What Hope for Economic Recovery?
by Economic problems.
What Hope for Economic Recovery?
By Mick Gillman
During the reign of Louis XVI of France, his queen, Marie Antoinette, reportedly once asked the royal finance minister: “What will you do about the deficit, Monsieur le Minstre?” His reply: “Nothing, Madame. It is too serious.”
Although times have changed, this particular philosophy still appears to be in vogue. Statesman and economists alike lament huge international debt, the grave economic imbalance between rich and poor countries, and the abject poverty in so many countries. But little if anything is done – the problems are too serious. Does this make economic sense? The word “economics’” comes from the Greek word oikonomos, which means a Stewart warehouse manager. Word economic is basically the study of how the world’s “house” is managed. How is it being managed?
To illustrate, let us imagine the earth as a neighborhood, and the individual nations as neighbors. One of the wealthiest neighbors is a compulsive spender and owes money to nearly everyone, but as he is their best client, his creditors are reluctant to press for payment. Some of the poorer families are so deeply in debt that they have to borrow money just to pay the high interest rates on their loans. Meanwhile, the father of the most destitute family in the area has just treated himself and his friends to a lavish celebration meal, although several of his children are starving.
The richer families eat very well and end up throwing a lot of food in the garbage can. They spend more on their pets than the poorer families can afford to spend on their children. From time to time they have neighborhood meetings to talk about all the problems in the area, but nothing seems to get done. Tension is growing between the rich families and the poor. Obviously, something is fundamentally wrong with the way this neighborhood is managed.
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Post CommentRobin Howell
On February 28, 2010 at 10:47 am
Dear Triond,
I would have contacted you directly if I could have found a method of doing it.
I am a UK resident. Do you have a UK site, or a partner that operates a UK site, or am I wrong to assume that most of your content is USA orientated?
I am quite surprised to find so many articles making so many grammatical mistakes that it often obscures what I am sure the writer means to say.
Is this because of some mechanical translation device?
Do you offer your contributors any editorial help in terms of spelling and grammar, and if not perhaps I could offer to help.
I would be interested to contribute myself, but I am uncertain who the audience might be. This does not mean that I regard my contribution to be pearls in any way, but there seems little point in commenting on British Politics or economic policy for example if 90% of the readership is American.
Regards, Robin Howell.
PS. The above article is a good example of my concern about the grammar, in that parts of it are very lucid and parts almost unintelligible, almost as if they are written by two different people. Matt’s article on debt is mostly very competently written, and yet his notes about who he is make him sound almost illiterate, but perhaps it is translated.