Puppet or Puppet-Master?

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For the most part, I've often felt like a lone voice in some sort of Biblical wilderness, quacking on about the reasons why the world - well at least the human race - appears to be in constant self-destruct mode, economically. Economics, as I've always maintained, is not a science. At best, it equates to some manner of astrology or quack medicine, and like both is rooted in centuries past: attempts by ill-equipped minds to explain the unexplainable. I was reading a cover piece in this week's New Statesman by Ed Conway, which rang so true with my long-held belief that economic dogmas - which come and go in long periodic cycles - are nowt more than fictions concocted by the uninformed and blindly optimistic to attempt to explain the vicissitudes of the market economy.

We know only too well the vagaries of trying to predict the behaviour of the world's climate. And predicting the fluctuations of economies is, like predicting the weather, at best an educated guess. The closing sentence of Conway's piece sums up this inexactitude: '...economic models are not inevitable, they are not laws of nature. They are ours to change.' Ours to change. My hope is - and it is probably a hope in vain - that my dream of an intelligently though-out and partially interventionist approach to the economy would surface in the form of a true mixed economy where competition and the social contract are neither compromised by the blind faith that the markets will sort everything out by default. They won't and they can't. We're the ones who make the rules, not some arbitrary Money God...

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