Another
ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS article from the FEASTA Website (home to David Korowicz and the Trade-Offs Financial Cross Contagion Paper) covering a
LONG history of Economic thought predating Adam Smith most people are not familiar with.
Included in this one are
NUMEROUS Power Point Slides, each one of which itself pulls the core ideas together in a concise format that newbies to Economic Theory can gain tremendous insight from. If you click on the slides, you can see them in larger format.
I'd love to put this one up on the Blog, but my last try with FEASTA for a Cross Posting Agreement got no response. I'll try again with this one. Meanwhile, I converted it to BBcode to drop in here inside the Diner.
A long read, but well worth the time. This Sunday Morning Brunch Edition of the Diner is
JAM PACKED with reading material! I will be putting up my
Doomer Science Fiction article as well as soon as the clock turns over on the software.
Economics and Moral Philosophy Sep 10, 2012
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Comments by
Brian
Davey
Cafe Economique TalkPresented in Nottingham, UK on 30th August 2012The talk is
presented below with its accompanying slides. Click on each slide to see a
larger version.
Please note that the notes that go with the power point were
written up after the talk had been given and thus differ slightly from the audio
version. The arguments in the written version are slightly more detailed and the
written version includes references and sources whereas this is not fully the
case in the audio presentation.
Audio file of talk (free registration
required)
Powerpoint
slides
In the late 1960s and early 1970s major university economics departments in
the USA and major economics journals decided to take the history of economic
thought out of the economic syllabus and stop accepting articles on the
subject.
Thus it is that many economists are pretty ignorant about the history of
their own subject. They probably think that Adam Smith, in the 18th century, was
the first economist.
|  |
In fact writing, thinking and study about economics goes back to the ancient
Greeks. It was taught in universities in Europe from 1250. This early scholastic
economic was a part of the moral philosophy. Its leading thinkers, St Augustine
and St. Thomas Aquinas, drew upon the writings of Aristotle and sought to unify
his ideas with that of Christian theology.
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But why was it a part of moral philosophy? The answer is that economics was
considered to be all about the use of means to attain ends. Nowadays economics
is a topic that I would describe as studying the use of intermediate means to
provide for intermediate ends. However, it typically neglects the integration of
the economy in the physical and natural world on the one hand while at the same
time ignoring the study of what structures and determines our intermediate ends
, namely the study of our ultimate ends. What are these ultimate ends?
|  |
To Aristotle you could not even consider this question
without having a view of what is particular to human beings. For him the end of
all human activity is sometimes translated as “happiness” but this can be
misleading to a modern understanding of that word – because what Aristotle meant
by happiness was a very specific idea of living a virtuous life in accordance
with reason. The virtues included personal characteristics like integrity,
honour, loyalty, courage and forthrightness. Ideally life meant developing
oneself and flourished in and through ones dealings and particularly through
participation in the community.
This did involve some need for provisions, and if
fortune was on your side your women and your slaves could take of your needs in
this respect, but Aristotle did not think that happiness involved accumulating
lots of possessions.
To Aristotle the amount of property needed for a good life was limited.
Taking this standpoint he saw there being two kinds of exchange and trade:
exchange in order to satisfy a genuine need; and exchange in order to make money
and accumulate possessions. The latter Aristotle thought of as unnatural, as he
did usury, because it involved money growing without limits which violated the
laws of nature – since everything in nature has limits.
Well, fast forward to Augustine and Aquinas. No doubt
they too turned a blind eye to the power structures of the feudal society in
which they lived but, as monks who had taken vows of poverty, they thought the
reason for living was firstly, as it says in the Ten Commandments, to love God
and also to love your neighbour. Life involved transcending yourself. Well, of
course, this is very different from calculating your individual interest as
assumed by modern economists. Instead it was assumed that you gave to and
provided for the people that you loved and that you exchanged with strangers –
in order, at the next stage, to have the things needed for the people that you
love and for oneself.
To Augustine every person has a choice – to provide his
or her goods for himself or to provide them for other people. This depends on
the love people feel for themselves compared to the love they feel for other
people. Thus distribution at the local and personal level, as economists
describe it, involves a moral choice. With Aristotle there was also an idea that
you shared wealth with a wider community, which in his case was the polis, the
political community (of men and non-slaves).
