what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Varoufakis. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Varoufakis. Sort by date Show all posts

Sunday, February 16, 2020

Explaining the blog's title

The blog was ten years old last autumn – making it one of the longest-running (english-speaking) blogs of its kind.  It first saw the light of day as "Carpathian Musings" because the blogging started in my mountain house in that area but, after a few winters spent in Sofia, I realized that the title was no longer a precise description of its source.
The blog was therefore, for 5 years or so, called “Balkan and Carpathian Musings”.
But neither the word "Balkan" nor "Carpathian" are keywords people use when they are googling on the topics the blog deals with - such as "the global financial crisis", "organisational reform", "social change", "capitalism" - let alone "Romanian culture", "Bulgarian painting", "transitology"etc.... 
So clearly the blog needed a name which better expresses its content and objectives. I realise, of course, that the way to increase the profile of a blog or website is to manipulate the algorithms – but this costs money I’m not willing to pay…
Let’s be clear, I’m not interested in raising the profile as an end in itself…..I have no illusions about my significance. But I am confident that my blog (and website) is an almost unique “resource” or, if you prefer, “library”…..Not perhaps so much of my writing – but of the insights of others whose books and papers I’ve taken the time and trouble to seek out and whose significance I’ve both recognized and wanted to pass on……Two crucial but not necessarily connected factors!!

So, let me try to explain why, for the past few months, I’ve been running with the title “Exploring No-Man’s Land”. The images of battlefields this summons up are quite deliberately chosen.
First, an accident of birth had me straddling the borderland of the West and East ends of a shipbuilding town in the West of Scotland – with class, religious and political tensions simmering in those places. 
Then political and academic choices in my late 20s brought me slap into the middle of the no-man’s land between politicians and different sorts of professional and academic disciplines.
Then, when I was almost 50, I became a nomadic consultant, working for the next 25 years in ten different countries
Previous posts have tried to give a sense of how that experience has made me who I am….

I was the son of a Presbyterian Minister (or “son of the manse” as we were known) and received my education in a state school which still then possessed the positive features of Scotland’s Democratic Tradition……now, sadly, much traduced.
It would have been easier for my parents to send me to the secondary school just a few blocks from our house but, as home was a manse (owned by the Church of Scotland) in the exclusive “West End”, that school was fee-paying. And my parents (although no radicals) would never have contemplated taking a step which would have created a barrier with my father’s congregation who were stalwarts of the town’s lower middle classes with modest houses and apartments in the centre and east of the town.
Thus began my familiarization with the nuances of the class system – and with the experience of straddling boundaries which was to become such a feature of my life. Whether the boundaries are those of class, party, professional group intellectual discipline or nation, they are well protected if not fortified…..And trying to straddle such borders – let alone explore them – can be an uncomfortable experience.

When I became a young councillor in 1968 (for the Catholic-dominated Labour party), I found myself similarly torn I developed loyalties to the local community activists but found myself in conflict with my (older) political colleagues and officials.
And I felt this particularly strongly when I was elevated to the ranks of magistrate and required to deal with the miscreants who confronted us as lay judges every Monday morning – up from the prison cells where they had spent the weekend for drunkenness and wife-beating……..
The collusion between the police and my legal adviser was clear but my role was to adjudicate “beyond reasonable doubt” and the weak police testimonials often gave me reason to doubt….I dare say I was too lenient and I certainly got such a reputation – meaning that I was rarely disturbed to sign search warrants!

And, on being elevated a few years later to one of the leading positions in a giant new Region, I soon had to establish relations with - and adjudicate between the budgetary and policy bids of - senior professionals heading specialized Departments with massive budgets and manpower.

It was at that stage that I developed a diagram for my students to make sense of the “conflict of loyalties” to what I saw as 4 very different pressures (audiences) to which politicians are subjected – 
- local voters (if the electoral system is based on local constituencies);
- the party (both local and national)
- the officials (and laws) of the particular government agency they had entered;
- their conscience.

Politicians, I argued, differ according to the extent of the notice they took of each of the pressures coming from each of these sources – and the loyalties this tended to generate. And I gave names to the 4 types which could be distinguished – “populist”; “ideologue”, “statesman”,  “maverick”.
The effective politician, however, is the one who resists the temptation to be drawn exclusively into any one of these roles. Each has its own important truth - but it is when someone blends the various partialities into a workable and acceptable proposition that we see real leadership.

