Where did our Money go?

Surviving and Thriving in the Great Transition.

The New Economics Foundation is holding a meeting next month 27th October on this. As they say:

Two years on from the biggest public bail-out in history, the banks have returned to business as usual. Meanwhile the rest of us pay the price for a massive, private-sector failure. With oil prices rising, climate crisis looming, food prices volatile and the economy unstable, there must be a better way. In towns and cities across the UK and beyond, people are discovering new ways to survive and thrive in times of crisis.
A great cultural transformation is stirring - from urban gardens to local currencies and making, mending and sharing, to the resurgence of music and storytelling, we are rediscovering how to do things for ourselves and moving from passive consumers to active producers.
Take part in the continuing tale of how we can still make it turn out right, because there is no Planet B.

Yes, good question that. A new blog, Bright Green Scotland, has written a rather long, but very readable piece on how the “left lost the plot”. Our friendly Norwegian Green disagrees but if you ignore the left issue and just look at the way Adam charts how the debate has shifted over the past two years and how public attitudes have also changed it makes a very reasonable point. From a situation where it was the Free Market speculative bankers who were public enemy number one, it is now the bloated apparatus of state.

The bankers get to live again while the poor, and not so poor, get to pay twice. First with their savings and second with their jobs.

It makes me wonder. We keep getting these booms and busts, but we still go back to the same old ways, business as usual - like a drunk returning to the pub in the morning.

There are those who argue that infinite growth on a finite planet is just not possible, and there does seem to be some cracks in the system already apparent. But what is the alternative? Does Steady State Economics have a future and what does it look like? Economic growth and economic health are two very different things and the former has been shown to be not very healthy. As I’ve said before, a substantial portion of recent past economic growth has been the result of cost of failure. Our economic “success” is based on mistakes – that can’t be right.

Jeremy answers some FAQs on a Post Growth Economy over on “Make Wealth History”. I’m not so sure that a post growth economy necessarily excludes wealth, it just depends on how it is measured. But one bit stands out for me:

Nature draws no distinction between ideologies, and the world doesn’t fit into our political constructs. Something is either sustainable or it isn’t, and neither capitalism nor socialism is ‘the answer’.