Even when we exchange with people we do not love we had
ethical obligations. For Aquinas exchange involved a just price – the price that
emerged through haggling that cleared the market – but, and this is crucial, a
just price is not imposed or experienced by some parties under conditions of
duress. To charge someone high prices because there was a famine was most
definitely not charging the just price.
So the context prevailing in the market is an issue too – indeed we can
extend this idea to include monopoly control of the market and other conditions.
Later in this talk I’ll argue that if you take away from people their means of
support, like access to the commons, this is also putting them under duress.
The early medieval period was characterised by power
structures somewhat akin to protection rackets where militarised hierarchical
gangs effectively imposed themselves on the people and extracted labour and
products, claiming that they had their authority and rights from God, but in
effect having their power from their ability and preparedness to act as ruthless
gangsters operating out of heavily fortified castles.
The church was no doubt complicit in all of this but it also acted as a form
of social welfare agency in difficult times when the aged, sick and poor could
turn to the monasteries. In addition, in England, the ordinary people had
certain rights to use the forests, the wastes and commons lands for their own
maintenance that were protected in the Charter of the Forests (the companion
statement of rights adopted at the same time as the Magna Charter).
The rise of the merchant class and of commercial
society in towns, and along trade routes outside the power of the military
elite, changed all of this over a number of centuries. With the Reformation in
England Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and sold them to his courtiers
dismantling welfare provision for ordinary people.
Economic theory changed with the times. According to Aquinas merchants did
fulfil a useful function of bringing goods from where they were abundant to
where they were scarce. However, that’s not all that they did. For example they
helped create economic conditions where it paid the elite to take the commons
land from the commoners to enrich themselves (with sheep for the wool trade).
And trade could be in slaves or the goods from slave plantations – or from
products extracted by taxes in colonies. In other words under conditions of
duress.
Increasingly economics reflected the technical issues of the time, rather
than being a theorisation of the morality of the market.
Over several centuries the commons land was enclosed and the people using it
lost their rights to sustenance. These processes meant they had to work for the
emerging capitalist class as wage labourers or pay rent to the landowners on
onerous terms. The price of labour and the price of land was the result of an
institutionalised form of duress in that the ordinary people had no other
options but to work on terms set by employers and landowners. |  |
Elite theorisation of economics turned a blind eye to
these processes, including in the ideas of Adam Smith in the 18the century.
Smith was a professor of moral philosophy and was no doubt aware of scholastic
economics. However for several centuries economic thinking had been changing
from the ethical reflections of monks into more hard bitten ideas about how
merchants and the aristocracy made money and accumulated wealth.
Thus Smith did not mention the Atlantic slave trade and plantations which
created the wealth that flowed into places like Glasgow. Nor did he consider
pillaging of India by the East India company. This international trade involved
economic arrangements nothing like his cosy picture which he wrote about,
although he must have been aware of it as the source of the riches of people in
his own world.
Smith’s inquiry into the Wealth of Nations was not
concerned with ethical issues about distribution and looking after the poor. He
regarded himself as living in a different kind of age, an age of improvement –
the commercial society had changed the game as far as economics was concerned.
So Smith wrote about how more primitive societies might be more equalitarian –
but, in his own society the labouring classes had their needs met and the more
important thing was that the division of labour, specialisation, was making
possible a continuous improvement in production . Thus everyone was much better
off, even if unequally so.
Not for the first time or the last Smith was another economist who ignored
less uplifting aspects of reality and chose to describe the further development
of specialisation and of the market as the future for commercial society.
Note that in this respect the monkish idea of progress as moral progress had
slipped into an idea of improvement as technical progress which produced more
wealth. Scarcity was the chief problem facing humanity and overcoming scarcity
was the chief task. This meant resources were to be used as efficiently as
possible and technological progress would allow for more to be produced. |  |
If you like scarcity became the original sin of the new economic religion
and efficiency and technological progress became the new means of salvation –
with economists functioning rather like a new priesthood, a role that they still
enjoy. Indeed, for the contemporaries of Smith in this period the production and
use of this greater wealth, would bring about better people directly and
indirectly – because the commercial society had its own virtues and rewarded
hard work, discipline, thrift, delayed gratification etc. |  |
Of course, people still realised that human and social
relationships were not always just, and that the ends that people pursued were
less than perfect. However, it was increasingly assumed that these problems too
required economic and technological progress. It would be when people were all
much better off that they would be able to get to grips with these problems.
