Holistic Political Economy
A society in which everyone has equal rights as a citizen, where no one can fall below the level needed for them to achieve their potential and in which the economy is managed within sustainable limits.
Those who want this fairer society must argue from first principles and insist upon it rhetorically. They must be fearless in the defence of civil society against the encroachment of market economics into places where it has no business to be.
Specifically, for politics, equal citizenship regardless of wealth, means that politics is about more that "holding the ring" between competing interest groups. For the politicians trying to change things there must be a recognition that change will be contested, requiring a doggedness and determination in the framing, advocacy and development of the alternative. They must be tireless in the identification of externalities and free riding, creative about the solutions and insistent that they are tackled.
Economic implications
If we can realistically (hope) to reshape politics we can also reshape business and change the balance of research and development that is undertaken: more butter less guns. We can start to think sensibly about how much is enough, products can be made sustainably, to last a lifetime, be regularly serviced and repaired and be disposed of with recycling that was designed in at the start.
When it comes to business and economics the settlement that is needed is one in which people outside any individual business, but who are impacted by what it does, have some rights over the way business conducts itself. In economic jargon free riding is stopped and there is no escape from its externalities. In addition all the people involved in any individual business are legitimate stakeholders, there has to be a balance between labour and capital (in old parlance). Business cannot act as it wishes in the name of freedom if the freedom it wins is at someone else’s expense – it takes society as a whole to regulate this hence my insistence on the use of the term political economy.
The challenge for action
If we characterise politics as a war, then that is what it will become. If we accept the above argument and the vision it points to, then the challenge for taking effective action is to break out of current practice.
What I mean by this is that politicians who want change must not accept the frame of reference of people who have totally different philosophical outlook. They must not settle for the amelioration of greed through taxation and try to compensate the poor though minimum wages and welfare. All the time they do this they are both fighting an uphill struggle to justify the cost, and have conceded the argument that there is another way of doing things. This is because the underlying moral framework that they have accepted (which creates the frame of reference within which they operate politically) is fundamentally opposed to what they are about.
Undoubtedly this will be difficult to change and I will address it head on when discussing the strategy and tactics of political action.
For now, I just want to establish that we can choose to believe in a better approach to political economy and work towards it. We can gain strength from knowing that it is doable and that an increasing body of knowledge backs this up.
This website is dedicated to showing that human behaviour is driven by many factors a lot of which we can control and that if we chose to, behaviour can be improved Note: Who Influences Now? . By changing the paradigm, we can make a huge change to the Human Activity System, and in the details, by using systems thinking we can design in virtuous circles. We know how to do this, it is not rocket science, so the site highlights lots of examples of what good looks like.