challenges facing humanity today. Economic theory has to be radically reinvented to squarely face the reality of rising unemployment, widening inequalities, growing ecological threats, frustrated social aspirations and unmet human needs. Monetary and fiscal policies are too crude and insufficient to steer... Read more
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Although Asian countries attain relatively high growth rates of GDP, many citizens do not seem to benefit from it. To remedy this problem, multilateral development institutions have developed the concept of inclusive growth, defined as growth that allows all members of a society to participate in and contribute to the growth process on an equal basis, regardless of... Read more
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The publication of the Club of Rome’s landmark report ‘The Limits to Growth’ in 1972 shook the intellectual foundations of social theory and challenged the very premises on which modern economy and prosperity are based. Once set in motion, it led to a revolutionary re-evaluation of human aspirations and economic activities. Among its many consequences, it has... Read more
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Great landmarks of history are few and far between. Normally they are recognized by scholars only long after the fact. Those in the thick of the fray may often be consciously inspired by the significance of their actions, but rarely does history come to share that perception. The rise of individualism in ancient Greece, its revival during the Italian Renaissance and the radical transformation of... Read more
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Social networking did not begin with the Internet. It is as old as human history. For what we now call social networking is really the evolution of human relationships which constitute the backbone of civilization. The emergence of the Internet is the third giant leap forward in a saga that began with the development of symbolic spoken language, the first great instrument that enabled human... Read more
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“Focusing on growth of the part without reference to its impact on the whole is a formula for social disease.”
The American subprime mortgage crisis, the international financial crisis that followed and the European financial crisis presently centered on Greece are all expressions of a deeper and wider crisis that has been preparing to surface for decades. This crisis encompasses... Read more
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Society constitutes an invisible web of relationships between its members. It has a defined structure of authority, status, rights, knowledge, beliefs, values, laws, specialized institutions, functional systems and formal activities radiating down and out from centers of power to the periphery. Beyond the perceptible limits lies an amorphous unknown territory akin to the undiscovered New World... Read more
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Life evolves by consciousness, consciousness evolves by organization. Human life evolves by a progressive heightening of our awareness, expansion of our knowledge, widening of our attitudes, and elevation of our values. This evolving human consciousness progressively expresses itself through the formulation and creation of more complex and effective organization – a... Read more
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Humanity has made immense progress over the last few decades. The starting point for setting a future's agenda can be anchored in a healthier, better educated, more prosperous, and better informed and connected world than ever.
Humanity finds itself at an evolutionary crossroad. The choice is between a perfect storm of progressively deepening crises and expanding... Read more
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For over 40 years the Club of Rome has been concerned with the sustainability of our planet. The conclusion of the famous first report to the Club of Rome The Limits to Growth that the world was on an unsustainable path was anticipatory and prescient.1 Although Limits caused considerable debate, after an initial flurry of interest, the message of the Club of Rome was largely... Read more
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1. Neoclassical Economics & the “General Equilibrium” System
1.1 Supply and Demand in a Static “Perfect” Equilibrium
The act of selling or buying goods always takes place at a given moment or instant in time, at which a price is agreed and paid. The general economic system is considered by standard economics to be based on a “General Equilibrium” which represents the... Read more
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For early economists such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and John Stuart Mill, economics was indivisible from moral philosophy. Their objective was not to discover eternal laws governing the functioning of human economic systems, but rather to improve upon the prevailing economic system to support the survival and enhance the economic security of all members of society. They... Read more
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“Employment is the single greatest challenge facing humanity today,” according to Ian Johnson, Secretary General of the Club of Rome, in his opening remarks to an international conference last November – remarkable words coming from an organization known principally for its concern about environmental issues. In similar fashion, renowned security expert Jasjit Singh, a World... Read more
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Adam Smith’s analysis in the Wealth of Nations gave birth at the end of the eighteenth century to economics as we know it today. As a moral philosopher, he wanted to provide a better understanding of how to fight poverty. While most social thinkers insisted that wealth could only develop from agriculture, Smith observed that the beginning of the industrialisation process was the key and priority... Read more
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Theoretical Discontent
From Newtonian to Human-Centered Economics
Future of Work
Money, Finance & Wealth
The Service Economy
Scarcity, Surplus & Markets
Equity, Freedom & Social Stability
Integration of Politics — Economy — Society
Essential Issues for the New Economics
Endnotes
1. Introduction
Civilization is an instrument... Read more
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Economic Theory