The slide on the right quotes philosopher David Hume, a contemporary of
Smith. This idea is still with us today and has been shared by many subsequent
thinkers. Karl Marx thought that the highest phases of communism would be
prepared by the ability of capitalism to create an economy of abundance. In this
context all sorts of problems between people would “wither away”. Without
believing in the need for revolution Keynes also believed that in the distant
future humanity would overcome its scarcity problem and thus its psychology of
self interestedness. (See his essay, “The Economic Possibilities for our
Grandchildren” published in
Essays in Persuasion). The problems for
humanity were no longer problems between people and God (or between people and
Nature) nor between people – they were problems of inadequately developed
technology.
Even more important was Smith’s abandonment of the
ideas of Augustine and Aquinas, about an obligation in economic activity,
towards loving your neighbour. For him a properly working market delivered
socially beneficial results even though people were pursuing their self
interests – or perhaps I should say, because people were pursuing their own self
interests.
The famous quote from Adam Smith on the slide illustrates this idea.
Having abandoned considerations of distribution which were rooted in ethical
considerations of love for one’s neighbour and ones obligations to a wider
community, the new economics asserted that by pursuing one’s private advantages
– and self love – the market would in any case organise a social outcome in the
interests of everyone.
In this theory people got what they wanted through the “invisible hand” of
the market because if they decided they wanted more beer and less bread they
would seek to buy more beer and less bread, the price of bread would fall and
that of beer would rise. Some bakers would switch to brewing and some farmers
would switch from wheat for flour to hops and barley for brewing…Prices would
act as signals that resources needed to be re-directed. As long as there were no
restraints to resources flowing from one use to another there was no need for
the state to intervene.
This was not a revolutionary new idea in his day –
these kind of ideas that the market activities motivated by self interest,
delivered what people wanted, can be found over a hundred years before Adam
Smith. Moreover we should try to understand it as contemporaries would have
understood it. Humanity had fallen – we’re sinners. And yet God had a
providential plan for the world and he realised his plan through the self love
of people operating through the “laws of the market”, that Smith described. At
the time of Smith it was big thing that Newton had showed that things did not
happen because of continual interventions by God. So instead people now thought
that God set up the basic design of the universe and then it ran itself. In a
similar way, the market and the “social physics” of economics worked through the
predictable self interested behaviour of people giving rise to economic laws. As
the poet Pope put it: “Thus God and Nature formed the general frame, And bad
self-love and social be the same”.
Later economists assumed that the famous invisible hand of the market meant
the operation of the price system and competition so that, without any central
plan, the market self-organised the allocation of resources. If there were too
much bread and not enough beer the bread would remain unsold and its price would
fall whereas the price of beer would be bid up. So then resources would switch
from bread production to beer production quite spontaneously, as long as markets
were competitive and the beer producers could not prevent others from brewing to
keep beer prices up. |  |
It’s a nice parable but what economists are well aware
of is that prices and the allocation of resources depends on the prior
allocation of rights to the different factors of production. What was being
ignored and relegated to the small print was what Aquinas had been aware of –
the issue of duress. Smith was an apostle of the market and commercial society
at a time when labour and land were being forced into becoming market
commodities by land enclosure and when the state, by attacking the poor law for
the support of destitute people, was ensuring that the poor worked on terms that
can be dictated by their employers.
Neither land nor labour are originally “produced” with the explicit purpose
of becoming commodities. Land is part of the living natural system and labour is
people who have been forced to work on terms dictated by the owners of the means
of production.
In this context the market does indeed produce according to the wishes of
those with purchasing power – but how purchasing power is distributed,
reflecting the economic and property system, was the deeper question.
As is usual the new economic priesthood avoided these questions and, as the
19th century progressed, devoted themselves instead to a deeper study of how
people, motivated by self love and self interest, behaved. What determined their
choices? This they did by using another framework from philosophical ethics,
namely the utilitarian philosophy developed by Jeremy Bentham and then by John
Stuart Mill. (The picture is of the corpse of Jeremy Bentham, with his head at
his feet in a glass box at the London School of Economics). |  |
Let me briefly compare Bentham and Mill’s moral philosophy to other schools
of moral philosophy. Whereas Aristotle had an ethics based on developing ones
virtues as a person, and the church an ethics based on explicit and written
codes and principles and duties, the utilitarians had an ethics based on
consequences. This consequentialist view was grounded in the idea that what
mattered was whether actions gave rise to subjective states of pleasure or pain
(utility or disutility). |  |
The idea of utility was to be found in scholastic and early economics but to
this school the utility of an object meant its fitness for its intended purpose.
