Stable Economy Quotes

They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods. However vast the distances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of complex organicism.

No,” said a third student. “Novartis is a public company. It’s not the boss or the board who decides. It’s the shareholders. If the board changes its priorities the shareholders will just elect a new board.” “That’s right,” I said. “It’s the shareholders who want this company to spend their money on researching rich people’s illnesses. That’s how they get a good return on their shares.” So there’s nothing wrong with the employees, the boss, or the board, then. “Now, the question is”—I looked at the student who had first suggested the face punching—“who owns the shares in these big pharmaceutical companies?” “Well, it’s the rich.” He shrugged. “No. It’s actually interesting because pharmaceutical shares are very stable. When the stock market goes up and down, or oil prices go up and down, pharma shares keep giving a pretty steady return. Many other kinds of companies’ shares follow the economy—they do better or worse as people go on spending sprees or cut back—but the cancer patients always need treatment. So who owns the shares in these stable companies?” My young audience looked back at me, their faces like one big question mark. “It’s retirement funds.” Silence. “So maybe I don’t have to do any punching, because I will not meet the shareholders. But you will. This weekend, go visit your grandma and punch her in the face. If you feel you need someone to blame and punish, it’s the seniors and their greedy need for stable stocks.

MEASURED IN THE BLOOD spilt in leadership challenges or the bile spewed daily in parliament, the developed world’s most stable economy has produced the most volatile and petty politics.

Tens of millions of Americans were angry, feeling forgotten by bureaucrats in Washington, derided by liberal elites, and humiliated by a global economy that had sped ahead of their skills and consigned their children to be the first American generation to fare less well than their parents. Trump crowned himself their champion. He promised them he would “make America great again,” a brilliant, one-size-fits-all mantra through which this segment of the country could channel their frustrations. They

Only a visionary leadership that can motivate "the better angels of our nature," as Lincoln said, and activate possibilities for a freer, more efficient, and stable America -- only that leadership deserves cultivation and support. / This new leadership must be grounded in grassroots organizing that highlights democratic accountability. Whoever our leaders will be as we approach the twenty-first century, their challenge will be to help Americans determine whether a genuine multiracial democracy can be created and sustained in an era of global economy and a moment of xenophobic frenzy.

Naomi Klein said recently we are going to have to choose between capitalism and climate change. Well, climate change is Mother Nature, or Goddess. The Great She is challenging us to do what's right for the most of us, for the sake of humanity and the planet. Climate change could be the deciding factor that uplifts humanity, creates more stable economies and more jobs and makes us live Her ideals of sharing, caring, peace, justice and equality. We have an incredible opportunity here to use climate change to take power away from the 1 percent and really take care of the needs of the 99 percent. It's really do or die.

The only solution was to tie the hands of macroeconomic policy makers.7 Instead of giving the Federal Reserve discretion to trade lower unemployment for higher inflation, the central bank should be forced to accept the fact that a certain amount of unemployment was necessary to keep inflation stable. As we will see, MMT contests this framework.

constant marking down of her performance is wildly at odds with the reality of the minority government. Despite the government’s wafer-thin margin, the parliament is remarkably stable; but it’s depicted as though we are living through the last days of Rome. Gillard is implementing reforms and the parliament has passed a record amount of legislation—around 180 bills to date—but the press talks endlessly of a government close to collapse. Australia is economically robust compared to faltering international economies, but you’d be forgiven for thinking the Australian economy is on the point of disintegration. The media’s primary focus is on personalities and politics, not policies or the running of the country.

Even in recent times, the empirical evidence does not support the claim that trade liberalization or incentive neutrality leads to faster growth. It is true that higher manufacturing growth rates have been typically associated with higher export growth rates (mostly in countries where export and import shares to GDP grew), but there is no statistical relation between either of these growth rates or degree of trade restrictions. Rather, almost all of successful export-oriented growth has come with selective trade and industrialization policies. In this regard, stable exchange rates and national price levels seem to be considerably more important than import policy in producing successful export-oriented growth

What the Soviet émigrés brought with them is symptomatic of what Israeli venture capitalist Erel Margalit believes can be found in a number of dynamic economies. “Ask yourself, why is it happening here?” he said of the Israeli tech boom. We were sitting in a trendy Jerusalem restaurant he owns, next to a complex he built that houses his venture fund and a stable of start-ups. “Why is it happening on the East Coast or the West Coast of the United States? A lot of it has to do with immigrant societies. In France, if you are from a very established family, and you work in an established pharmaceutical company, for example, and you have a big office and perks and a secretary and all that, would you get up and leave and risk everything to create something new? You wouldn’t. You’re too comfortable. But if you’re an immigrant in a new place, and you’re poor,” Margalit continued, “or you were once rich and your family was stripped of its wealth—then you have drive. You don’t see what you’ve got to lose; you see what you could win. That’s the attitude we have here—across the entire population.

The economy — and the need to keep it strong and growing — has somehow become the most important aspect of modern life. Nothing else is allowed to rank higher. The economy is suffering; the economy is improving; the economy is stable or unstable — you’d think it was a patient on life support in an intensive-care unit from the way we anxiously await the next pronouncement on its health. But what we call the economy is nothing more than people producing, consuming and exchanging things and services.

If democratic power-sharing is a potent form of freedom, accepting an election loss may be the ultimate demonstration of how free you want to be. History is littered with fascist leaders who have rigged elections and tortured or killed critics, but their regimes are remarkably short-lived - especially considering the obsession these men usually have with holding power. Many wind up dead or in prison, and almost none leave behind stable regime. Western democracies, on the other hand, are amont the most enduring and prosperous political systems in history. They seem to be able to transfer power almost indefinitely, which further bolsters their economies and cements their alliances.

To sum up, the truth of post-1945 globalization is almost the polar opposite of the official history. During the period of controlled globalization underpinned by nationalistic policies between the 1950s and the 1970s, the world economy, expecially in the developing world, was growing faster, was more stable and had more equitable income distribution than in the past two and a half decades of rapid and uncontrolled neo-liberal globalization. Nevertheless, this period is protrayed in the official history as a one of unmitigated disaster of nationalistic policies, especially in developing countries. This distortion of the historical record is peddled in order to mask the failure of neo-liberal policies.

Tech helped to create this economy, and tech is what keeps it stable by giving us the greatest bread and circuses of all time. Casino owners discovered in the late 1980s that people who gambled on screens became addicted three to four times faster than those who gambled at tables. The rest of America had learned that lesson by 1992, when a third of homes had Nintendo systems. Men without jobs have video games the way men without girlfriends have pornography, and growing numbers of men are finding the substitute good enough to be going on with, declining to pursue either permanent employment or marriage. The historian David Courtwright calls this “limbic capitalism,” the redirection of America’s productive energies into inducing and servicing addictions.