And I would make the same point about the different professional and academic disciplines.
Each generates its own way of looking at the world – as you will see from the table below which looks only at seven academic disciplines

The core assumptions of academic subjects
Discipline
Core assumption
Most Famous exponents (not necessarily typical!)
Sociology
Struggle for power
Durkheim, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, C Wright Mills,Robert Merton,  Herbert Simon, A Etzioni, Ralf Dahrendorf
Economics
Rational choice
Adam Smith, Schumpeter, Keynes, P Samuelson, M Friedmann, J Stiglitz, P Krugman
Political science
Rational choice (at least since the 1970s)
Robert Dahl, Gabriel Almond, David Easton, S Wolin, Peter Hall, James Q Wilson, Bo Rothstein, Francis Fukuyama
Geography
??
Mackinder, David Harvey, Nigel Thrift, Danny Dorling
Public management
mixed for traditional bodies - rational choice for New PM
Woodrow Wilson, Chris Hood, Chris Pollitt, Guy Peters, G Bouckaert,
anthropology
shared meaning
B Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Claude Levi-Strauss, Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas, Chris Shore, David Graeber
Political economy
draws upon economics, political science, law, history, sociology et al to explain how political factors determine economic outcomes.
JK Galbraith, Susan Strange, Mark Blyth, Wolfgang Streeck, Geoffrey Hodgson, Yanis Varoufakis,

And, of course, each of these seven fields has a variety of sub-fields each of which has its own specific “take” even before you get to the eccentricities of individual practitioners – let me remind you of this table about 10 sub-fields in Economics which I used in a recent post

Pluralism in Economics
Name of “school”
Humans….

Humans act within…
The economy is…..
Old “neo-classical”
optimise narrow self-interest
A vacuum
Stable
New “neo-classical”
can optimise a variety of goals
A market context
Stable in the absence of friction
Post-Keynes
use rules of thumb
A macro-economic context
Naturally volatile
Classical
act in their self-interest
Their class interests
Generally stable
Marxist
do not have predetermined patterns
Their class and historical interests
Volatile and exploitative
Austrian
have subjective knowledge and preferences
A market context
Volatile – but this is generally sign of health
Institutional
have changeable behaviour
Instit envt that sets rules and social norms
Dependent on legal and social structures
Evolutionary
act “sensibly” but not optimally
An evolving, complex system
Both stable and volatile
Feminist
exhibit engendered behaviour
A social context
Ambiguous
Ecological
act ambiguously
Social context
Embedded in the environment
This is an excerpt only – the full table is from Ho-Joon Chang’s “Economics – a User’s Guide” but can be viewed at diagram at p61 of The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the experts; Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins (2017)

Please understand, I’m not trying to confuse – rather the opposite….I’m trying to liberate!
Once we become aware of the very different worlds in which people live, our world suddenly becomes a very richer place – in which we have choices about the particular lens we use to make sense of it all…
I remember the first time I really became aware of this – when I did the Belbin team test. And The Art of Thinking by Bramsall and Harrison (1984) very usefully sets out different types of strategic thinking..

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Greek tragedy

At last a Minister of Finance with some integrity…..Yanis Varoufakis – to whose important “Global Minotaur” book I devoted a blogpost almost three years ago - has emerged from the chaos that is Greece as the Finance Minister of the new Syriza government. He is either a very foolish or a very courageous man!

His has been one of the clear and strong voices of economic sanity for the past few years, using his blog to great effect – giving us not only analysis but challenging recommendations. In a post earlier this month, he explains why he decided to run in these elections. He’s fully aware of the ease with which honest people get corrupted (in different ways) by office and assures us that will keep a letter of resignation in his inside pocket for use whenever he “loses the commitment to speak truth to power”. The problem, of course, is that he has just become that power!! So his dialogue will have to be with his conscience!

Paul Mason – from whom sadly we do not hear much now that he has moved from radio to television – had a recent interview with him in which Varifakous promised to “destroy the Greek oligarchy system". In 2010, Varifakous wrote (with fellow political economics Professors Stuart Holland and James Galbraith – son of the famous JG) a 12 page modest proposal for resolving the European crisis…..