Now utility was given a different meaning – it was the ability of an object or
service to give rise to a sense of subjective happiness, satisfaction or
dissatisfaction. The criteria for an optimal decision then became the greatest
happiness for the greatest number of people. But how did you measure this
subjective state? |  |
Economists came up with a solution – there were no
absolute measures of utility but this did not matter because in choosing between
options people demonstrated in practice what their comparative utilities were
between different goods. They demonstrate their relative preferences by what
they are prepared to pay as they allocate their limited purchasing power between
different purchasing options for goods and services. What people are prepared to
pay is a proxy measure of their utility for the last unit of a good that they
purchase.
This idea of willingness to pay (or willingness to accept in payment) is then
used by economists as a proxy measure for how much people value things that do
not normally appear on markets. It is thought to be a convenient idea too
because the same situation can involve losers as well as winners, and here is an
idea here that this can be solved by cash compensation payments. If an action
involves increased welfare for one person and decreased welfare for someone else
then it still might involve a greater happiness overall and one can tell that is
so if the gainer can compensate the loser and still be better off. (This is the
so called Kaldor Hicks principle. Note that winner does not actually have to
compensate the loser, they merely have to be able to in theory).
What people are prepared to pay thus measures how much
things matter to them – their ethical values were reflected in their monetary
values. Economists are enthused with this idea as it appears to them to give a
common measuring rod that can be used for all sorts of situations, including
policy decisions about issues that do not normally appear in an ordinary market
at all – for example, environmental decision making.
Thus the importance of protecting a species threatened with extinction is
measured by what people are prepared to pay to protect it – or prepared to
accept in compensation if it goes extinct.
This is actually nonsense because it assumes informed preferences and most
people do not have preferences about such natural things as they live separated
from the species anyway. What’s more it leads to a beauty contest where pandas
and popular animals would score highly but the creepy crawlies or snakes that
are crucial parts of eco-systems get no offers to pay at all. If people are then
informed about the species and the ecological issues the obvious point to make
is that value is created by being informed about the things, highlighting a need
for education, not by spontaneous preferences.
So this point of view is highly challengeable and it has been claimed that
economists are involved in corruption – see right. |  |
This leads me on to what it is economists actually do –
and why these things matter. And the answer is that economists are actually
there as advocates for a particular kind of value system. They are not unlike
priests whose job it is to argue for their belief system.
This is a quote from economist Robert Nelson who describes what it was like
to work as an economist in the US Department of the Interior which was and is
responsible for the upkeep of national parks and landscapes in the USA:
“If economists had any influence—which they sometimes did, if rarely
decisive—it was seldom as literal ‘problem solvers.’ Rather, the greatest
influence of economists came through their defence of a set of values. Much of my
own and other efforts of Interior (Ministry) economists were really to persuade
others in the department to act in accordance with the economic value system, as
compared with other competing priorities and sets of values also represented
within the ranks of the department.” Robert Nelson
Economics as
Religion Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001 p xiv
So how do economists actually do this?
In fact economists mostly create models from assumptions that are assumed to
be self evidently true…or claimed to be true enough for practical purposes.. and
then analyse the logical consequences with mathematic symbols and diagrams. With
enough simplified assumptions it then seems possible to show that competitive
markets deliver efficient outcomes defined in the way economists want.
