Mark Jones wrote:
> You still didn't let us know what *you* think "we" should do about > falling markets. Maybe the answer will be in your forthcoming book about the > New Economy.
Well, I'll take a pop. Let's take another look at 'infrastructure', 'natural monopoly' and 'public good' and 'externalities' - and speak loudly for the public ownership and control of those sectors which meet the definitions - at global (eg. internet, software standards, currency transaction regulation and taxation, intellectual property), national (eg. airline, telecommunications backbone, electricity, interstate transport, libraries, education, incarceration, health insurance, national parks, centralised wage and conditions body, public service broadcasting, public housing), or council level (eg. cable channel allocation, community broadcasting, local thoroughfares, rent controls). Environmental despoliation/depletion oversight and responsibility is sadly especially difficult to allocate - it's tied in with many of the above and a while global body would be ideal (given global implications of local decisions), but then we run the risk of a Summers/Pritchett scenario, I suppose. That little lot would go some way to recognising some Schumpetarian thoughts on monopoly, Keynesian thoughts on cycles, development and amelioration, Polanyian thoughts on the relationship betwen polity and market, Arrowian reservations about information economics, Georgian/dependencista thoughts on development traps, and maybe even a couple of Marxian thoughts on competition and crisis. Whimpering incrementalism in the face of cacophonous urgency, I admit. But a comfy fit between Keynesian nostalgia and logical projection of principles - and fetchingly bold in its bald innocent simplicity, I think. Waddya reckon? |