Klaus Kastner is a retired Austrian banker who has a very sharply-written blog called Observing Greece and gives us not only an interesting and measured response to the Syriza victory but access to the programme on which Syriza ran

We are all very rude about the Greeks – and their role in European events in the last 100 years gives us every reason to be. Their invasion of Turkey in 1919 caused massacres and massive migration treks and regional instability. Of course, Britain’s elite has always had strong Hellenic prejudices and has consistently been on the sidelines cheering the bloodletters and oligarchs on……..A long article in November last year gives the detail on Winston Churchill’s role in the horrific Greek  Civil War post 1944My gym teacher at school was a Greek communist who was one of many forced to leave the country because of the violence. His nickname was “Wee Pat” and I still remember his stentorian voice as he would bellow to those wanting to be excused the stronger exercises “keep your vest on boy!”!!!

Those wanting to keep in touch with Greek events might usefully use the Macropolis website which started in 2013 specifically to help outsiders try to make sense of the Greek tragedy…..


Friday, April 19, 2019

On being serious in letters

Being part II of  of the introduction to Dispatches to the next generation – the short version

I thought it would be useful to try to write a blurb for this book – on the basis that it might give me a checklist against which I could check whether the text actually fulfilled its promises – or what I thought the book should cover…..
This is a book”, I started “about the ways we have tried to think about the economic crisis which has gripped us over the past decade”…..I paused to look at the words….”Hang on! That’s not true” I said to myself…”It’s a book about how I have tried to think about the crisis”.
The royal “we” on these occasions tends to creep in unconsciously - perhaps to protect us against accusations of subjectivity, perhaps to add an air of abstraction.

I must have forgotten that, when I first compiled this short version a couple of years ago, I had chosen the title quite deliberately to convey the sense that the book would indeed try to strike a more “personal” note or “tone” than is normal for such subjects.
I was trying, after all, to gather my thoughts together “as if” I was leaving a letter behind for my children…In such an endeavour, I was following the lead of people like Ernest Callenbach who had left behind such a letter – or Alain Touraine or Yanis Varoufakis who had penned highly personal books inspired by the thought of loved ones….

Focus of the posts in Part II
Title

What the reader takes away
Specialists have such a narrow focus – and are so used to talking to students and other academics - that they have lost the art of communication. I recommend a dozen books which actually bring economics to life
A unique table I’ve developed which plots books and authors according to both their academic discipline (I selected nine) and ideological position
Other Ways to make sense of it all

This introduces a good “typology” ie a way of classifying the very different approaches and the reasons for their divergent conclusions

Application of the typology – with examples of the books and writers who have made sense to me

When you come across an author who holds your interest, you start to ask why others can’t do the same….
PostWar Mood music – how the intellectuals made sense of our economic system
This is my annotated list of important books – from the 1950s to the start of the crash. Be warned - there are about 50 titles


Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Money Talks - why we need a new Vocabulary of social change

Exactly one hundred years ago. Keynes wrote a famous paragraph about globalisation which started -
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.
Two world wars checked capitalism's dynamism - although the post-war period enjoyed what the French have called "the glorious 30 years". A new phase, however, came into play in 1971 with Nixon's unilateral decision to take the US out of the 1944 Bretton Woods system of global finance. The UK's Big Bang liberalisation of banking and the EU's Single Market 15 years later; and the establishment in 1995 of the World Trade Organisation were further boosts to a new phase of global financialisation.
These past 40 years of increasingly instantaneous financial flows have made a mockery of both democracy and of sovereignty. It is capital markets which now decide the shape and scope of state policy-making - and which have destroyed the model of social democracy. 
When countries borrow, it is the money markets who make the judgements about the risks and therefore the range of interest rates payable.
Whatever the rhetoric of party manifestos, it is money - not politics - which now talks and which should make us take more seriously the question posed more than a decade ago by the veteran US political scientist SM Wolin in Democracy Incorporated – managed democracy and the spectre of inverted totalitarianism (2008) - namely whether capitalism and democracy can continue to coexist. Robert Kuttner's Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? (2018) clearly doubts it

The ideology of "neoliberalism" may well be a useful one for academics but is disastrous as an explanatory tool for social activists - let alone one likely to help persuade others. We do therefore desperately need a proper vocabulary for persuasive conversations with others about the nature of the system which is grinding us asunder. I've taken in recent blogposts to refer to it, variously, as "The Beast" or the Elephant - although Yanis Varoufakis's "Minotaur" is probably the best metaphor.
When I was born, capitalism was something which stood or fell according to its ability to produce real things - now it is more of a psychic process so well described in Adam Curtis' documentaries. The 2011 book Monoculture - how one story is changing everything is one of the few good reads about all this.