|  |
What is involved here is actually an implicit theory of how human beings are, what makes them tick. Using this approach it seems reasonable to economists to theorise human beings as if they act in a predictable way – calculating their individual self interest to maximise their utility and then acting accordingly. This makes possible a deterministic view of human action that allows economists to model markets. Of course, markets are places where there are lots of actors but the assumption is made that to get a collective picture of what happens you add up the actions of all the separate individuals as if they do not influence each other. There are no group dynamics in this situation. This is called methodological individualism and diverges a lot from the assumption of the scholastics – that people are providing for others too, including those that they love.Then you make a whole load of other assumptions, the effect of which is to make market behaviour completely predictable in a way that can be modelled in mathematics and diagrams. Such assumptions include the idea that people have all the information that they need about now and the future, do not change their preferences, act only out of self interest and yet act honestly, act in competitive markets, that there are no transaction costs…Most of these premises were nonsensical. Not only were markets not competitive, but people do influence each other when it came to market actions – which accounts for the collective irrationality of market bubbles, for example, when people look to each other for the way the market is evolving and their collective optimism becomes self reinforcing.In fact the market is always shot through with a lack of information and/or information asymmetry. People make mistakes, operate without enough knowledge and so on. This is not to mention that fact that if people really are only motivated by individualistically calculated self interest it is difficult to know why they should not resort to various types of crime. There’s often an implicit assumption of honesty in these models but in real life markets are prone to fraud and opportunism, to secrecy and misleading accounts of product quality. All of these things mean market outcomes are often far from the ideal pictured in the theory.
Of course, if you assume away the real world in your models then, surprise
surprise, these models deliver ideal allocation outcomes – or they do on the
blackboard and in the lecture theatre in the groves of academe, if not in real
life. But what has happened is that conclusions are manufactured based on
premises initially assumed. This may happen in very sophisticated mathematics so
that mere muggles don’t understand it but that’s what the wizards are doing.
(Today’s leading economic textbook writer, Greg Mankiw, has described
non-economists as ‘muggles’, the ordinary people without magical powers,
described in the Harry Potter novels. His implication is that economists are
like wizards.) |  |
As I have said the key to all of this is based on an idea of what people are
like. There is an implicit modelling of human beings here. Certain types of
behaviour (the type that allows economists to model people and markets
predictably) is called “rational”. |  |
You may think that this description of how people are
and how they behave is meant by economists to be applicable only to economic and
market activities. But if people are calculating their individual self interest
in their economic dealings why should one assume that they do not do the same
thing in their political, their social and their interpersonal dealings? Should
we not also assume that government officials are calculating their interests
too? At the very least, why should contact between business and government not
lead to a cosy relationship, particularly if people can leave government posts
and get lucrative jobs with industry? What about bribes and kick-backs from
business for special favours?
When I studied economics at the end of the 1960s the textbooks, for example
by Paul A Samuelson, pictured a world where the state was essentially benevolent
and independent from business. A democratic process determined the policies the
state would adopt and economists were just technical advisers about the options.
They could regulate markets without being contaminated by the self interest
motivations of markets. The idea that the state could be captured by business
interests and the majority of the people were effectively excluded from real
influence was not there.
This began to be replaced by another view of the relationship between
business and the state spearheaded by the Chicago School.
The idea that the state could be captured by interest groups led to a kind
of market fundamentalism by the Chicago school. The ideal was to go all the way
and for the state to be driven out of market activity altogether if at all
possible.
To the Chicago economists the rational calculating individual was a
description that could be applied to the understanding of all human behaviour,
not just that in the market place.
|  |
So, what framework do you use to explain racial discrimination? To Gary
Becker at Chicago, racism is a preference choice of who you want to live near
and employ. Note, he does not endorse or condemn Becker merely sees himself
explaining and drawing out the consequences. |  |
The model of rational economic behaviour is then used by Becker and another
theorist, Richard Posner, to explain “love” , marriage and prostitution in a
utilitarian framework. Marriage is a relationship involving reciprocal service
provision which saves on transaction costs like pricing each service that a
couple provide for each other, or keeping accounts for these services. In this
framework prostitution is a “spot” sexual transaction where it is “more
efficient” to pay for the service in money. | 
 |
It is used to explain crime too. Most people don’t steal because it would
not be profitable but in the life circumstances of criminals the rational
maximisation of costs and benefits of crime does make it pay according to
Becker. This is another form of the redistribution of income in the same broad
category as government welfare programmes. |  |
The trouble with this view is that it is at best
tautologically true in a sense that is banal – people do things because they
want and thus they must get satisfaction or utility from doing and deciding what
they do. However this banality makes little sense of the many actions and people
who do things where they are conflicted – where they act in ways that involve
self sacrifice for moral reasons, where there is genuine anguish about their
difficult decisions, where they do things because they think they ought to, not
because it gives them any satisfaction at all.
