Got any suggestions?

[BEZERKO]

I've decided I need to know a little bit about economic theory. I've printed a few pages out of wikipedia on the Chicago School and Milton Friedman, J.M. Keynes and "Keynesian" economic thought. I'm reading Naomi Klein's the Shock Doctrine, and next on the list is Reich's Supercapitalism. I'm fairly familiar with most of the work done by the Longview Institute on Market Fundamentalism (the term I prefer over the missleading "freemarket capitalism," though I also like the term "market evangelism") and the idea of using morality as the foundation of a new economic system or a "moral economy" with such things as ethical corporations. There is also a lot of good work produced by the Rockridge Institute which includes ideas on progressive taxation, fair taxation, healthcare ("Don't think of a sick child") etc.

So, how about the cutting edge stuff concerning progressive economic theory? Moral and ethical justifications? Statistics (ugh!)?

I've been sort of scared into doing a little research on the subject by Naomi Klein's book. Basically, her assertion is that there are people who want to institute a lot of regressive "laizzes faire" economic ideology, and they're ruthless enough to use trauma (hurricane Katrina, the tsunami, 9-111 attacks) to ram through retrogressive economic reforms. Greenspan has been a proponent of so-called economic "shock therapy." I don't really want to get into the complicated mathematical models or statistics, but hey, whatever.

[Celebration]

1. progressive economics

http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Heart-Economics-Family-Values/dp/1565847474/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201037318&sr=8-1

She is a MacArthur fellow from UMass. I haven't read the book but she writes very well. The Wall Street types can't stand her. She gets a lot of speaking engagements from France. Her type of economics is not in vogue currently. This book is about the economics of making the family unit stronger.

[bain_sidhe]

2. A good "context" book: Wealth and Democracy

by Kevin Phillips. It's an older book, but it provides an historical context for what's happening in the U.S. today.

It's been a while since I read it, but his central thesis (or at least one of them) is that every superpower's slide from "superpower" status has been preceded by the "outsourcing" of production. It happened to Spain, it happened to the Dutch, it happened to England, and it's happening to us, now. When the main wealth of a country starts to come from buying and selling money, that "superpower" is going down--and the rise of the next one is generally determined by what country they outsourced their production to.

[oldhippie]

3. I just read Reich's "Supercapitalism " and thoroughly enjoyed it ........

.... although I was surprised at some of his positions. It made me think a bit.

[SlowDownFast]

4. Read this blog:

http://hypertiger.blogspot.com/

It's not mine, it's not pretty, and might seem a little over-the-top, but there's alot of in-depth truth about how we got this way and where we're going.

[Extend a Hand]

5. M. King Hubbert's prescription for a steady state economy

http://www.energybulletin.net/3800.html

<snip>
Less well known were Hubbert's studies since 1926 on the rate of industrial growth and of mineral and energy resources and their significance in the evolution of the world's present technological civilization. 3 Clark in "Geophysics" in February 1983 states ""In recent years, he (Hubbert) has assaulted a target -- which he labels the culture of money --that is gigantic even by Hubbert standards. His thesis is that society is seriously handicapped because its two most important intellectual underpinnings, the science of matter-energy and the historic system of finance, are incompatible. A reasonable co-existence is possible when both are growing at approximately the same rate. That, Hubbert says, has been happening since the start of the industrial revolution but it is soon going to end because the amount the matter-energy system can grow is limited while money's growth is not.
</snip>