Line up all the economists in the world, it is said, and they'll all point in different directions. And while it's true that economists do view society through the particular lens of their political or sociological ideology, there are some general economics principles that seem widely held in the field.
One is that you can point to economic performance as an indicator of a household's or a company's or even a nation's success. And therefore the need to look after the drivers of this all-important economy - banks and corporations and GDP and all that stuff.
Economic performance is even one of the most important indices when considering happiness and quality of life on those top 10 countries to live in lists that pop up once or twice a year.
But yet, there is something obviously missing in a person who gives attention only to the financial side of things in life, something out of kilter and off balance - even psychotic - in running the world based on what the bean counters have to say.
We'll explore what's wrong with this view today. How Money Stops Growth, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
Click here to listen to this episode.
Showing posts with label Economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economics. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Monday, February 13, 2012
Putting the New Consciousness into Practice
We've been bombarded with images and catch phrases heralding a new era for a number of decades now. From marketed scientific publications like the Aquarian Conspiracy to the blue environmentally pagan humanoids of Avatar to the end of the world apocalypse that Hollywood envisioned as the running out of the Mayan calendar, we've been up to our keisters in pop culture interpretations of the changing consciousness brought by a relentless new age spirituality for almost as long as I've been alive.
And way longer than that in the esoteric literature from Europe.
Some portray this as an inevitable product of the cosmic cycles of consciousness that are moving us dramatically towards the third millennium. Others say it's all the destiny outlined in Revelations in the Bible. Still others that it's all the product of the endless cycles of birth and death being acted out on a global scale.
A lot of room for interpretation and speculation, isn't there? Which is why it's important, here in the middle of the thing, to try to do something and not just speculate.
Putting the New Consciousness into Practice, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
Click here to listen to this episode.
And way longer than that in the esoteric literature from Europe.
Some portray this as an inevitable product of the cosmic cycles of consciousness that are moving us dramatically towards the third millennium. Others say it's all the destiny outlined in Revelations in the Bible. Still others that it's all the product of the endless cycles of birth and death being acted out on a global scale.
A lot of room for interpretation and speculation, isn't there? Which is why it's important, here in the middle of the thing, to try to do something and not just speculate.
Putting the New Consciousness into Practice, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
Click here to listen to this episode.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Illuminating the Causes of the Economic Meltdown
The crisis has been blamed on mortgage malpractice, on poor or non-existent regulation, on greed for banking bonuses that causes risky lending to be conducted. And it seems clear that all of this is implicated in the current economic meltdown being led by the U.S. Regulators want to blame Wall St., Wall St. wants to blame the regulators, apologists for the Bilderbergers, Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission even point to the Baby Boomers as the cause.
And all of this just muddies the waters.
You listen to the pundits and the debaters and the talk show blowhards and cable TV comedians and end up believing in whichever espouses the economic or political philosophy you already adhere to. And nothing changes. You just wind up feeling that you don't really know anything, no matter how informed you are.
Well, to begin with, there's been a systematic effort over many decades to eliminate the regulations put in place in the 1930s to stop the kind of financial sector gluttony and greed that got us in trouble in 1929, and is repeating itself again now. This is not being understood. We get almost no historical context to explain what's going on ... and so we don't solve the fundamental causes of the problems.
We'll try to shed some light on the causes today on our program, with a panel discussion with a number of Americans linked to Norberto Keppe's science of Analytical Trilogy so we can try to understand, once and for all, what's really going on. And what we can do about it.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Society on the Couch
Drug dealers, prostitutes, terrorists, assassins. These are all aspects of society we have to deal with in our modern world. But not only in the external population. No, there are many of those personalities in power today. And they use the police and military to squash dissent in all of the myriad and horrible ways we’ve seen in the 20th century.
Let’s bring the precise lens of psycho-socio pathology brought by Norberto Keppe’s science of Analytical Trilogy to the subject today. We’ll analyze Society on the Couch through Keppe’s astounding book, The Psychoanalysis of Society, and also consider the inequality in economics and how it creates such social injustice.
All that and more on this week’s installment of Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.
Join the conversation at joneshealing@gmail.com
Click here to listen to this episode.
Let’s bring the precise lens of psycho-socio pathology brought by Norberto Keppe’s science of Analytical Trilogy to the subject today. We’ll analyze Society on the Couch through Keppe’s astounding book, The Psychoanalysis of Society, and also consider the inequality in economics and how it creates such social injustice.
All that and more on this week’s installment of Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.
Join the conversation at joneshealing@gmail.com
Click here to listen to this episode.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Pathology of Power, Inverted Economics and Good Business
The core of the psycho-social problems of the age is under our microscope today. The pathological power structure and how it works against us, our deluded idea that war defends freedom, our psychotic economy – hot and essential topics. And the story of an American visitor to our International Society of Analytical Trilogy. Join the discussion. Comments welcome at joneshealing@gmail.com
Click here to listen to this episode.
Click here to listen to this episode.
Monday, August 03, 2009
Redefining the Relationship between Work and Capital
It's a philosophy deeply entrenched in our North American view of life: make your money work for you, leverage your investments, make money while you sleep.
But hidden behind these strategies is a massive trap. Money, which is supposed to be a means, has become the ends. Today, capital is more important than your mother.
Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, Redefining the Relationship Between Work and Capital.
One of my students, a Director at a large European supermarket chain, was lamenting the plight of human beings after returning from his summer vacation in Europe.
