Day 250: Economics Nobel Prize reduced to Laughingstock

“The award was for their work on the pricing of financial assets. Together they concluded that predicting the price of stocks and bonds in the short term is virtually impossible. But they showed it is possible to forecast the broad course of prices over longer periods, such as the three to five years.

Shiller was among those who warned in the 1990s that the run-up in stock prices as part of the Internet stock bubble was the result of "irrational exuberance." 

Last decade, Shiller made similar warnings about the run-up in U.S. home prices. That proved to be correct when the housing bubble burst and plunged the nation into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.”

http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/14/news/economy/shiller-nobel-economics/index.html?iid=s_mpm

Our expectations and standards of economics and economists really has reached an all-time low when we hand out Nobel prizes for work on how to improve one’s gambles in the financial market and for predicting failures in our economic system.

While we still haven’t mastered basic resource management, whereby we ensure that everyone has got access to those resources which safeguard human subsistence – we rather place value and importance on the speculative side of economics which only cares about profit and unsubstantiated growth at the expense of issues of real importance, such as eradicating poverty and starvation.

We entertain ourselves with the fringe side of economics while we haven’t even got the basics in place. Resource inequality and living standards disparity are skyrocketing. We’ve never had this many people living in poverty and we’ve never had this much wealth and ‘know how’ in the world.

And still, even though we have everything in place to create a world where everyone lives a life of comfort and dignity, we’re not moving the puzzle pieces in place to bring a better world into being.

Economics as a discipline has failed us in every way. Economics should be disqualified as a field from receiving any form of recognition of praise until we have put into place the basics as a foundation where everyone is able to secure their life. This should be the primary focus of economics, and so long primary structures and logistics are not in place to support life on earth – we shouldn’t bother indulging ourselves in fictional economics pertaining gamble and speculation.

If we really want to do something worthwhile in the name of economics, we would start with providing a safety net such as a Living Income Guaranteed, which practically ensures that everyone is provided with the means to live their life, without being deprived of basic necessities and living in a survival state of being - the way life is supposed to be lived.

To find out more about the Living Income Guaranteed, visit:

www.basicincome.me 

basicincomeguaranteed.wordpress.com

Day 233: Can LIG provide us the punch to beat the recession?

Whenever the point of policies in relation recessions opens up in economy textbooks, we look at expansionary and monetary policies to help stimulate the economy. Within this government spending, taxation and interest rates play a major role. Here, we are pulling strings from a giant tapestry, hoping that a pull here and there will have an effect way down, on the other side of the tapestry, somewhere down the line… (if we allow enough time to pass by of course).

Yet, we can stimulate the economy a lot more effectively by boosting the aggregate demand in the economy, through the implementation of a Living Income Guaranteed
.
By granting everyone who does not have access to a stable income with a grant that allows them to live a decent life, we generate a greater level of disposable income. Those who were previously surviving and saving – now transfer more money towards spending and consumption.

As disposable income goes up, demand goes up, spending goes up and the wheels of the economy are greased up: economic activity goes up and economic growth is being promoted! As people want more things, more people need to be employed and the unemployment rate goes down. People get their needs taken care of, suppliers and producers are able to sell their things and jobs are being created.
As the economic capital grows, the social capital improves as well. As people’s living standards rise, people become more effective and efficient in their activities.

Implementing a Basic Income Grant System, is a win-win situation.

Check out the following blogs for more information:

Living Income and Nationalized Resources

Living Income Can Save Capitalism

Living Income and Minimum Wage

Living Income Guaranteed and the Nationalization of Banks

Living Income Guaranteed and Pensions

Day 135: 6 Billion wasted on US Elections

http://americablog.com/2012/11/2012-election-spending-topped-6-billion.html

The 2012 elections in the US reached 6 billion dollars, which is the highest amount ever. Most of this money goes to media and communication. And also consider -- that voter turnout was only around 50%. That's a lot of money, to convince only half the population.

If we look back at Day 17: Starvation is Murder, where we had a look at priority spending in the world and looked at how much money would be needed to achieve universal access to basic social services in developing countries -- we can see that this 6 Billion could have covered basic education for all.

What about, instead of spending all this money on campaigning, which is basically advertising -- you go and spend money and so something real like provide all developing countries with basic access to education -- that would be real nice campaigning stunt.

What does this tell us about Human Nature?

In economics we have thing called 'opportunity cost' which was also discussed in Day 46: The Economic Problem:

"Within that, opportunity cost specifically, refers to the next best alternative one forgoes for the option which was chosen. So if you have $50 and you want both a jacket and a shirt – and you decide to spend the money towards the jacket – the opportunity cost is the shirt as the next best thing you could have gotten. A cost for economists is what you had to ‘give up’ to ‘get it’. "

This tells us something about our values, and what we are willing to forgo in order to get what we want. This is just one example of how we are willing to invest massive amounts into an election -- but will not use this same money towards creating a world that is Better for All.


Economics is often called the 'science of scarcity' -- and likes to emphasise the problem of having limited resources to achieve certain things. Yet, we are living in a world where we care fuck-all about scarcity and being able to do 'only so much' -- instead of doing something real, like making sure that everyone has universal access to basic requirements -- some parts of the population hog up all the resources at the expense of many. If scarcity is such a problem, then why are we not acting according to this problem -- and use our resources effectively and responsibly?

How many more natural disasters do we need to experience? How many more disturbing news stories to we have to read EVERY DAY? Before we realise that ENOUGH is ENOUGH.

If you agree that enough is enough -- check out www.EqualMoney.org, and inform yourself on how we can make this world a better place for all.

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