Who’s World are We Co-Creating

Increasingly only economics rules the world. As a mathematician I find these words of Milton Keynes about as scary as any sentence I have ever read. They imply, for example, that hopes and dreams we invest in democracy - or each joyful generation’s hopeful pop songs like John Lennon’s Imagine - are actually dictated by how peoples, places and society sit within economics’ global scheme of things.

Daring to understand the scheme of things may also unearth such worldwide discoveries as that of Nobel Peace Laureate  Muhammad Yunus :  systemic poverty, into which about a quarter of children are born into round the world, is a consequence spun by 250 years of  man-made economics and woeful media. The mathematician and investigative reporter in me, passed on through several generations of my family tree,  recommends that 21^st C humanity (worthy of our species’ sustainability) cannot afford to lurk now that knowledge networks offer the connectivity to openly linkin all communities to life critical information flows. After 26 years of tracking what choice of global economic rules, my gut feels that The Time is Now for people empowerment if this is ever to be http://www.normanmacrae.com/netfuture.html  www.daringnation.com

Micro’s Sustainability Rising Versus Macro’s Top-Down

I learnt from the lifetime journalism of The Economist’s unacknowledged giant (aka dad Norman Macrae): Yes Entrepreneurial Revolutionaries Can progress the human lot by wielding an antidote to those who would confine people to economics’ black boxes whilst often themselves being ignorant of the future history consequences they are compounding. Always ask of an economic frame – or decision made in the name of economics- what compound good it does for the next generation. Assume advocacy of any economics proposition is perpetrated by those guilty of not systemically comprehending what future exponential they are developing unless they are prepared to openly debate their case.

Unless systems –rules, communications and investments - are measurable to compounding progress for future generations, economics will achieve the opposite of what the word implies – bubbling up only to cause costly collapses which often trap communities most disconnected from where the speculative power began to spin its badwill.

If Adam Smith’s work around the 1750s is accepted as the source of modern day debates on how economics works, then the scary problem of economics was not of his making, nor of most of his social action disciples through to the early 20^th century.  But what happened next was a century of economic fixes and frames sponsored by the big get bigger in North Western hemispheres’ developed nations increasingly drowned the Hippocractic oaths of economists and all the rule-making professions which society gives semi-monopoly rights to command over peoples lives. Ironically we the peoples are too trusting in the assumption that true and fair is organic to each such profession’s behaviours and the overall multidisciplinary governance that comes from interfacing all professionals. This problem is then exacerbated wherever academia abstractly thinks separated disciplinary excellence is all that matters.  The vain desire to over-generalise make such ivory towers ever more distant from communities and cultures  - global professions accidentally become the enemy of local grounding and youthful empowerment that is called for wherever life’s deepest needs require economically customised solutions. This is notable in such community-defining arenas as banking, healthcare, education, clean energy including waters and foods.

Worse 20^th C media - wherever it came about by giving away part of the commons so that governments can swell their short-term coffers and popularity – reinforces a double-loop for destroying trust and purposeful leadership. This value destruction is spun in tandem by both the rule-making and communications professions which increase their own costs year on year at the expense of sustainability of peoples’ and communities’ futures.  

THE PURPOSE OF ECONOMICS

For sure, the timelines of the preceding paragraphs are an over-simplification but in tracking the purpose of the majority of current economists, they provide a rough guide to the pressures that have unproductively conditioned the last quarter of a millennium of social and business evolution.   

Adam Smith’s primary motivation in inventing the reasoning of economics was to help prevent other nations of people falling victim to the fate of his beloved Scotland . In an international financial scam round 1700, Scottish people lost half of all their wealth. The result was the hostile takeover by England euphemistically branded United Kingdom . Scotland was in effect partitioned as an early colony of England ’s empire. By 1850 over half of Scots had emigrated making Scots one of the early Diaspora nations with more worldwide peoples than dwellers on Scottish land. The Scottish people prior to 1700 had invested more in education, family and community development than just about anywhere in Europe . The paradox of the demise of a nation that cared so much about communities geared to investing in its next generation is the one I keep in mind in construing every text from Adam Smith’s golden pen. There is continuity in his text and the USA 1776 Declaration of Independence’s productivity meanings of the words happy and free. Similarly we can interpret the albeit more bloody revolution of Scotland ’s auld alliance partners the French. Their transfer of assets back to the people guillotined royalty who had been monopolising productive resources. This is between-take that the coining of the French word entrepreneur celebrates in society’s intended agency of liberte egalite fraternite.

These undercurrents of economics flow through a quarter of a millennium first rising as a joyful science and then falling as a dismal science. This is echoed in the moral sentiments of the centenary biography of The Economist in 1943. Its first hundred years of journalizing had mainly lived up to its Scottish founder James Wilson’s purpose –originally a social business tool that helped him as a Member of Parliament throw out of up to 90% of fellow MPs who had become agents of big vested interests (eg the corn laws) not representatives of peoples.