Jules Peck

We hear a lot about this ‘new economy’. But what actually is it?

Aside from nearly 500 Transition initiatives worldwide, there is a vast and increasing array of practitioning and thinking around what is being called the ‘new economy.’

One thing everyone I met has in common is a desire to create a new world order, a new way of creating, connecting and being which is beyond the market, beyond ownership, growth and capitalism.

Perhaps its time for progressives to get their act in gear, dump the dead left-right, state-private dialectic and start a new party – a peoples party. A party of, by and for the people.

Evidence shows its very clear we have reached the safe limits to growth in terms of the most pressing threat to human civilisation – that of a stable atmosphere. Therefore, until we can find a way to decouple growth from carbon emissions and reach that mythical “dematerialised” economy, restarting global economic growth seems a dangerous folly. But what might the implications of this be for capitalism?

Professor Ha-Joon Chang has two things in common with Karl Marx. Firstly he’s right in much of his economic analysis of the ills of capitalism and secondly his prescriptions of the solutions to these ills are lacking. Chang’s best-selling book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism is a timely and important addition to the most crucial debate of our age. I recommend it as both a good read and helpful resource. But I think his analysis missed out three final and far more crucial ‘things’ to his 23.