This is a post from about 5 weeks ago, before the Occupy Wall Street protest started. It was lost on a server transfer so I’m reloading it now. It makes interesting reading when thinking about the Occupy movement and what its core concerns are. I think the post below encapsulates those concerns, namely: measurement, institutions and values. Our current system externalises as many costs as possible, has institutions cuorrupted by money, and has lost any sense of meaningful values, other than monetary gain. Not only has our economy become monetised, so has our society. In terms of how values have been set aside and how they may be recovered, this piece by Chris Hedges is revealing. On to the original post.

Economics is quite popular these days. It’s not so much the traditional discipline, itself, that is the focus, but a constant flagellation of its representation. Simply put, it’s not delivering the goods. Many trained economists would argue that economics is not the problem but the solution. To paraphrase “it’s the politicians, stupid!”.

The word “economics” also seem to be creeping into the title of every other book, blog or column. “The Economics of…….sex, drugs, football, hairdressing (i made that one up) and so on. The message is clear. People want to know how the world works and seek to understand it through the lens of economics, which is, as I’m repeatedly informed, only about the allocation of resources. We’ve also had Freakonomics followed up by SuperFreakonomics, just in case you didn’t get it the first time.

Diane Coyle is a serial offender is this area with 2 recent books called “Sex, Drugs and Economics” and “The Economics of Enough” (I would recommend both and happy to lend them to anyone local). These books do help us to make more sense of the way our economy works and, therefore, how our society is structured. Economics describes how people transact with each other and for what reasons. Getting into the nitty gritty of personal life seems an odd place for economics to be but research continues to show that how we make decisions is very much dependent on variables which can, to some extent, be measured and quantified. Put bluntly, incentives and pay offs do matter (unless you have no impulse control at all – read male teenagers – but this can be controlled and measured as well).

“The Economics of Enough” is a well written account of  the economic challenges facing us and how we can move forward to create more even prosperity and happiness. Diane outlines what is importance to people: happiness, nature, posterity, fairness and trust. She then looks at where the problems are: our measurement system, our values and our institutions. She then finishes off with a “Manifesto of Enough”, a ten point programme for shifting to a world of “Enough”. It’s all very useful and accurate in its conception. What I like about the book is the realisation that our values have become warped (seen readily in the fiasco of the Global Financial Crisis and its response) and our institutions have become corrupted by those same values. Changing that will require some serious reform and will face major resistance by the vested interests happy with the current situation.

Slipping nicely alongside this book is a new film called “The Economics of Happiness“, which I screened last night in Christchurch to an audience of 115 people, including 2 local MPs. This film, by Helena Norberg-Hodge, Steven Gorelick and John Page, visits themes raised by Diane in her book, but it does so in a more poetic fashion. Drawing on many years research and living in Ladakh, Helena pulls together a picture of a severely fractured global population struggling to maintain its humanity in the face of the onslaught of globalisation. The film dismantles many myths around the benefits of globalisation, describing it is ultimately a process designed for major transnational corporations to increase profits at the expense of people and planet. It’s naturally tends towards the polemical but it’s hard to dispute the evidence. Median incomes do not tell us the whole story. The constant externalisation of environmental and social costs produce a massive hidden subsidy to the global business network. The global institutions (IMF, WTO and World Bank) support and embed this process and remove sovereignty wherever possible so that business faces no impediment. We don’t pay the true costs but some one else picks up the tab.

This links back to Diane’s discussion around measurement. Economics can only be of use if the variables, that are plugged into the models, have integrity. As both Diane and Helena note, the value of integrity is missing. The pressure of profit takes few prisoners and if a cost can be ignored, it will be. Whilst Diane is still in favour of economic growth, she recognises it must come within a properly constructed framework. Helena goes further in promoting a more localized world, where we are in touch with, and close to, our processes and means of production. This approach brings the connection back into our lives and this, ultimately, is the root of the happiness we are looking for.

The clear message from these works (and others like it) is clear. There is a desire for a new approach to our economy and there is evidence to support it. The various manifestos, blueprints and proposals for reform are starting to merge in content and structure. Slowly but surely a solid platform for re-envisaging our society is coming together and a renaissance in economics may not be far away.