A provocative look at how and why Britain has fallen into decline from being a superpower in 1914 to being a third world economy in 2014 by two of Britain's leading Economists journalists With a second recession looming, Britain is facing a moment of truth. Going South examines how the leader of the Industrial Revolution came to exhibit the features of a "developing country." The symptoms of this vertiginous plunge in the world's rankings are already starkly apparent: a chronic balance of payment deficit, a looming shortage of energy and food, a dysfunctional labor market, volatility in economic growth, and a painful vulnerability to external events. And if these are the big indicators of imminent relegation to the Third World, many smaller ones are too numerous to fully catalogue. So stark is the evidence that it is our contention that Britain's looming relegation is not in doubt. The names change with intellectual fashion--the developing world, the Third World, less-developed countries, "emerging markets," or simply the Global South. But the destination is the same. Britain is going south--rapidly. Assuming that Britain faces up to its plight, there is no easy model for the redevelopment of the national economy. Whichever path is taken will be a hard one. The age of the quick fixes is over.
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(1)Tomas Sedlacek has shaken the study of economics as few ever have. Named one of the "Young Guns" and one of the "five hot minds in economics" by the Yale Economic Review, he serves on the National Economic Council in Prague, where his provocative writing has achieved bestseller status. How has he done it? By arguing a simple, almost heretical proposition: economics is ultimately about good and evil. In The Economics of Good and Evil, Sedlacek radically rethinks his field, challenging our assumptions about the world. Economics is touted as a science, a value-free mathematical inquiry, he writes, but it's actually a cultural phenomenon, a product of our civilization. It began within philosophy--Adam Smith himself not only wrote The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments--and economics, as Sedlacek shows, is woven out of history, myth, religion, and ethics. "Even the most sophisticated mathematical model," Sedlacek writes, "is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us." Economics not only describes the world, but establishes normative standards, identifying ideal conditions. Science, he claims, is a system of beliefs to which we are committed. To grasp the beliefs underlying economics, he breaks out of the field's confines with a tour de force exploration of economic thinking, broadly defined, over the millennia. He ranges from the epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament to the emergence of Christianity, from Descartes and Adam Smith to the consumerism in Fight Club. Throughout, he asks searching meta-economic questions: What is the meaning and the point of economics? Can we do ethically all that we can do technically? Does it pay to be good? Placing the wisdom of philosophers and poets over strict mathematical models of human behavior, Sedlacek's groundbreaking work promises to change the way we calculate economic value.
Whereas "Volume One: Microeconomics" dealt with the optimizing individual, "Volume Two: Macroeconomics" explains the factors that affect the economy of an entire country and, indeed, the planet. It explores the two big concerns of macroeconomics: how economies grow and why economies collapse. It also illustrates the basics of the labour market and unemployment, inflation and debt, what the GDP is and what it measures, and the influence of government, trade, and technology on the economy. Along the way it covers the economics of global poverty, climate change, and the business cycle. In short, if any of these topics have cropped up in a news story and caused you to wish you grasped the underlying basics, this book is for you. And while walking you through an entire introductory macroeconomics course, its cartoon characters - with cameos from Nobel Prize - winning economists such as Milton Friedman and Paul Krugman - take the sting out of the subject.
In recent years a new approach to macroeconomics has been developed that challenges conventional wisdom and uncovers how money 'works' in the modern economy. This book synthesises the key principles of Modern Money Theory, exploring macro accounting, currency regimes and exchange rates in both the USA and developing nations. Randall Wray addresses the pressing issues of how misunderstandings about the nature of money have caused the current global financial meltdown, and provides fresh ideas about how policymakers around the world should address the continued weaknesses in their economies.
