Sublime

of larger society. So that’s a very old battle in human history between the self-serving stories of an elite and the stories that can actually help serve a broader society. Part of what we’ve seen in our economics is that elites previously used to appeal to gods, to how our ancestors did it, to the natural order, etc., to make credible their storie

It is his analysis of animal spirits and the possibilities of public spending that have made Keynes the economist of the moment.

“we have entered a different phase for the economy, a new era where production matters less and what matters more is access to that production: distribution, in other words—who gets what and how they get it”[282]. In this context, there

central banks to ‘monetary-fund’ government deficits. They argue this allows the state to balance economic activity by acting as the ‘employer of last resort’

But there are far more serious issues here than merely trying to protect some treasured object, some particular ritual or a preferred corner of social life from the monetary calculus and the short-term contract. For at the heart of liberal and neoliberal theory lies the necessity of constructing coherent markets for land, labour, and money, and the

Sen is the father of the Capability Approach, a critical contribution to welfare economics which has been hugely influential since the 1980s. Instead of crude financial measures or naive hedonism, Sen argued that the highest good was the freedom to choose a life one has reason to value—to have options, and thus be able to live deliberately.

Slowing down the pace of change may give us time to create enough new jobs to replace most of the losses. Yet as noted earlier, economic entrepreneurship will have to be accompanied by a revolution in education and psychology.

For John Fullerton, the banker who walked away from Wall Street, here lies the source of the problem. ‘We’ve reached the logical conclusion of this expansionist economic paradigm,’ he says. ‘Unless we can achieve magical decoupling we have an exponential function on a closed system planet … yet the finance system has no in-built plateau, it can’t “

This can be seen in how conservatives keep on stressing the importance of “ownership” as the best safety net for households[97], the inflating bubble of student loans, or the excessive reliance on consumption driven by credit card debt. With the financial system as the only mechanism for sustaining production and consumption, today’s problem is les