Hillary trotted out her favorite image of a three-legged stool that upholds stable societies: “a responsive, accountable government; an energetic, effective private sector economy; and then civil society, which represents everything else that happens in the space between the government and the economy, that holds the values, that represents the aspirations.” This “stool” is actually the image of the bland governance of a corporate society: a government responsive to the demands of finance capital, a capitalist economy, and private, unelected and well-funded organizations that will determine “our values”. Note what is missing: a vigorous political life, scrupulously independent media, and an education system that prepares intellectually alert and critical citizens.

The larger point is that as society and the economy go through this shift there will not only be less economic opportunity to fulfill your role as “father, protector, provider, and bread winner,” there will be less appreciation for such roles.  Therefore, to make sure you have purpose and agency in life, you need to find hobbies and interests that are not dependent on economic circumstances and cannot be supplanted by government intervention.   Fun – Because of the Darwinistic programming you have, many men will approach life from the angle of attaining financial security first, and THEN relaxing and enjoying life.  You will get everything in order, get your degree, get your career, pay off your debts, pay off your house, and then, once financially stable, finally permit yourself to enjoy life.  There is just one minor problem with that approach:   Life doesn’t work that way.   Not

In reality, states never repay their debt. They roll it over, meaning they defer repayment endlessly, paying only the interest on the loans. As long as they can keep doing this, they remain solvent. It helps to think of public debt as a hole in the ground next to a mountain representing the nation’s total income. Day by day the hole gets steadily deeper as interest accrues on the debt, even if the state does not borrow more. But during the good times, as the economy grows, the income mountain is steadily getting taller. As long as the mountain rises faster than the debt hole deepens, the extra income added to the mountain’s summit can be shovelled into the adjacent hole, keeping its depth stable and the state solvent. Insolvency beckons when the economy stops growing or starts to contract: recession then eats into a country’s income mountain, doing nothing to slow the pace at which the debt hole continues to grow.

It is possible to be too stable. No Outer World has colonized a new planet in two and a half centuries.. are lives too long to risk and too comfortable to upset. “I don’t know about that, Dr. Fastolfe. You’ve come to Earth. You risk disease.” “Yes, I do. There are some of us, Mr. Baley, who feel that the future of the human race is even worth the possible loss of an extended lifetime. Too few of us, I am sorry to say.” “In trying to introduce robots here on Earth, we’re doing our best to upset the balance of your City economy.” “You mean you’re creating a growing group of displaced and declassified men on purpose?” “Not out of cruelty or callousness, believe me. A group of displaced men, as you call them, are what we need to serve as a nucleus for colonization. Your ancient America was discovered by ships fitted out with men from the prisons. Don’t you see that the City’s womb has failed the displaced man. He has nothing to lose and worlds to gain by leaving Earth.

Sri Lankan Socioeconomics 101 If people stopped chasing after power and connections and realized that they have all the power they need within themselves, to create whatever they want with their lives: there will be more friendships than contacts, less gold-diggers, more marriages based on love, better family lives, stable and enriched childhoods leading to a well endowed, disciplined and better educated workforce. There will be loyalty and ingenuity and better standards of education. Abundance of well educated individuals => pressure to innovate =>increased entrepreneurship, improved economy.High functioning economy attracting more foreign capital => export surplus. Educated workforce + increased involvement in international business => pressure to improve foreign allies and foreign policy => pressure to improve transparency => decrease in corruption. So stop sitting around complaining about corruption and (with all due respect,) get off your ass and do something for yourself. Stop chasing after other people's power and chase after your own dreams and you will have all the power you need.

Continuous growth and the consequent ever-increasing acceleration of the pace of life have profound consequences for the entire planet and, in particular, for cities, socioeconomic life, and the process of global urbanization. Until recent times, the time between major innovations far exceeded the productive life span of a human being. Even in my own lifetime it was unconsciously assumed that one would continue working in the same occupation using the same expertise throughout one’s life. This is no longer true; a typical human being now lives significantly longer than the time between major innovations, especially in developing and developed countries. Nowadays young people entering the workforce can expect to see several major changes during their lifetime that will very likely disrupt the continuity of their careers. This increasingly rapid rate of change induces serious stress on all facets of urban life. This is surely not sustainable, and, if nothing changes, we are heading for a major crash and a potential collapse of the entire socioeconomic fabric. The challenges are clear: Can we return to an analog of a more “ecological” phase from which we evolved and be satisfied with some version of sublinear scaling and its attendant natural limiting, or no-growth, stable configuration? Is this even possible?

In the meantime Chancellor Schleicher went about—with an optimism that was myopic, to say the least—trying to establish a stable government. On December 15 he made a fireside broadcast to the nation begging his listeners to forget that he was a general and assuring them that he was a supporter “neither of capitalism nor of socialism” and that to him “concepts such as private economy or planned economy have lost their terrors.” His principal task, he said, was to provide work for the unemployed and get the country back on its economic feet. There would be no tax increase, no more wage cuts. In fact, he was canceling the last cut in wages and relief which Papen had made. Furthermore, he was ending the agricultural quotas which Papen had established for the benefit of the large landowners and instead was launching a scheme to take 800,000 acres from the bankrupt Junker estates in the East and give them to 25,000 peasant families. Also prices of such essentials as coal and meat would be kept down by rigid control. This was a bid for the support of the very masses which he had hitherto opposed or disregarded, and Schleicher followed it up with conversations with the trade unions, to whose leaders he gave the impression that he envisaged a future in which organized labor and the Army would be twin pillars of the nation. But labor was not to be taken in by a man whom it profoundly mistrusted, and it declined its co-operation. The industrialists and the big landowners, on the other hand, rose up in arms against the new Chancellor’s program, which they clamored was nothing less than Bolshevism. The businessmen were aghast at Schleicher’s sudden friendliness to the unions. The owners of large estates were infuriated at his reduction of agricultural protection and livid at the prospect of his breaking up the bankrupt estates in the East. On

...the centrality of competitiveness as the key to growth is a recurrent EU motif. Two decades of EC directives on increasing competition in every area, from telecommunications to power generation to collateralizing wholesale funding markets for banks, all bear the same ordoliberal imprint. Similarly, the consistent focus on the periphery states’ loss of competitiveness and the need for deep wage and cost reductions therein, while the role of surplus countries in generating the crisis is utterly ignored, speaks to a deeply ordoliberal understanding of economic management. Savers, after all, cannot be sinners. Similarly, the most recent German innovation of a constitutional debt brake (Schuldenbremse) for all EU countries regardless of their business cycles or structural positions, coupled with a new rules-based fiscal treaty as the solution to the crisis, is simply an ever-tighter ordo by another name. If states have broken the rules, the only possible policy is a diet of strict austerity to bring them back into conformity with the rules, plus automatic sanctions for those who cannot stay within the rules. There are no fallacies of composition, only good and bad policies. And since states, from an ordoliberal viewpoint, cannot be relied upon to provide the necessary austerity because they are prone to capture, we must have rules and an independent monetary authority to ensure that states conform to the ordo imperative; hence, the ECB. Then, and only then, will growth return. In the case of Greece and Italy in 2011, if that meant deposing a few democratically elected governments, then so be it. The most remarkable thing about this ordoliberalization of Europe is how it replicates the same error often attributed to the Anglo-American economies: the insistence that all developing states follow their liberal instruction sheets to get rich, the so-called Washington Consensus approach to development that we shall discuss shortly. The basic objection made by late-developing states, such as the countries of East Asia, to the Washington Consensus/Anglo-American idea “liberalize and then growth follows” was twofold. First, this understanding mistakes the outcomes of growth, stable public finances, low inflation, cost competitiveness, and so on, for the causes of growth. Second, the liberal path to growth only makes sense if you are an early developer, since you have no competitors—pace the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century and the United States in the nineteenth century. Yet in the contemporary world, development is almost always state led.