"People seem lost," he said. "They seem very far from the basics of life.
Then he went on to make an interesting parallel. When he was a boy growing up on the French island of Martinique, he became fascinated with bee-keeping. He learned the basics from his dad, then began to branch out to develop his own bee hives. Marked by a strongly competitive nature and beset with the rivalry that commonly springs up between sons and fathers, he set out to see if he could overtake his father's honey production. He studied and researched the latest bee breeding techniques to learn how to maximize production, do more with less, ramp up his production to steroid-high levels without increasing his investment substantially. He imported queen bees from France and America, bred them with his local product, and very shortly achieved impressive spikes in production levels.
He admits to feeling a certain power in this, a sensation that he was creating some kind of super bee that would lead the way to continuously higher quantities of honey. But his success was short-lived. Hybrid bees, it turns out, are much more fragile than natural ones. They bred quickly and produced a big jump in honey output over the short term, but were genetically weaker and more sensitive to fluctuations in environmental cycles. What's more, their breeding cycles were totally out of sync with nature's. Bees would breed robustly, then fly out of the hive looking for flowers to pollinate, and the flowers wouldn't be out yet. Over the long term, my student realized, mucking around with nature had disastrous - and expensive - side effects.
In our discussion, we were making the connections between the philosophy underlying his desires to out-produce his father, and the mania in business today to produce ever increasing profits based on projections and stockholder demands rather than natural business cycles.
"If I'm to have any possibility of meeting those imposed financial goals," he told me, "Something's going to have to give. I'm going to have to take shortcuts somewhere - with employee relations or salary limits or even business ethics."
So look at that dilemma. We're all twisted up inside because of exactly this struggle. Our megalomania causes us to impose our will on natural cycles so much, bending and twisting and changing everything to fit with our "getting more for less" philosophy, that we completely screw up the greater system.
And then, oh, do we suffer! Because it's hard, sometimes impossible, to find our way back.
Wasn't that lament exactly what Dante was articulating when he wrote, "Half-way upon the journey of our lives, I roused to find myself within a dark wood, for the straight way had been lost."
This program based on Brazilian psychoanalyst and social scientist, Norberto Keppe's science of Analytical Trilogy, is an attempt to help us find the straight way again. I am always open to hearing from you about these themes. rich@richjonesvoice.com
Today, we'll focus in on how much we've strayed off the path and gotten all twisted around in economics. My colleague and fellow teacher, Sofie Bergqvist, joins me today to provide some illumination provided through Keppe's book, Work and Capital.
Click here to listen to this episode.
But hidden behind these strategies is a massive trap. Money, which is supposed to be a means, has become the ends. Today, capital is more important than your mother.
Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, Redefining the Relationship Between Work and Capital.
One of my students, a Director at a large European supermarket chain, was lamenting the plight of human beings after returning from his summer vacation in Europe.
"People seem lost," he said. "They seem very far from the basics of life.
Then he went on to make an interesting parallel. When he was a boy growing up on the French island of Martinique, he became fascinated with bee-keeping. He learned the basics from his dad, then began to branch out to develop his own bee hives. Marked by a strongly competitive nature and beset with the rivalry that commonly springs up between sons and fathers, he set out to see if he could overtake his father's honey production. He studied and researched the latest bee breeding techniques to learn how to maximize production, do more with less, ramp up his production to steroid-high levels without increasing his investment substantially. He imported queen bees from France and America, bred them with his local product, and very shortly achieved impressive spikes in production levels.
He admits to feeling a certain power in this, a sensation that he was creating some kind of super bee that would lead the way to continuously higher quantities of honey. But his success was short-lived. Hybrid bees, it turns out, are much more fragile than natural ones. They bred quickly and produced a big jump in honey output over the short term, but were genetically weaker and more sensitive to fluctuations in environmental cycles. What's more, their breeding cycles were totally out of sync with nature's. Bees would breed robustly, then fly out of the hive looking for flowers to pollinate, and the flowers wouldn't be out yet. Over the long term, my student realized, mucking around with nature had disastrous - and expensive - side effects.
In our discussion, we were making the connections between the philosophy underlying his desires to out-produce his father, and the mania in business today to produce ever increasing profits based on projections and stockholder demands rather than natural business cycles.
"If I'm to have any possibility of meeting those imposed financial goals," he told me, "Something's going to have to give. I'm going to have to take shortcuts somewhere - with employee relations or salary limits or even business ethics."
So look at that dilemma. We're all twisted up inside because of exactly this struggle. Our megalomania causes us to impose our will on natural cycles so much, bending and twisting and changing everything to fit with our "getting more for less" philosophy, that we completely screw up the greater system.
And then, oh, do we suffer! Because it's hard, sometimes impossible, to find our way back.
Wasn't that lament exactly what Dante was articulating when he wrote, "Half-way upon the journey of our lives, I roused to find myself within a dark wood, for the straight way had been lost."
This program based on Brazilian psychoanalyst and social scientist, Norberto Keppe's science of Analytical Trilogy, is an attempt to help us find the straight way again. I am always open to hearing from you about these themes. rich@richjonesvoice.com
Today, we'll focus in on how much we've strayed off the path and gotten all twisted around in economics. My colleague and fellow teacher, Sofie Bergqvist, joins me today to provide some illumination provided through Keppe's book, Work and Capital.
Click here to listen to this episode.
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