What Piketty Forgot

(Dai Luo / Flickr)

(Dai Luo / Flickr)




Inequality and Growth







A Mistaken Model







The Limits of Growth






Towards a New Economy

All this leads to a larger conundrum.








Noel Ortega is the coordinator of the New Economy Working Group.

  • http://www.philippeorlando.com Philippe Orlando

    “In essence, the investor class makes money from money, without contributing to the “real economy”
    This is the economical model actively promoted by Wall Street, unfortunately. In their ideal world wealth is created without workers and outside the real economy of the real world.

    It is astonishing to me how impervious most economists, if not all, are to the concept of a finite planet. It seems that these people are missing some basic and very elementary knowledge of what a finite set is. The fact that a limited amount of actions and growth can happen within the frame of a limited entity is obvious to anybody, including very young kids and genial scientists. But for some reason as soon as somebody goes through some training in Economy, they seem to believe that a system out there called the economy exists in which infinite growth can happen ad aeternum. Today we even know that the universe is not infinite. Our oceans, vastly huge, will be totally depleted of fish around 2050 at the current rate of fishing, and filled with plastic micro particles. Every other terrestrial sets is reaching its limits except the economy…in the minds of economists. It is as if there is a rule for the world we see, including physics, biology, chemistry, but economy obeys something totally different. Economy is extra temporal and doesn’t obeys any known laws on planet earth or in the universe. I’m waiting for the day when an economist will tell us that actually economy escape all known laws, including the laws of thermodynamics. These people all show off and are all proud of their tough mathematical models, which they claim makes the real difference between economists and public policy people the same way the 400 meter makes the difference between men and children, but it hardly take a genius to realize that an economy based on the burning of fossil fuels on a finite planet and generating a huge amount of various pollutants can’t sustain life for too long. I suspect sometime in the 20th century economists develop a complex of inferiority vis as vis of hard core science. This is when all those pointless mathematical models appeared to validate economy as a science. I wouldn’t also under estimate the macho attitude of the average male in academia, including economy. Being seen as nurturing and not wanting to make money and taking care of the environment is a feminine quality. Real men just grow and build things and always go forward without limit.