Obama wasn’t wrong to criticize Bush’s policies, but he was wrong to put the blame on “shred[ding] regulations.” More important, Obama didn’t mention the Fed’s culpability in the crisis, nor the way government guarantees of banks—explicit and implicit—drove banks to engage in the massively risky behavior that created the crisis. Of course, Obama wasn’t in a position to critique government guarantees of banks—he was supporting Bush’s TARP. I pick on Obama only as one example of the conventional wisdom that blames all economic problems on insufficient regulation. Hundreds of commentators and politicians said the free market was the cause, and that government would be the solution. The problem with our banking system has not been too little regulation, but too much. To curb excessive risk taking, we do need more “adult supervision,” as Obama put it, but that supervision should come not from government officials, but from creditors and customers. So, the big-government types are correct that our financial system is dysfunctional, and that this dysfunction is the key destabilizing factor in our economy. But the solution isn’t more regulation, or even “smarter regulation.” To fix our financial sector and make our economy more stable, we need something far more drastic: an actual free market. Government needs to stop telling banks what to do and stop bailing them out when they fail. No regulator will ever be as effective as the threat of failure.

The new GST: A halfway house In spite of all the favourable features of the GST, it introduces the anomaly of having an origin-based tax on interstate trade he proposed GST would be a single levy. 1141 words From a roadblock during the UPA regime, the incessant efforts of the BJP government have finally paved way for the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST). This would, no doubt, be a major reform in the existing indirect tax system of the country. With a view to introducing the GST, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley has introduced the Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill 2014 in Parliament. The new tax would be implemented from April 1, 2016. Both the government and the taxpayers will have enough time to understand the implications of the new tax and its administrative nuances. Unlike the 119th Amendment Bill, which lapsed with the dissolution of the previous Lok Sabha, the new Bill will hopefully see the light of the day as it takes into account the objections of the state governments regarding buoyancy of the tax and the autonomy of the states. It proposes setting up of the GST Council, which will be a joint forum of the Centre and the states. This council would function under the chairmanship of the Union finance minister with all the state finance ministers as its members. It will make recommendations to the Union and the states on the taxes, cesses and surcharges levied by the Union, the states and the local bodies, which may be subsumed in the GST; the rates including floor rates with bands of goods and services tax; any special rate or rates for a specified period to raise additional resources during any natural calamity or disaster etc. However, all the recommendations will have to be supported by not less than three-fourth of the weighted votes—the Centre having one-third votes and the states having two-third votes. Thus, no change can be implemented without the consent of both the Centre and the states. The proposed GST would be a single levy. It would aim at creating an integrated national market for goods and services by replacing the plethora of indirect taxes levied by the Centre and the states. While central taxes to be subsumed include central excise duty (CenVAT), additional excise duties, service tax, additional customs duty (CVD) and special additional duty of customs (SAD), the state taxes that fall in this category include VAT/sales tax, entertainment tax, octroi, entry tax, purchase tax and luxury tax. Therefore, all taxes on goods and services, except alcoholic liquor for human consumption, will be brought under the purview of the GST. Irrespective of whether we currently levy GST on these items or not, it is important to bring these items under the Constitution Amendment Bill because the exclusion of these items from the GST does not provide any flexibility to levy GST on these items in the future. Any change in the future would then require another Constitutional Amendment. From a futuristic approach, it is prudent not to confine the scope of the tax under the bindings of the Constitution. The Constitution should demarcate the broad areas of taxing powers as has been the case with sales tax and Union excise duty in the past. Currently, the rationale of exclusion of these commodities from the purview of the GST is solely based on revenue considerations. No other considerations of tax policy or tax administration have gone into excluding petroleum products from the purview of the GST. However, the long-term perspective of a rational tax policy for the GST shows that, at present, these taxes constitute more than half of the retail prices of motor fuel. In a scenario where motor fuel prices are deregulated, the taxation policy would have to be flexible and linked to the global crude oil prices to ensure that prices are held stable and less pressure exerted on the economy during the increasing price trends. The trend of taxation of motor fuel all over the world suggests that these items

Hans Kundnani, research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations and once a journalist in Berlin, seeks to relate Germany’s past to its recent behaviour in the eurozone crisis. He argues that history is in danger of repeating itself — not on the battlefield, but in the economy. His thesis is that today’s European Union is seeing a rerun of “the German question” that emerged after the founding of the Prussian empire. This time, Germany is not a military power but an economic one. Its economy is too dominant to preserve a stable balance with its eurozone and EU partners, yet too weak to enforce economic stability from above, he says. He calls it a “geo-economic semi-hegemon”, with the potential to cause a bitter and possibly disastrous conflict with its closest partners. Kundnani’s thesis is tempting. He believes that even today, Germans still feel they are victims — in the eurozone, suffering from the spendthrift behaviour of the southerners. A fear of Germany’s half-hearted hegemony is certainly shared in countries such as France, Italy and Greece. But this is not how Germans see themselves. The Germany that grew out of Stunde Null — the “zero hour” of 1945 — is a very different place from the insecure empire inaugurated by the Prussian Kaiser. The second world war, that greatest of self-inflicted national disasters, left the country divided and economically devastated. It has been overcome but not forgotten.

The Chinese renminbi was fixed against the dollar from July of 2005 until June 2009. With a fixed exchange rate, a currency’s value is matched to the value of another single currency or to a basket of other currencies. So when a country pegs its currency to the dollar, the value of the currency rises and falls with the dollar. This action helped China survive the global financial crisis. But China removed the dollar peg after the global financial crisis ended last year. Meanwhile, Japan has also seen the value of the yen grow stronger. With the U.S. economy continuing to lag and growing fiscal uncertainty in European countries, the yen has continued to gain strength because it was the only currency that was stable. So countries like China expanded their purchases of the yen, resulting in the yen’s appreciation. As the yen continued to rise against the dollar, the Japanese government intervened in the currency market in September for the first time since March 2004. This is not the first global currency war the world has seen. In 1985, the finance ministers of West Germany, France, the U.S., Japan and the UK gathered at the Plaza Hotel in New York to sign the Plaza Accord. Under the deal, the countries agreed to bring down the U.S. dollar exchange rate in relation to the Japanese yen and German mark. As the recent currency war continues to spread around the globe, some countries are now saying that there is a need for a new Plaza Accord to stabilize the world economy and the global financial market.

the existing market economy has no “stable” or “neutral” setting: there is only growth or contraction.

