By Chris Becker
It’s a shame that something that effects our lives so much is so little understood, so polarised and captured by the politico-housing complex, yet is so ignored by the average person on the street, for little or no reason.
There is a lot of hope of course, since the foundations of mainstream economics has wilted away following the GFC. Books like these (and a classic like Steve Keen’s “Debunking Economics) will help push over the fetid pile all together.
From Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang, here’s a brief summary of his book and more from the website:
Ha-Joon Chang also recently posted another list at Huffington Post, which he covers in more detail in a lecture thats embedded below:
1. Economics was originally called ‘political economy’
2. The Nobel Prize in Economics is not a real Nobel Prize
3. There is no single economic theory that can explain Singapore’s economy
4. Britain and the US invented protectionism, not free trade
5. Free trade first spread mostly through un-free means
6. It was arch-conservative Otto von Bismarck who introduced the first welfare state in the world
7. Capitalism did best between the 1950s and the 1970s, an era of high regulation and high taxes
8. The internet was invented by the US government, not Silicon Valley
9. Before tax and welfare spending, Germany and Belgium are more unequal than the US
10. Finland, one of the most equal countries in the world, has grown faster than the US
11. The ‘lazy’ Greeks are the hardest working people in the rich world after South Koreans
12. Switzerland and Singapore are not living off banking and tourism alone
13. Most poor people don’t live in poor countries
Australian watchers particularly take note from the 13:30 minute onward mark, and the last comments are reserved mainly for the domestic bank economists.
.