governments & markets | Moral Markets?

Towards the Wellbeing Economy: Implications for Public, Environmental and Financial Policy

by Sam de Muijnck Elisa Terragno Bogliaccini Jim Surie | 12 Apr 2021 | banking / finance sector, well-being / human flourishing, climate change & sustainability, critiquing / reinventing capitalism, governments & markets

There is a growing recognition that our economy has to be fundamentally. In the new paradigm that is starting to emerge, the well-being of people and the planet is put at the center of the economy and society is organized more democratically. In this way, it concerns both a shift ideas and in power. Besides exploring what this paradigm shift entails for the economy in general, our report takes a closer look at the following three fields: (1) the public sector, (2) environmental policy and (3) the financial sector.

The New Corporate Power Concentrations – Recording Live Cast Now Available

by Ilse Oosterlaken (Moral Markets) | 10 Nov 2020 | opinion & ideas, business ethics & CSR, governments & markets

The recording of our live cast on new corporate power concentrations (9 November) with authors Rana Foroohar and Jonathan Taplin is now available. The interview with Foroohar and the interview with Taplin, part of the episode, are also available as separate videos.

Is There Sufficient Room for Local Communities in a Globalized Economy?

by Ilse Oosterlaken (Moral Markets) | 12 Oct 2020 | governments & markets, community / civil society, opinion & ideas, globalisation / free trade

In a recent dialogue economists Raghuram Rajan and Paul Collier both defended their view that local communities should be re-empowered again. Yet Collier called it ‘dumb’ to reverse globalization. But can we have our cake and eat it, Ilse Oosterlaken wonders. Would it not be necessary to make economies more local before local communities can thrive again?

How the Welfare State Became the Neoliberal Order

by Public Books | 22 Sep 2020 | book reviews, historical perspective, neoliberalism, governments & markets

“Amy C. Offner’s Sorting Out the Mixed Economy remakes a popular understanding of how today’s neoliberalism was built. Offner shows that neoliberalism, rather than having been imposed by the Washington Consensus, was in fact first developed at a local level. The book shows American entrepreneurs, trained in big government as Lilienthal was, working together with Latin American businesses, banks, and landlords. It was when these new kinds of partnerships returned to the US—when private companies, treated as public concerns and sustained by government funds, began to take shape in the “developed” world—that neoliberalism truly began.”

Poverty as Injustice

by Project Syndicate ("The World's Opinion Page") | 28 Aug 2020 | inequality & justice, economic growth & GDP, governments & markets, opinion & ideas

“Across Western advanced economies, a widespread sense of malaise has given rise to a debate about what the state can and should do to ensure economic justice, particularly for those at the bottom of the income ladder. As always, the fundamental question is whether public policies would help or hamper growth and dynamism.”

Is a Job Guarantee the Answer?

by Inside Story | 24 Aug 2020 | governments & markets, opinion & ideas, communism, socialism & free markets

“It’s no wonder that people like the idea of a job guarantee, with the government as the employer of last resort, promising a job to anyone who wants one. It would avoid the catastrophic and well-documented social, economic, political and cultural costs of long-term unemployment on families, health, life expectancy and communities. And economists love that it’s an ‘automatic fiscal stabiliser’: it increases government spending when the economy is weak by funding the guaranteed jobs, and reduces it as the economy recovers. So, if the benefits of a job guarantee are so big, what’s the problem?”

Bailouts Pose an Economic, and Moral, Threat

by Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty | 14 Aug 2020 | communism, socialism & free markets, governments & markets

“Suddenly in these times of the COVID-19 crisis, everything is ‘free’: stimulus checks, benefits, paycheck loans, and medical care. The government can spend with reckless abandon. Trillions of dollars of debt are rubber-stamped with little fanfare. […] The result of a government-rescue culture is not the flowering of capitalism but very much the opposite. As Ruchir Sharma writes in the Wall Street Journal, ‘the irony is that the rising culture of government dependence is, in fact, a form of socialism – for the rich and powerful‘.”

A Protestant Perspective on Privatization and Subsidiarity

by Jordan Ballor | 17 Jul 2020 | opinion & ideas, religious perspectives, governments & markets

“There are diverse theories and accounts of subsidiarity, and they can often (although not always) be understood as complementary. In what follows, I will sketch a brief biblical and historical account of subsidiarity, with special attention to Protestant sources, before concluding with some thoughts about the significance of this teaching for political philosophy and public policy, particularly as it relates to the legitimate scope of government authority and action in areas including the provision of public goods, (de)regulation, and privatization.”

Can We Create All the Money We Need?

by The American Prospect ("an independent voice for liberal thought") | 14 Jul 2020 | book reviews, governments & markets

“Many mainstream economists have backed away from the view that deficit-financed public spending is necessarily risky or counterproductive. Space has also opened in public debate for non-mainstream thinkers who argue full-throatedly for a bigger, more active public sector, freed from imaginary financial constraints. The most visible of these today is the school called Modern Money Theory or Modern Monetary Theory (both terms are used), or MMT. […] Stephanie Kelton is among the most prominent of the dozen or so economists associated with MMT. Her new book The Deficit Myth is intended to bring MMT to a broader audience. […] The policy conclusions are mostly convincing; the route by which they’re arrived at is less so.”

Big Pharma Wants to Pocket the Profits From a COVID Treatment You Already Paid For

by Institute for New Economic Thinking (association of heterodox economists) | 7 Jul 2020 | health care, governments & markets, research updates

“Our data suggests that Gilead’s considerable accomplishment in securing authorization for use of remdesivir in treating COVID-19 represents only the culminating step in a cumulative process of innovation that involved the collective action of public, as well as private, enterprise. While Gilead will likely invest several billion dollars in bringing remdesivir to market, our data suggests that the public sector, in aggregate, has already invested much more. Patent law and the USPTO recognize the role played by Gilead in the discovery and development of remdesivir. There is, however, no mechanism for similarly recognizing the decades of foundational, basic research that made this discovery possible.”

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