This is the final bubble. The US government now has to keep printing money to keep things stable. Maybe when the economy booms again they can hold off—but that might be a while.

Nor did the idea of a central government seem compatible with sentiment. After all, the states had histories that went back two centuries, and each state had its distinctive character and qualities that its citizens were loath to see diminished. Franklin, back in the 1750s and 1760s, when he had been deputy postmaster general, had traveled up and down the coast on visits of inspection and seen the tremendous variety of the colonies. Even a brief catalogue of them suggests some of the proud distinctiveness they cherished. Massachusetts, settled by Puritans, was populated by middle-class farmers, tradesmen, and artisans, without extremes of wealth and poverty. Its economy was stable (save for the temporary postwar dislocations that led to Shays’ Rebellion). Massachusetts was

As stable as it may seem on the surface to some, the current configuration of the global economy and the financial system is getting harder to maintain. Below the façade of the unusual calm of the last few years, interrupted by relatively few bouts of instability since 2008–09, tensions are rising and the effectiveness of central banks is coming under stress, so much so as to raise serious questions about the durability of the current path that the global economy is on.

From 1792 until 1928, federal government spending remained relatively stable at about two-and-a-half percent of all spending in the economy. But when Franklin Roosevelt became President in the early 1930s, the data reveal a fundamental change in the size and scope of government. Government spending, which had remained steady for more than 130 years, began to grow from less than 3 percent of the economy prior to 1928, to 10 percent in the 1930s, to 17 percent in the 1950s, then to 22 percent today.

In America, democracy had prevailed, and the nation congratulated itself on the strength and durability of its system. Large-scale mass production was creating a large and stable middle class that was the bulwark of democracy. Here, finally, was the society J. A. Hobson had wished for a half century before, in which prosperity was so widely shared that the abundant fruits of mass production could find their market at home. Americans took it as their patriotic duty to consume. According to the chairman of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers, the “ultimate purpose” of the American economy was “to produce more consumer goods.

So, the postindustrial economy opened a new chasm between those with good jobs in services, which were stable, high paying, and rewarding, and those with bad jobs, which were fleeting, low paying, and unsatisfying

There is striking evidence—now gathered and acknowledged by the OECD and IMF—that economies with more equal distributions of income and wealth have stronger and more stable economic growth than those with greater inequality.56 Redistributive policies which reduce inequality are found to have in general a positive impact on growth.57

1. The chief root of monetary troubles is the scientific authority the Keynesians gave the superstition that increasing the quantity of money can ensure prosperity and full employment. 2. The superstition was fought successfully by economists for two centuries of stable prices during the age of modern industrialism and the gold standard. 3. Before then inflation largely dominated history. 4. Keynes’s (macro-economic) error was to suppose that labour demand and supply can be equated (and unemployment avoided) by managing total demand. Employment depends on demand in each sector of the economy. Managing total demand by expanding money supply created only temporary and therefore unstable employment. 5. A “lost generation” of economists who have learned nothing else continues to offer the quack “full employment” remedy and to win short-term popularity for it. 6. No government, national or international, that wants to remain in office can be expected to limit the quantity of money better than a gold standard or any other (semi-) automatic system because in practice it succumbs to sectional pressures for additional cheap money and expenditure. 7. The gold standard, balanced budgets, fixed exchanges, enabled governments to resist sectional importunities. The removal of these “shackles” has enabled governments to act more irresponsibly. 8. The only hope for stable money and resistance to inflation is to protect money from politics by removing the power of government to require its citizens to use its money as the only legal tender. 9. Government would then not inflate its supply, because it would be forsaken for other currencies. 10. Inflation can therefore be stopped by introducing competition in currency. The notion that it is a proper function of government to issue the national currency is false. Citizens should be free to use and refuse any currencies they wish: politicians would then have to limit their quantities. Then inflation would be avoided.

Tens of millions of Americans were angry, feeling forgotten by bureaucrats in Washington, derided by liberal elites, and humiliated by a global economy that had sped ahead of their skills and consigned their children to be the first American generation to fare less well than their parents. Trump crowned himself their champion. He promised them he would “make America great again,” a brilliant, one-size-fits-all mantra through which this segment of the country could channel their frustrations. They envisioned an America in which regulations didn’t strangle the family business, taxes weren’t so onerous, and good-paying jobs were plentiful and secure. Some of them also harked back to the 1950s, envisioning a simpler, halcyon America in which white male patriarchs ruled the roost, decorous women kept home and hearth, and minorities were silent or subservient.

Many, but by no means all of us, have been shielded until now from the worst effects of his pathologies by a stable economy and a lack of serious crises. But the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression, deepening social divides along political lines thanks to Donald’s penchant for division, and devastating uncertainty about our country’s future have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage. Doing so would require courage, strength of character, deference to experts, and the confidence to take responsibility and to course correct after admitting mistakes. His ability to control unfavorable situations by lying, spinning, and obfuscating has diminished to the point of impotence in the midst of the tragedies we are currently facing. His egregious and arguably intentional mishandling of the current catastrophe has led to a level of pushback and scrutiny that he’s never experienced before, increasing his belligerence and need for petty revenge as he withholds vital funding, personal protective equipment, and ventilators that your tax dollars have paid for from states whose governors don’t kiss his ass sufficiently.

Many, but by no means all of us, have been shielded until now from the worst effects of his pathologies by a stable economy and a lack of serious crises. But the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression, deepening social divides along political lines thanks to Donald’s penchant for division, and devastating uncertainty about our country’s future have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage. Doing so would require courage, strength of character, deference to experts, and the confidence to take responsibility and to course correct after admitting mistakes.

Rising S, a Texas-based company, does build bare-bones underground shelters for that crowd. But since 2012, Lynch has been catering to a different group—wealthy citizens who want all the comforts and amenities of home if and when catastrophe strikes. “We’ve revolutionized the bomb shelter,” he told me. “Everybody was building cold and clammy structures, with no color, no nothing, just a storm shelter with some shelves. You could drive to work in a Kia but what if you want a Mercedes and can afford it? Our clients are like that.” Lynch’s upscale clients share the view that society is splintering and fear the consequences for the privileged in a world where the collective trust in public institutions has weakened. It’s a dark take on American society, but one that keeps Rising S’s nearly 100,000-square-foot factory humming with new orders. “We are one unjustified police shooting away from having riots across the United States,” Lynch said. “A lot of people are worried about war, social and civil unrest.” So far, that’s meant building an underground swimming pool for one client, while another ordered a hidden stable to keep his valuable stud horses safe.

central bank should be forced to accept the fact that a certain amount of unemployment was necessary to keep inflation stable. As we will see, MMT contests this framework.

