There’s nothing like a good crisis to make us rethink old ideas. The
depression of the 1930s led to the rejection of the prevailing idea
that unemployment would right itself if only people would work for
lower wages. Governments could do very little to help. These ideas were
overthrown by experience and by the invention of modern macro economics
by British economist, John Maynard Keynes. By the end of World War II,
most Western governments had adopted Keynesian economic policies
designed to ensure that total expenditures were sufficient to maintain
full employment.
It's highly unlikely that life as we know it - or
want it - can continue for long unless we rein in population growth.
Too many measures indicate that the great mass of us burning fossil
fuels, gobbling up renewable resources, and generating toxic trash is
overloading our life support ecosystems. In the central North Pacific
Ocean gyre, swirling plastic fragments now outweigh plankton 46 to one.
When a British government commission
publishes a report calling for an end to economic growth, it suddenly
seems that our world is changing. Growth has been the central goal of
economists since the beginning of the industrial revolution. But Prof.
Tim Jackson, the Economics Commissioner of the UK's Sustainable Development
Commission has written a book that sums up the current state of our
knowledge about economic growth and shows convincingly that growth should
end.
Why is it that whenever the G20, the G8, or the World Economic Forum gather, I get a sinking feeling that these "world leaders" will accomplish nothing, change nothing?
There are, according to Wikipedia, 203 sovereign states in the world. So who died and made the G 20 king? Why can they, along with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a host of multi-national corporations and banks, decide how the world will run or how it will fail?
