Welcome to the Metaeconomics website, which is a continuation of the New Society strand in my website www.frankparkinson.co.uk.
The overarching purpose of both is to raise evolutionary awareness, and the particular purpose of this website is to show you the viewer that the global economic system is in terminal breakdown and argue the need for radical new economic thinking – in a word, the need for a new economic paradigm.
In 1993 I wrote a discussion paper “The End of Economics”, later reprinted in my 2002 book Jehovah and Hyperspace. One section of it was entitled ‘The Genie Escapes the Bottle’, the genie being the power of governments to print money at will once it had been detached from the backing of gold. Such a conclusion was widely regarded at the time as reactionary, but events are now proving its truth, for the financial catastrophe which started to unfold in summer 2007 can be traced back to the unlimited amounts of dollars created in the United States and the greed and deception in high places that has grown along with them.
The ensuing global recession and financial chaos has meant that this website has been created, in late autumn 2008, at the best and worst of times. Events are now moving so rapidly towards the collapse of the existing paradigm that viewers will be more sympathetic to the radical views it puts forward but, on the other hand, predictions made here could become history within weeks – or proved wrong. I can assure the viewer that although some of them may seem at first too apocalyptic to be credible, they follow from the figures and from geopolitical forces now in motion, not from any wish to shock.
The website could be entitled “Economics at the Crossroads”, and I offer on the last page a signpost to a sustainable future. The body of the site is made up of information, historical and current, to support my case. Some of the information is hardly more than simple economic logic, some is rather technical, and this has created a difficulty in identifying and writing for a target audience. While I hope that professional economists may find here something of value, the website has been designed largely for those who know less economics than I do.
The blindspot in all current theory is the way in which American economic policy, which affects the whole world, is driven by greed, deceit and fraud on a scale which most find incredible, despite the evidence in full view. Much of this website is devoted to looking at the evidence. I think it is true to say that no mainline economist takes it into consideration. Niall Ferguson’s television series The Ascent of Money, launched just before this website, takes the view that what is now going wrong in the global financial system is just the latest of many such historical corrections, and George Soros’s The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, published in May 2008, attributes the current breakdown to lack of psychological insight and poor regulation. If economic policy really is driven by fraud on a strategic scale and at governmental level, as I argue, to ignore or deliberately blind oneself to the fact must lead ultimately to an economics of delusion and, more to the point, much human misery.
Metaeconomics is, broadly speaking, the study of the foundations of economics, and differs from economics proper in that it examines elements that we take for granted, such as money, banks and corporations, with a view to radical change. Fritz Schumacher popularised the term metaeconomics by defining it as “economics as if people matter,” but since his time we have become aware of the need for an, “economics as if the planet matters.” There is ample material on both aspects available in books and on the Internet, from which this website has drawn, but my particular aim is to focus on economic developments which impact on human evolution. In this the website goes beyond economic reform movements such as The New Economics Foundation and Resurgence, and while it supports almost all their ecological goals, its aim is more radical, to show, firstly, that orthodox economic theory has lost touch with reality and, secondly, that the world’s major economic institutions are driven by greed and criminality on so great a scale that economic theory and practice is acting as a regressive evolutionary force – literally changing human nature. This may sound melodramatic, but the important thing is whether or not it is true, and one of the aims of this website’s aims is to provide evidence.
There are always hidden dimensions in economics – historical, spiritual, political, ecological – and we need to bring these to the surface before engaging in economic theory. It is a huge agenda, and two principles may be taken as a thread to guide the viewer through a mass of economic information. They are:
If you agree strongly with these two assertions, you will, I hope, find that this site says something important. In effect, they turn Marxism inside out, for while he too believed in economic evolution and predicted the collapse of capitalism which we are now living through, he was blind to the two assumptions that are central to the argument here presented: firstly, to rebuild society with a new economic system but the same selfish, ignorant and power-hungry individuals running it will also end in disaster and, secondly, the most significant truth about evolution is the unique ability of the human species to reinvent itself. This means that every individual has the potential for radical change, for self-transformation. It also means that we must decide what we, as a species, want to be, and awareness of that obligation changes almost everything in economic theory and practice.
Few economic commentators are clear-sighted enough to see that current trends are leading inexorably to an economic breakdown on a scale previously unknown. Two notable exceptions , on whose expert knowledge I have drawn, are David Walker, formerly US Comptroller General, who foresees an extended period of hyperinflation in America, and Robert Peston, the BBC economics correspondent, who asks the question: “What kind of capitalism will arise from the rubble?” I ask the same question on this website but approach it as an evolutionary philosopher and reach a different, but perhaps complementary, conclusion. Where Peston talks of “economic bomb shelters and mobile hospitals” as a short term response I see the long term answer in “lifeboat communities.”
The website was launched in December 2008, when the effects of the so-called “credit crunch” were starting to become apparent. It was almost alone at the time in predicting hyperinflation, one notable exception being David Walker, the former US Comptroller General, on whose data and opinion I placed reliance, but the conclusion came entirely from the logic of the figures. Now, four months on, the word “hyperinflation” is heard occasionally among professional economists and commentators, but usually as a rather speculative hypothesis, whereas the evidence from the figures has become overwhelming. President Obama has committed the American government to print almost two trillion dollars to stimulate an economy which, to use common parlance, has fallen off a cliff. Gordon Brown has done the same in Britain, only relatively moreso, and other governments are following suit. The inflationary consequences of this desperate move to “save the system” are spelled out in the section “Hyperinflation: A Lesson from History” on the page headed The Endgame. That the American and British economies, and many others, are heading inexorably to this goal is obscured by the present deflationary effects of the bursting credit bubble, and the reassuring effects of the technical term “quantitative easing,” which means only “printing more money.”
Although I am a cultural historian and philosopher of evolution, not a professional financial adviser, it would be remiss not to point out that if, and when, present monetary excess creates hyperinflation, savings and pensions will be wiped out. The prudent will not rely on the government to protect their interests. Government is part of the problem, not the answer.
Apart from a few writers on the economic fringe, the website was also alone, so far as I know, in predicting a revolution to come in banking and monetary theory. The banking revolution is now well started, with the Federal Reserve being given two trillion dollars of taxpayers’ money (future taxpayers, that is) and the chairman, Ben Bernanke, point blank refusing to tell Congress how it was going to be spent (March 3, 2009) as reported by Reuters. In effect, the Fed, which is a private bank, has taken over the US government in what is, quite literally, a coup d’ état. In the words of Chris Powell, Secretary of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, “any government that can disburse $2 trillion secretly and without any accountability, is not a democratic government. It is government of, by and for the bankers.” (Dec. 12, 2008, GATA Dispatch). This brief quotation give at least some idea of the momentous issues now at stake. Governments are not flooding the markets with liquidity, to get the economy moving again, but giving vast amounts of taxpayers’ money to banks. They are destroying the livelihoods of nations in order to save the banking system. Economic theory and practice have taken us to a world which is at once Alice in Wonderland and Kafkaesque. The construction of a new kind of economics is no longer an option, but a necessity.
The website will be updated in six months, by which time, it is hoped the situation may be clearer