From a strictly investment perspective, commercial real estate has several benefits over residential real estate: • More stable cash flow • Longer leases (usually five to ten years) • More opportunity for cash flow (more rental units than even a multi-family home) • Economies of scale (lower per-unit costs, like buying in bulk)

Africa, I believe, is embarking upon an era of sharp divergences in which China will play a huge role in specific national outcomes—for better and for worse, perhaps even dramatically, depending on the country. Places endowed with stable governments, with elites that are accountable and responsive to the needs of their fellow citizens, and with relatively healthy institutions, will put themselves in a position to thrive on the strength of robust Chinese demand for their exports and fast-growing investment from China and from a range of other emerging economic powers, including Brazil, Turkey, India, and Vietnam. Inevitably, most of these African countries will be democracies. Other nations, whether venal dictatorships, states rendered dysfunctional by war, and even some fragile democracies—places where institutions remain too weak or corrupted—will sell off their mineral resources to China and other bidders, and squander what is in effect a one-time chance to convert underground riches into aboveground wealth by investing in their own citizens and creating new kinds of economic activity beyond today’s simple extraction. The proposition at work here couldn’t be more straightforward. The timeline for resource depletion in many African countries is running in tandem with the timeline for the continent’s unprecedented demographic explosion. At current rates, in the next forty years, most African states will have twice the number of people they count now. By that same time, their presently known reserves of minerals like iron, bauxite, copper, cobalt, uranium, gold, and more, will be largely depleted. Those who have diversified their economies and invested in their citizens, particularly in education and health, will have a shot at prosperity. Those that haven’t, stand to become hellish places, barely viable, if viable at all.

There’s never going to be an economy rich enough or a government program strong enough to compensate for the lack of a stable family and the absence of self-discipline.

President Vladimir Putin has evolved a “hybrid foreign policy, a strategy that mixes normal diplomacy, military force, economic corruption and a high-tech information war.” Indeed, on any given day, the United States has found itself dealing with everything from cyberattacks by Russian intelligence hackers on the computer systems of the U.S. Democratic Party, to disinformation about what Russian troops, dressed in civilian clothes, are doing in Eastern Ukraine, to Russian attempts to take down the Facebook pages of widows of its soldiers killed in Ukraine when they mourn their husbands’ deaths, to hot money flows into Western politics or media from Russian oligarchs connected to the Kremlin. In short, Russia is taking full advantage of the age of accelerating flows to confront the United States along a much wider attack surface. While it lives in the World of Order, the Russian government under Putin doesn’t mind fomenting a little disorder—indeed, when you are a petro-state, a little disorder is welcome because it keeps the world on edge and therefore oil prices high. China is a much more status quo power. It needs a healthy U.S. economy to trade with and a stable global environment to export into. That is why the Chinese are more focused on simply dominating their immediate neighborhood. But while America has to deter these two other superpowers with one hand, it also needs to enlist their support with the other hand to help contain both the spreading World of Disorder and the super-empowered breakers. This is where things start to get tricky: on any given day Russia is a direct adversary in one part of the world, a partner in another, and a mischief-maker in another.

We Do Not Have a Trade Deficit. We have a capital surplus. ... Trade deficits are partly a question of consumer preference — American consumers really do like Hondas more than Japanese consumers like Buicks — but they are not mainly a question of consumer preference. They are mainly a question of investor preference — and investors prefer the United States, which is why there is almost twice as much foreign direct investment in the United States as in China, even though China’s economy has grown at a much faster rate over the past 20 years. ... Trade deficits don’t happen because the wily Japanese juke us on trade policy. They happen because intelligent people holding a fistful of dollars very often decide to forgo the consumption of American consumer goods in order to invest in American assets. In economics terms, what this means is that the trade deficit is a mirror image of the capital surplus. ... The trade deficit might remain unchanged, but there would be a large cost attached: Without that foreign investment capital flowing into the United States, money gets more expensive. That means entrepreneurs have a harder time raising capital. ... One of the problems, I suspect, is that people hear the word “deficit” and they think of the trade deficit as being like the budget deficit, i.e. a mounting debt that one day will have to be paid. It is something closer to the opposite: We get more stuff in return for the stuff we sell, and we get cheap investment capital on top of that. Foreigners get access to a dynamic economy with a stable government (miraculously stable, considering the jackasses in charge of it) and a stable currency. Everybody benefits.

All human activity is subject to habitualization. Any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy of effort and which, ipso facto, is apprehended by its performer as that pattern. Habitualization further implies that the action in question may be performed again in the future in the same manner and with the same economical effort. This is true of non-social as well as of social activity. Even the solitary individual on the proverbial desert island habitualizes his activity. When he wakes up in the morning and resumes his attempts to construct a canoe out of matchsticks, he may mumble to himself, “There I go again,” as he starts on step one of an operating procedure consisting of, say, ten steps. In other words, even solitary man has at least the company of his operating procedures. Habitualized actions, of course, retain their meaningful character for the individual although the meanings involved become embedded as routines in his general stock of knowledge, taken for granted by him and at hand for his projects into the future.17 Habitualization carries with it the important psychological gain that choices are narrowed. While in theory there may be a hundred ways to go about the project of building a canoe out of matchsticks, habitualization narrows these down to one. This frees the individual from the burden of “all those decisions,” providing a psychological relief that has its basis in man’s undirected instinctual structure. Habitualization provides the direction and the specialization of activity that is lacking in man’s biological equipment, thus relieving the accumulation of tensions that result from undirected drives.18 And by providing a stable background in which human activity may proceed with a minimum of decision-making most of the time, it frees energy for such decisions as may be necessary on certain occasions. In other words, the background of habitualized activity opens up a foreground for deliberation and innovation.19In terms of the meanings bestowed by man upon his activity, habitualization makes it unnecessary for each situation to be defined anew, step by step.20 A large variety of situations may be subsumed under its predefinitions. The activity to be undertaken in these situations can then be anticipated. Even alternatives of conduct can be assigned standard weights. These