Skidelsky's "Money and Government", which was the positive focus of the last post, is an important book in its (sadly all too rare) attempt to make the world of money comprehensible to the average citizen. But it has, these past few weeks, been lying unread in my car - I just didn't have the patience to wade through the economic history it offers.
Something called "Modern Monetary Theory" has suddenly become flavour of the month in leftist circles thanks apparently to one of Bernie Saunders' advisers, one Stephanie Kelton whose book The Deficit Myth  has been attracting feverish reviews - although Michael Roberts, the Marxist economist, needs some convincing 
Such is the level of interest in this new body of work that Real Economics devoted an entire issue to the subject which is well worth reading

update; last year saw the publication of this book which argues against the prevailing view that capitalism is destroying democracy – balancing the 2013 book Managing Democracy; managing dissent – capitalism, democracy and organising consensus.

Monday, June 12, 2023

Can Economics change its Spots?

I’ve written fairly savagely about economists in the past – so it’s about time I recognised there are some in the new generation who are thinking differently. And I’m not talking about the behavioural economists who, for me, have little to offer – they’e just making minor adjustments to what remains a thoroughly complacent, arrogant and selfish view of human nature. The table which follows doesn’t do justice to the new wave of iconoclasts who are clamouring for our attention – but it’s a start


Famous for

Key Books

 Kate Rawarth

The concept of planetary limits

Doughnut Economics”

 Isabella Weber,

Questioning prevailing wisdom about inflation

How China Escaped Shock Therapy”

 Mariana Mazzacato

Exploding myths about corporations and the State

The Entrepreneurial State”

The Vaklue of Everything”

Mission Economy”

 Thomas Pikety

Exposing the scale of inequality

The Economics of Inequality”

Capital”

Capital and Ideology”

 Mark Blyth

Ruthless dissection of the politics behind the economics

Austerity – the history of a dangerous idea”

Angronomics”

 Yanis Varoufakis

Being the bad boy of the eurozone – but a great story-teller!

A textbook

an autobiography

The Global Minotaur”

And the Weak Suffer What They Must?”

 
And, because I’m impatient to get this post – with all its usual hyperlinks – to my readers, 
let me finish with a great review of Thomas Pikety’s latest book “Time for Socialism” from 
what is rapidly becoming a never-to be-missed journal - Jacobin
 

The fact that a thinker with Piketty’s intellectual influence has embraced socialism is significant in itself, paving the way for greater numbers of people to begin envisioning a world beyond capitalism. But what should we make of his vision of socialist transformation?

Talk of a relatively gradual and already underway shift toward socialism will no doubt raise eyebrows among radicals trained to expect that a break with capitalism will necessarily require some form of revolutionary rupture in the state and economy. Yet this gradualist vision should not be dismissed out of hand.

The truth is that we have no way yet to precisely predict the form that a transition to socialism will take in an advanced capitalist democracy. Piketty’s insistence that the radical reforms he envisions will be won through struggle against (rather than accommodation to) corporate power is likely sufficient as a strategic horizon for the foreseeable future. Though a more rapid and less peaceful revolutionary break may eventually be put on the agenda in the face of minoritarian employer reaction, there’s no need nor any political benefit to project immediate revolution as the only possible path forward.

Some radicals may similarly frown upon Piketty’s insistence that the transition to socialism is already underway, as seen in the growth of the welfare state and related declines in economic inequality. Yet here too the author is onto something: the reforms won by socialists, organized labor, and social movements over the past century have made significant incursions into market relations.

Despite neoliberalism’s ravages, the welfare state has not been dismantled even in places like the United States and the UK — current and future struggles for decommodification are thus being waged on a significantly higher social baseline than they were in, say, the 1930s. As such, the most pertinent criticism of social democrats — one shared by Piketty — is not that they were gradualists, but rather that they eventually proved incapable of being effective gradualists. Instead of continuing to shift power and control toward working people, social democratic parties largely abandoned this project in the face of economic crisis, globalization, and employer resistance from the 1980s onward.