At the same time this way of analysing things has important aspects of being
a toxic self fulfilling prophecy and contributes to the ethical degradation of
society.
In fact psychologists have looked at what motivates
people all around the world in different cultures and have come up with a
picture of the varieties of motivations. This picture includes the ideas of the
economists in values in the bottom left hand quadrant but makes no sense of the
many other motivations that people have demonstrated in this diagram by Common
Cause.
http://valuesandframes.org/handbook/Many of these are not simply
different self interested “preferences” in a utilitarian sense. For example many
of the spiritual and community and environmental motivations involve serving a
higher purpose which involves transcending or going beyond the self. These are
intrinsic motivations which can involve a different “life game” in the sense
meant by the critic of psychiatry, Thomas Tzsas; purposes to give meaning and
direction in life.
http://www.bgmi.us/web/bdavey/Life.htm
If the assumptions of what “rational economic man” are
like do not accurately describe many people, they probably do accurate describe
many economists and those trained by them. There is a saying in the Talmud, “We
do not see things as they are, we see things as we are” and this probably does
describe how many economists actually think and decide.
There are important respects in which the economic viewpoint functions as a
belief system which is now shaping how things are in the form of a self
reinforcing or self fulfilling prophecy. The point is that the economist’s view
of the world actually serves to create the very mindset that it describes.
For example, a study of economic and non economics students in 1993 by Frank,
Gilovich and Regan found that most people learn to be more co-operative as they
get older – but that learning economics slows this process of social maturity.
While students in other disciplines learn to be cooperative over college years,
students majoring in economics learn the same fact much more slowly.” It seems
that micro-economics teaching over as little as 4 months can have a noticeable
effect:
“They picked three classes at Cornell University. Two of these were
introduction to microeconomics. The third was introduction to astronomy. In the
first microeconomics class (class A), the professor was a game theorist with
interests in mainstream economics, and he focused on prisoner’s dilemma and how
cooperation might hinder survival. In the second microeconomics class (class B),
the professor’s interests were in development economics and he was a specialist
in Maoist China.
To the students in all these introductory classes, the authors posed simple
ethical dilemmas, including questions such as “If you found an envelope with
$100 with the owner’s address written on it, would you return it?” The questions
were asked twice, first in September, in the beginning of the fall semester and
once again during the final week of classes in December, not even a full four
months apart.
Comparing results against the
astronomy control group, students in economics class A became much more cynical
and gave less ethical responses at the end of the semester. Students in class B
grew to be more unethical, yet not by so much compared to students in class A.
The results clearly show that no matter what their initial ethical tendencies
were, students who were exposed to a mere four-months of “rational” reasoning
became less cooperative.”
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-decision-lab/201104/why-does-studying-economics-hurt-ethical-inclinationsIn important respects there is evidence that departments of economics have
become departments for the promotion of anti-social behaviour.
An early Chicago economist called Frank Knight made the
observation that one requirement for markets to work efficiently is that people
are honest. If they are not honest then things get more complicated – the
transaction costs start to rise. You need to spend time checking out your
suppliers or customers, you need to work longer on creating water tight
contracts. You need to take court action more often with huge costs involved. In
the small town world of Adam Smith if the butcher, the baker and the brewer
ripped each other off the dishonesty would soon get noticed and eventually they
would be likely to lose out from their dishonesty. Federal Reserve Chair Alan
Greenspan and the de-regulators of the 1990s and the early 21st century clearly
did not see the world they lived in like that.
Yes, Adam Smith’s market self organised the supply of the goods that people
want. But markets can self organise criminal activity and anti social behaviour
too.
And this can be on a massive scale. When the American banks created
financial instruments out of loans to people with no income and no assets, got
them judged to be AAA quality they then sold these toxic fraudulent instruments
victims all over the world. The financial victims that purchased them had no
easy way of checking if they were safe investments and assumed that if rating
agencies said that they were AAA then they were. All told there were probably up
to a half a million criminal felonies that took place in this period. |  |
So economics has come a long way. The ideas of the scholastics were
compatible with what could be found in the Bible in the First Epistle to Timothy
in the New Testament, that “The love of money is the root of all evil”. In the
17th and 18th century the idea was that God worked through individual self
interest to create a society delivering in the interests of everyone. This has
now morphed into economics becoming a virtual religion in its own right with
theology for rich people who love money. |  |
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