Some people argue that economics is an exception to this general story. Economics, they say, provides a much more analytically precise and tightly integrated body of theory—a theory that is explicitly linked to a small set of generally accepted assumptions about human beings’ motivations and decision-making procedures, and that has been rigorously tested against quantified empirical evidence. Among all the social sciences, economics alone, these boosters contend, has a defensible claim to true scientific status. Economics certainly deserves to be regarded as the queen of the social sciences; unlike the others, it has unquestionably produced useful knowledge on a wide range of issues that affect our daily lives. Yet we should be suspicious of its bold claims to scientific status. Modern neoclassical economic theory is firmly grounded in the kind of mechanistic worldview (described in “Complexities”) that sees the economy as a machine, and to explain the operation of this machine it imports many of the concepts of nineteenth-century classical physics. So it stresses the natural tendency of the economy to find a stable equilibrium and the possibility of isolating the effect of changes in different economic factors (like changes in interest rates) on economic performance.25 As well, to achieve its simplicity and elegance, the theory focuses on the behavior of independent individuals operating in a market—individuals who are atomized, rational, similar in preferences, and stripped of any social attributes. But this makes the theory largely asocial and ahistorical: there’s generally no place in it for large-scale historical, cultural, and political forces that sometimes have a huge impact on our economies—forces like the emancipation of women, rising environmental consciousness, or democratization in poor countries. Because it’s insensitive to broad social forces, modern economic theory is also surprisingly insensitive to its own tight relationship with capitalism. Nevertheless, it’s clearly a product of capitalism—a specific, historically rooted economic system—and it only makes sense in the context of capitalism.26

Consequently, there has been much less time for the market forces that act on companies to reach the kind of meta-stable configuration manifested in the systematic scaling laws obeyed by cities and organisms. As explained

Eastman Kodak will not be returning. Walmart and its ilk will never provide stable employment. The boom economies of energy exploration might seem more “real” than an extensive interconnected community of food and beverage makers, but any “one-stop shop” of a single corporation or an energy extraction bonanza is ultimately less stable than a mutually reinforcing, geographically unique, and irreplaceable range of businesses.

For most of the past two decades the central goal of energy pricing has been to reduce volatility. Policymakers want to ensure that businesses face a predictable environment, with relatively stable prices for electricity and fuels; in a more predictable environment, businesses are more likely to make large-scale capital investments. The government’s main tools in achieving this stability are state-run firms that convert raw fuel into usable energy: power-generating firms and oil refiners. When fuel prices are high, these companies suffer depressed profits or even losses, because they cannot pass on the full cost increase to their customers. But when prices are low, their profits soar, because they are not required to pass on their full cost savings either. These industries can be thought of as “shock absorbers” that enable the economic car to drive relatively smoothly even when the road is full of potholes.

It's tempting to imagine that economic injustice destabilizes societies to the point where they collapse and have to reform themselves, but the opposite appears to be true. Countries with large income disparities, such as the United States, are among the most powerful and wealthy countries in the world, perhaps because they can protect themselves with robust economies and huge militaries. They're just not very free. Even societies with income disparities that are truly off the chart—medieval Europe had a Gini coefficient of .79—are relatively stable until a cataclysmic event like the plague triggers a radical redistribution of wealth. During the last decades, progressive reforms have reduced the Gini coefficient—and stabilized the economies—in many Latin American countries. From every standpoint—morally, politically, economically—such reforms are clearly the right things to do. But throughout the great sweep of human history, egalitarian societies with low Gini coefficients rarely dominate world events. From the Han Dynasty of Ancient China to the Roman Empire to the United States, there seems to be a sweet spot of economic injustice that is moderately unfair to most of its citizens but produces extremely powerful societies. Economist Walter Scheidel calculates that 3,500 years ago, such large-scale states controlled only 1 percent of the Earth's habitable landmass but represented at least half the human population. By virtually any metric, that's a successful society. 'For thousands of years, most of humanity lived in the shadow of these behemoths,' Scheidel writes. 'This is the environment that created the 'original one percent,' made up of competing but often closely intertwined elite groups.' The question, then, is how do ordinary people protect their freedom in the face of such highly centralized state control?

Right now, fewer than one third of adults over age 50 have started saving for long-term care, one in three employed adults aged 55-64 has no savings for retirement, and another one third have less than one year's salary in savings. It used to be easier to save in a more stable market when more jobs were full-time with reliable benefit programs, when the cost of college wasn't so astronomical.

As Alexander Gerschenkron, the great Ukrainian-born scholar of European industrialization, put it: Although “the cheapness of labor in a backward country is said to aid greatly in the process of industrialization … the overriding fact to consider is that industrial labor, in the sense of a stable, reliable, and disciplined group that has cut the umbilical cord connecting it with the land and has become suitable for utilization in factories, is not abundant but extremely scarce in a backward country. Creation of an industrial labor force that really deserves its name is a most difficult and protracted process.”36 The lesson of history is that industrial labor, as distinct from merely cheap labor, is often in short supply in unindustrialized economies, and factory owners in the first throes of industrialization have always complained bitterly about this fact.

In gaming, as in some parts of life, there is always going to be a sweet spot between perfectly stable and perfectly unstable system dynamics. The rich-get-richer aspect of Monopoly may produce bitterness and social friction. But on the other hand, no one would want to play a perfectly socialistic version of the game, in which all income is distributed equitably, no one ever goes bankrupt, and the game never ends. Likewise, a real-life economy in which there are no winners and no losers would not work because, as twentieth-century experiments with communisms showed us, an economy in which hard work yields no personal benefits is an economy in which no one does hard work. *

Many scholars want to understand themselves as the people who are solving problems, but I think one of the things Nelson [Flores] and I – that brings us together in our work is our deep suspicion that many of the scholarly labels and categories and approaches have in fact emerged from the very systems of power that we’re trying to critique here. I think when we keep pushing – and we always push – “What’s your theory of change? What is it that changes?” These families use language in this way, so this school institutionalizes language in this way to change these behaviors. Then, what happens? Then, people have access to a different world? Then, the structure of the economy transforms? Then, stable housing and living wages and political representation – then that emerges from language use? Or are we facing a fundamentally different kind of challenge? Should our critique, should our efforts towards promoting language learning and our engagement with language, be oriented towards those bigger challenges? Or should they be narrowly focused on changing people’s language practices in their homes, in classrooms – really changing the behaviors of the marginalized? (4/10/2020 on Vocal Fries podcast)

