#Econ

Tim Jackson has to be the only economist I know with an inspiring vision for economic activity and replacing our roles as novelty consumers with something lasting, world changing and ultimately better.

It’s a story about us - People. Being persuaded to: Spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to create impressions > that won’t last, on people we don’t care about.

Tim’s the author of Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet . (which, ironically, does not have a Kindle edition :-( ).

Great diatribe by Mitchell and Webb (of peepshow fame) on why the whole election platform claim of “eliminating government waste” is complete bollocks (I can use the word “bollocks” here because he’s English. Ahem…).

I hope Tony is listening. The Australian Liberals need a slightly better leg to stand on economically.

Wow. Constantly amazed at how Umair Haque keeps making such amazing observations and good calls on what really needs to be done for the future. Love this post on The Betterness Manifesto .

Here’s the score. The global economy faces a series of tectonic structural shifts. The great gears of this vast machine must be reset over the next decade. Consumption must fall. Savings must rise. Investment must be more productive. Incomes and wealth must be shared more broadly. Borrowing from tomorrow must slow. The rate at which we value the future must grow. Growth itself must be revitalized.

Really great blog post from Mark Cuban on the fact Wall Street has gone from being about value creation and allocating capital to arbitrage speculation and value hijacking .

The best analogy for traders? They are hackers. Just as hackers search for and exploit operating system and application shortcomings, traders do the same thing. A hacker wants to jump in front of your shopping cart and grab your credit card and then sell it. A high frequency trader wants to jump in front of your trade and then sell that stock to you. A hacker will tell you that they are serving a purpose by identifying the weak links in your system. A trader will tell you they deserve the pennies they are making on the trade because they provide liquidity to the market.

Fantastic infographic from Information is Beautiful cutting through all the crap to give a clear picture of what each political party is forwarding in order to cut Britain’s whopping £167B deficit if they get into power. Love it for its clarity and conciseness.

I need this sort of graphic for the Australian election as well.

Leveraging the total and well justified outrage at the banks over their massive bailouts, The Robin Hood Tax project rebrands the Tobin Tax idea (and prior to that Keynes’ idea of a tax on all financial transactions) to try to divert bailout money and questionably speculative activity (rather than wealth creation) to assist in social causes, combatting climate change and other social priorities.

Totally love this idea, even as a former economist. I’d love to see it pushed despite practical difficulties. Oh, and absolutely fantastic performance by Bill Nighy in the Curtis directed short (and how can you not love seeing the Gherkin in the background?).

OMG, this is awesome. Yeah, ok so that first degree of mine is in Economics and Political Science, so I’m totally geeking out on this, but it’s actually really good as well as theoretically accurate. So, listen close.

If you don’t know anything about economics, the scary thing you should take away from this is how heavily opposed in advice these two approaches are and that supporting one or the other is fundamentally a question, when you strip everything down to fundamentals, of belief. Pretty spooky, huh ?

Story of Stuff author Annie Leonard presents her reasons that Cap and Trade is flawed and that the most important thing we need to do is agree on the global cap. Great animation: plain speaking, clear, concise and most of all, understandable.

More info at her website .

Loving Umair Haque these days and his excellently penned essays on the zombieconomy and how we got into this trouble in the first place How not to Hummer your business .

What is unnovation? It’s when your business eats its children and destroys the long term value it has been creating (if you’re lucky) by focusing on seductive, easy short-term profits. Great rant illustrated by the Hummer, but insert your value-destroying business move from the 90’s and noughts here.

Slate has a really excellent map of vanishing jobs over time since January 2007 the in the US. The story starts off with blue net job growth and red losses and proceeds like one of those zombie outbreak movies where the red starts breaking out all over.

A bit scary ass for all my friends in the United States, but very interesting. I would have done this a bit more smoothly (and possibly in flash), but it’s a nice visualization of a very scary trend as well as letting you examine point in time data a bit better.