Towards an economy worth believing in

If the recent financial news has awakened a concern in you for the way that we do finance, -and frankly it darn well should- then a good place to start your fact-finding and opinion gathering would be this page; it's chock-full of links to alternative perspectives.Towards an economy worth believing in | Ekklesia. It is worth remembering that the typical model that neo-liberals use to justify their no-holds barred vision of free markets (perfect competition) is actually one which is impossible to replicate in reality because the assumptions that drive the model are not possible to have in a real world situation. And to add to the woes, the indications are that even small differences in the actual conditions from the model lead to considerably sub-optimal solutions. It is for that reason that there is a growing concern for economics to become a real social science based on observation rather than on rarified models and high-level mathematics (okay a bit of a cartoon, but look up Post-Autistic Economics). And of course we should note that much of the rhetoric by neo-liberal ideologues is arguably a way of defending privilege: it acts in effect to bar the way to those who do not have to make a reasonable return on their efforts (hence the Trade Justice movement) and we only have to look at both the way that the practice is actually towards monopoly and not competition and the way that the reality of the need for regulation is quietly 'forgotten', selectively (see my earlier post).