Before the twentieth century, ideology - as opposed to religion - did not kill people by the millions and tens of millions. The stakes were not thought to be worth it. Such enthusiasm for mass murder awaited the combination of aristocratic militarism, really-existing socialism, and fascism. Thus it was only in the twentieth century that utopian aspirations about how the economy should be organized led nations and global movements to build dystopias to try to bring the utopian future closer. And then they turned around and justified the dystopia: compromises must be made, and this is as good as it is going to get. My view is that too much mental and historical energy has been spent parsing differences between movements that are justly classified as dystopian, and even totalitarian, in aspiration. Time spent on such a task is time wasted, given their commonalities - if not in formal doctrine, then at least in modes of operation. The guards of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Dachau, and the rest were very like the guards of the Gulag Archipelago. Rather, mental and historical energy should be focused on where these movements got their energy. Why was the world unable to offer people a society in which they could live good lives? Why was a total reconfiguration necessary? Karl Polanyi saw fascism and socialism as reactions against the market society's inability or unwillingness to satisfy people's Polanyian rights. It could not guarantee them a comfortable community in which to live because the use to which land was put had to pass a profitability test. It could not offer them an income commensurate with what they deserved because the wage paid to their occupation had to pass a profitability test. And it could not offer them stable employment because the financing to support whatever value chain they were embedded in also had to pass a profitability test. These failures all gave energy to the thought that there needed to be a fundamental reconfiguration of economy and society that would respect people's Polanyian rights. And the hope of millions was that fascism and really-existing socialism would do so. Instead, both turned out to erase, in brutal and absolute ways, people's rights, and people's lives, by the millions. So why were people so gullible? The German socialist Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 could see the path Lenin was embarked upon and called it 'a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc.' The German liberal Max Weber, writing in 1918, could also foresee what would become of Lenin's sociological experiment, saying it would end 'in a laboratory with heaps of human corpses.' Similarly, the British diplomat Eric Phipps wrote in 1935 that if Britain were to take Hitler's Mein Kampf seriously and literally, 'we should logically be bound to adopt the policy of a "preventive" war.' The dangers of a fascist turn were clear. The unlikelihood of success at even slouching toward a good society of those who took that turn ought to have been obvious. Utopian faith is a helluva drug.

In this triangle, the idea is a measure deriving its value from its position in an economy of human and divine in which the human is not opposed to the divine as mortal to immortal, because all soul is immortal, but as forgetful to mindful or unstable to stable.

Proclaiming Clean Slates to restore economic balance – annulling the accumulation of debts when they grew beyond the ability to be paid – kept pre-Roman civilization financially stables. Mosaic Law placed this principle at the core of Jewish religion (Leviticus 25). Yet modern Christianity all but ignores the fact that in Jesus’s first sermon (Luke 4) he unrolled the scroll of Isaiah and announced his mission to proclaim the Year of the Lord, as the Jubilee Year was known. Restoring the Jubilee Year became the basis for early Christians to break away from Rabbi Hillel, whose prosbul clause was used by creditors to force debtors to waive their rights to a Clean Slate. Jesus’s position – reflected also in the Dead Sea scrolls of the Essenes – prompted the wealthy establishment to fight so strongly against him.

Land of Sugar The incredibly fertile lands and stable, warm climate of Hawaiʻi proved to be ideal for the growth of sugarcane, which would eventually lead to the dominance of sugarcane over Hawaiian agriculture and sugar exports’ iron-clad hold on the Hawaiian economy and overseas interests. Beginning in the 1820s onward, sugar plantations cropped up on the islands of Oʻahu, Maui, Kauaʻi, Molokaʻi, Lanaʻi, and the Big Island of Hawaiʻi itself. Over the next one hundred years, sugar production from Hawaiʻi would grow from under fifty thousand tons of sugarcane to well over half a million tons. This had several effects. The first was a huge influx of immigrant labor to help cope with the demands of a rising sector, especially since growing, harvesting, and processing sugarcane was a labor-intensive process. Tens of thousands of laborers were contracted from Japan, China, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Korea. Hawaiʻi’s population swelled by over 300,000 people over this time and resulted in the percentage of Native Hawaiians dropping to about 10 percent of the total population by the 1900s. It

The United States and our partners across the region are working to build a better future for the Middle East. One where the Middle East is more stable, better connected to its neighbors, and through innovative projects like the India Middle East and Europe rail corridor (IMEC) that I announced this year at the summit of the world’s biggest economies (G20, New Delhi: Sep 10, 2023), more predictable markets, more employment, less rage, less grievances, less war when connected. It benefits the people. It would benefit the people of the Middle East, and it would benefit us. American leadership is what holds the world together. American alliances are what keep us, America, safe. American values are what make us a partner that other nations (IMEC values?) want to work with. To put all that at risk if we walk away from Ukraine, if we turn our backs on Israel, it’s just not worth it. That’s why tomorrow I’m going to send to Congress an urgent budget request to fund America’s national security needs, to support our critical partners, including Israel and Ukraine. It’s a smart investment that’s going pay dividends for American security for generations, help us keep American troops out of harm’s way, help us build a world that is safer, more peaceful and more prosperous for our children and grandchildren. - President Joe Biden, October 20, 2023

The three Baltic republics of the former Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, declined to join Russia in the successor Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and became EU members in 2004. Among the states that stayed with the CIS, six could claim to be European: Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia itself. They could therefore, if they came to fulfil the conditions of stable democracy and competitive market economy, apply for membership of the EU.

However, the EU also agreed for the first time to expand on the provisions of the treaty and laid out what became known as ‘the Copenhagen criteria’: stable democracy, human rights and protection of minorities, the rule of law, a competitive market economy, and the ‘ability to take on the obligations of membership including adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union’. While political union meant different things in different member states, the significance of ‘the obligations of membership’ was clear enough, including the huge task of applying not far short of 100,000 pages of legislation, mostly concerning the single market. To allay fears that widening would result in weakening, there was also the condition that the EU should have ‘the capacity to absorb new members while maintaining the momentum of integration’.

When an economy is stable, people get optimistic. • When people get optimistic, they go into debt. • When they go into debt, the economy becomes unstable. Minsky’s big idea was that stability is destabilizing.

• When an economy is stable, people get optimistic. • When people get optimistic, they go into debt. • When they go into debt, the economy becomes unstable. Minsky’s big idea was that stability is destabilizing.

There is no easy way to say it, but the world of our children and their children will be a far more perilous one. As resources and habitable land diminish, nations will turn against one another in an effort to maintain or gain what they feel is their share or their right. As economies degrade, the social fabric begins to fray and mass migration becomes a global phenomenon, so the election of populist leaders promising the Earth is likely to become increasingly commonplace. At a time when the need for stable and sensible governance will never have been so critical, many countries could be led by unqualified premiers for whom posturing and saber-rattling replace discourse and cooperation. This is nothing less than a recipe for war.

the economy performs best if the central bank has the latitude to make monetary policy decisions in pursuit of maximum employment and stable prices,

To be completely honest with you, God is the only one who has the power to be your everything. His compassion has the capability to fill your heart with warmth more calming than sun rays falling upon your cheek. His peace transcends every layer of your being and eclipse the most anxious of thoughts. His grace is extended freely, covering your sin nature with a robe woven for royalty. His resources are unlimited. His strength is beyond comprehension. His economy is stable. His provision is perfect. He pursues you with creativity. He speaks softly to you...so softly that only your heart would know it was Him. He comforts you with light touches the way the wind drifts across your skin. He leads you to green pastures and quiet waters where you can have a moment to be still and to rest in Him. He initiates intimacy with you, drawing you to converse with Him, to ask of Him and to make yourself known to Him. God is the only one who can meet your every desire, exceed your every expectation, and fulfill your life completely...because you are worth it.