Nor does it make sense to criticize Piketty for omitting calls for the nationalization of the economy’s commanding heights. There’s a strong argument to be made that markets for private goods are fully compatible with (and arguably necessary for) a thriving socialist society — provided that the state radically undermines capitalist power and wealth, that firm-based economic democracy is expanded, and that robust welfare policies provide everybody with the essential services they need to survive. That said, Piketty’s case would have been strengthened had he engaged more with proposals for a complete democratization of firms, as famously envisioned by Sweden’s “Meidner plan.”

A more significant limitation is that Piketty says little in the book about the importance of rebuilding the power of organized labor. This question gets passing mentions in his admonitions to “rethink institutions and policies including public services, and in particular, education, labor law, and organizations and the tax system” and to “stop denigrating the role of trade unions, the minimum wage, and salary scales.” Yet the author’s relative inattention to organized labor today is somewhat surprising given his commendable focus on the urgency of bringing back working-class politics and his consistent acknowledgement of the historical importance of trade unions in reducing inequality.

Perhaps Piketty, with his expertise in leveraging data to identify historical trends and policy solutions, felt that it was best to leave it to others to flesh out the strategic lines of march necessary to win his proposed vision. But without a revitalized labor movement to change the balance of class power, the author’s most ambitious policy solutions are unlikely to pass — and some of his other proposals might not have their intended consequences. Employee comanagement, for example, generally can serve as a tool for increasing workers’ influence when paired with robust trade unions. But in the absence of the relatively favorable relationship of forces created by strong working-class organization and the credible threat of disruptive workplace action, comanagement plans risk becoming toothless at best and mechanisms of employer control at worst, pushing workers to rubber stamp bosses’ prerogatives.

Friday, January 10, 2020

57 Varieties of Capitalism

Last October I developed a table in what was probably the most important post of the year – one in a series about capitalism. The table listed 11 academic disciplines; showed how 3 “schools” of thinking could be discerned in each discipline; and how they tended to treat the subject.
The key variable distinguishing these schools was the extent to which they recognised the realities of power. I named them “market theoreticians”; “mixed” and “critical-realist” respectively.
The subsequent matrix produced 33 different “lens” with which to try to understand the system which rules over us with Minotaur-like voraciousness. I was proud of the result – I had never seen it done before. Of course there was a school of political economists which developed in the 1980s and 90s called the Varieties of Capitalism approach – but this focused on essentially two basic models. 

My matrix is distinctive in 3 ways – first that so many academic fields are listed. At best people will mention economics, sociology and political science – with little recognition that economics has several very different sub-fields. And I might have added “complexity science” which has rapidly developed its own specialism.
The second original aspect of the table is the recognition of three very different “schools” or approaches…Most economists, of course, still adhere to highly theoretical and unrealistic assumptions which were explored (and exploded) in this recent post
But political and behavioural economists – let alone the sociologists, geographers and even psychologists have been muscling in….Indeed I have had to add the psychologists to the table…giving 36 "lens" or squares

And the final distinctive aspect of the table is the identification of so many books – almost 50 covering most of squares…
I have selected the books which appear in the table according to whether they portray a world of “perfect competition” in which, according to the theory, no one has any power or, at the other extreme, a world of large companies and groups exercising power (legal and illegal). 

We are prone these days to use ideological labels too easily – so I want to avoid that by using less obvious labels.
- “Market theoreticians” (column 3) are those whose writing is based on the totally unrealistic assumptions of perfect competition
“Mixed economy” therefore covers those who clearly argue for what used to be called “the mixed economy” and are quite clear that they wish a better, more balanced capitalism;
- The “critical-realist” label covers those who go further in their critical approach, extending their analysis to the role exercised by dubious and illegitimate power players who try to buy democracy and whose activities threaten the planet’s very survival.

Some academic disciplines, of course, like economics, are almost exclusively associated with one school (market) whereas others are more pluralist 
Needless to say, the allocation to one particular column is arbitrary and could be disputed – as can the choice of illustrative authors and books (not all of which I have actually read)
The table is, however, a rather superb example of what post-modernism has done to us – which I will explore in a subsequent post   

The table is, however, a good example of what post-modernism has done to us

 Key Texts about the future of capitalism – by academic discipline and “approach”

 

Academic

Discipline


1. Critical-Realist

2. Mixed approach

3. “market theoreticians”

 Economics

 Debt and Neo-Feudalism; Michael Hudson (2012)

 Credo – economic beliefs in a world of crisis; Brian Davey (2015). Davey is not a career or conventional economist!

 

23 Things they didn’t tell you about capitalism; Ha Joon-Chang (2010)

People, Power and Profits – progressive capitalism for an age of discontent; Joseph Stiglitz (2019)

The Future of Capitalism – facing new anxieties; Paul Collier (2018)

Shifts and Shocks – what we’ve learned, and still have to, from the financial crisis; Martin Wolf (2014)

Conceptualising Capitalism – institutions, evolution, future; Geoff Hodgson (2015)

 

Why Globalisation Works; Martin Wolf (2004)

 

 

most of the discipline

Economic history

 

Capitalism and its Economics – a critical History; Douglas Dowd (2000)

Never Let a Good Crisis go to waste; Philip Mirowski  (2013)

 

 Crashed – how a decade of financial crises changed the world Adam Tooze (2018)

 

Economic historians by definition have a strong sense of political and other institutions

Political economy

Inside Capitalism – an intro to political economy; Paul Phillips (2003)

Susan Strange

- States and Markets (1988)

- Casino Capitalism ; (1986)

- The Retreat of the State (1994)

 

Austerity – the history of a dangerous idea; Mark Blyth (2013)

Yanis Varoufakis

- And the Weak Suffer what they must – Europe, austerity and the threat to global stability (2016)

- The Global Minotaur (2012)

 

The discipline still rediscovering itself but, again, by definition, has a strong sense of the importance of institutions

Political

Science

 

 

 

 

 

Crisis without End - the unravelling of western prosperity: A Gamble (2014)

 Democracy Incorporated – managed democracy and the spectre of inverted totalitarianism; Sheldon Wolin (2008)

Paul Hirst eg Revisiting Associative Democracy; ed Westall (2011).

 The Great Disruption – human nature and the reconstitution of social order; Francis Fukuyama (1999) 

Mammon’s Kingdom – an essay on Britain, Now; David Marquand (2015)

Only a few brave pol scientists trespass into the economic field – although it is becoming more fashionable

Policy analysis/Think Tanks

 

“The Locust and the Bee – predators and creators in capitalism’s future”; G Mulgan (2015)

An Intro to Capitalism (IEA 2018)

Sociology

Wolfgang Streeck.

- How will Capitalism End?; (2016)

- Buying Time – the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism (2013)

End of capitalism? Michael Mann (2013)

Capitalism; Geoff Ingham (2008)

 

 

 

Vampire Capitalism – fractured societies and alternative futures; Paul Kennedy (2017)

 

 

The sociological voice is still inspired by C Wright Mills, Veblen, Weber and Durkheim

Geography

David Harvey

- Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (2014)

- The Enigma of Capital (2010)

- A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism (2005).

 

Danny Dorling

- A Better Politics – how government can make us happier (2016

- Injustice (2014)

The geographers are a bolshie lot - with a strong sense of geo-politics

Environment

Come On! Capitalism, short-termism, population and the destruction of the planet; (Club of Rome 2018).                            

Why we can’t agree about Climate Change; Mike Hulme (2009)

Natural Capitalism – the next industrial revolution; Paul Hawken (1999)

they pride themselves on their technocracy

 

 

 

 

Management and man’t studies

“The Dictionary of Alternatives – utopianism and organisation”; M Parker (2007)

Rebalancing Society; Henry Mintzberg (2014)

Peter Senge

Charles Handy

Most mant writers are apologists – apart from the critical mant theorists

 

Religious studies

Laudato-Si – Pope Francis’ Encyclical (2015). Accessible in its entirety here

 

 

The Crisis of global capitalism – Pope Benedict XVI’s social encyclical and the future of political economy; ed A Pabst (2011)

 

Questions of Business Life; Higginson (2002)

Psychology

Herbert Marcuse

What about me – the struggle for identity in a market based society?; Paul Verhaeghe (2014) 

 

 

 

Journalism

Post Capitalism – a guide to our Future; Paul Mason (2015) ….

 The Capitalism Papers – Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System; Jerry Mander (2012).

 

How Good Can we be – ending the mercenary society Will Hutton (2015)

 Capitalism 3.0 Peter Barnes (2006)

They don’t enjoy the tenure of the academics (altho Hutton is a college Director)