Essayist and critic Wendell Berry, in his book Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1994), takes aim at a premise beneath much of today’s hostility to the Christian ethic—namely, the assumption that sex is private, and what I do in the privacy of my bedroom with another consenting adult is strictly my own business. Thinkers like Berry retort that this claim appears on the surface to be broad minded but is actually very dogmatic. That is, it is based on a set of philosophical assumptions that are not neutral at all but semi-religious and have major political implications. In particular, it is based on a highly individualistic understanding of human nature. Berry writes, “Sex is not, nor can it be any individual’s ‘own business,’ nor is it merely the private concern of any couple. Sex, like any other necessary, precious, and volatile power that is commonly held, is everybody’s business . . .” (p. 119). Communities occur only when individuals voluntarily out of love bind themselves to each other, curtailing their own freedom. In the past, sexual intimacy between a man and a woman was understood as a powerful way for two people to bind themselves to stay together and build a family. Sex, Berry insists, is the ultimate “nurturing discipline.” It is a “relational glue” that creates the deep oneness and therefore stability in the relationship that not only is necessary for children to flourish but is crucial for local communities to thrive. The most obvious social cost to sex outside marriage is the enormous spread of disease and the burden of children without sufficient parental support. The less obvious but much greater cost is the exploding number of developmental and psychological problems among children who do not live in stable family environments for most of their lives. Most subtle of all is the sociological fact that what you do in private shapes your character, and that affects how you relate to others in society. When people use sex for individual recreation and fulfillment, it weakens the entire body politic’s ability to live for others. You learn to commodify people and think of them as a means to satisfy your own passing pleasure. It turns out that sex is not just your business; it’s everybody’s business.

When the Planters fled from Haiti, they established coffee farms or cafetales, as part of their newly formed Plantation. Generally, coffee profits were about 5%, whereas sugar gave them a 10% return, but much was dependent on the economy and local conditions. Cafetales were easier to start and with as little as 10 slaves, a planter could begin his enterprise. Most of the French plantation owners took great pride in their holdings and beautified their plantations with magnificent palms lining grand entryways and spectacular wrought iron gates. The eastern end of Cuba was still available for development and many big plantations started in this modest way, but eventually the coffee plants were replaced with sugar cane due to the greater profit margin. Though blamed by many as the sole cause for the decline of Cuba’s coffee industry, the U.S. Import Tariff of 1835 was only partially to blame for the fall in coffee production. From the beginning, the prices of sugar fluctuated and prevented the Cuban economy from ever becoming stable. The first time was when the prices reached a high, during the Peace of Amiens in 1802. The treaty only survived for a year and shortly thereafter prices plunged, when the supply exceeded demand. During the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the price of sugar soared again, until the British conquest of Martinique and Guadeloupe brought the price tumbling down. The following year during the War of 1812 prices rose again, and by 1814 they reached another all-time high. This continued into modern times, creating a feast or famine economy.

a basic income is arguably more justified by the need for economic security than by a desire to eradicate poverty. Martin Luther King captured several aspects of this rather well in his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here? [A] host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.15 Twentieth-century welfare states tried to reduce certain risks of insecurity with contributory insurance schemes. In an industrial economy, the probability of so-called ‘contingency risks’, such as illness, workplace accidents, unemployment and disability, could be estimated actuarially. A system of social insurance could be constructed that worked reasonably well for the majority. In a predominantly ‘tertiary’ economy, in which more people are in and out of temporary, part-time and casual jobs and are doing a lot of unpaid job-related work outside fixed hours and workplaces, this route to providing basic security has broken down. The

Capitalism began as a theory about how the economy functions. It was both descriptive and prescriptive – it offered an account of how money worked and promoted the idea that reinvesting profits in production leads to fast economic growth. But capitalism gradually became far more than just an economic doctrine. It now encompasses an ethic – a set of teachings about how people should behave, educate their children and even think. Its principal tenet is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for the supreme good, because justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth. Ask a capitalist how to bring justice and political freedom to a place like Zimbabwe or Afghanistan, and you are likely to get a lecture on how economic affluence and a thriving middle class are essential for stable democratic institutions, and about the need therefore to inculcate Afghan tribesmen in the values of free enterprise, thrift and self-reliance. This new religion has had a decisive influence on the development of modern science, too. Scientific research is usually funded by either governments or private businesses. When capitalist governments and businesses consider investing in a particular scientific project, the first questions are usually ‘Will this project enable us to increase production and profits? Will it produce economic growth?’ A project that can’t clear these hurdles has little chance of finding a sponsor. No history of modern science can leave capitalism out of the picture. Conversely, the history of capitalism is unintelligible without taking science into account. Capitalism’s belief in perpetual economic growth flies in the face of almost everything we know about the universe. A society of wolves would be extremely foolish to believe that the supply of sheep would keep on growing indefinitely. The human economy has nevertheless managed to keep on growing throughout the modern era, thanks only to the fact that scientists come up with another discovery or gadget every few years – such as the continent of America, the internal combustion engine, or genetically engineered sheep. Banks and governments print money, but ultimately, it is the scientists who foot the bill. Over the last few years, banks and governments have been frenziedly printing money. Everybody is terrified that the current economic crisis may stop the growth of the economy. So they are creating trillions of dollars, euros and yen out of thin air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, before the bubble bursts. Everything depends on the people in the labs. New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008. If the labs do not fulfil these expectations before the bubble bursts, we are heading towards very rough times.

One explanation of such deviations between a satisfactory development and the actual development might be rooted in the specific user–producer relationships prevailing. There are several factors that promote stability and even inertia in those relationships. The costs involved in establishing new channels and codes of information work in this direction. So do the organized markets, where patterns of domination and mutual trust will reinforce stable relationships and make changes difficult to achieve.

A continuing thread of Europe’s transformation over the seven decades since 1950 has been the central importance of Germany. Change here, in the country that did more than any other to destroy the continent during the first half of the twentieth century, has been especially profound. Despite its destruction as a nation state at the end of the Second World War, Germany has remained at the heart of Europe’s development – central to post-war economic recovery, central to the Cold War, central to the ending of the Cold War, central to widening European integration, central to the creation of the Euro, central to the crisis of the Eurozone, central to the migration crisis, and central to the still-embryonic steps to reform the European Union after its recent serious travails. In the meantime Germany has become a vital pillar of stable liberal democracy, it presides over Europe’s strongest economy, has overcome forty years of division to attain national unity, and has reluctantly acquired the mantle of European leadership. Germany’s own transformation has played a key role in Europe’s post-war story – and is far from the least successful part.

Josiah Quincy’s celebrated tome referred to “a well regulated militia composed of the freeholders, citizens, and husbandmen, who take up arms to preserve their property as individuals, and their rights as freemen.”98 He asked: “Who can be surprised, that princes and their subalterns discourage a martial spirit among the people, and endeavour to render useless and contemptible the militia, when this institution is the natural strength, and only stable safeguard, of a free country?”99 After all, “the supreme power is ever possessed by those who have arms in their hands, and are disciplined to the use of them.