'The ideas of economists... both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.' So said John Maynard Keynes in an oft-quoted passage reminiscent of Rudolf Steiner's similar 'what happens between human beings is, among other things, the result of the ideas they entertain.'

In terms of today's events, what matters is to probe deeper our understanding of economic life and its processes, the more so if we think for whatever reason that things could or should be done differently. Associate! fosters such an ongoing idea-audit by presenting relevant, but often contrasting, points of view and occasionally (as in Karp's piece in this issue) offering something of a manifesto piece. A further ongoing theme concerns the need to take an accounting approach to economics, it would appear that this approach is beginning to gain currency in certain circles - see 4) below.

The August issue of Associate! is available here.

This autumn (2009), the Centre for Associative Economics in partnership with the London Waldorf Trust will be offering a short but comprehensive course concerning finance and education, with particular reference to independent schools and Rudolf Steiner's insights in this regard. The course will be held in London (hopefully at or near Rudolf Steiner House), will take place over three separate Saturdays or Sundays (dates yet to be decided), and will cover a range of topics, including the History of Money and Accounting, Double Entry Book-keeping, Financial and Spiritual Sovereignty, Teaching of Financial Literacy to 14-19 year olds, the Funding of Education and the Challenge of Public Benefit.

Conceived in continuing professional development terms, it will combine conventional understandings of finance with Rudolf Steiner's approach and aims to be two-way, providing a thorough backgrounding in the topics covered, but encouraging also feedback and the sharing of experience by participants.

The target cost is £150, depending on numbers. The course will be coordinated by Dr. Christopher Houghton Budd, to whom initial enquiries should be addressed.

An Excerpt from the Friends Page by Stephen Vallus, Lafayette, USA.

I am always greatly encouraged when I find the work of others paralleling our own, which the monthly Associate! newsletter excels at providing of course! Recently I came across a paper entitled: 'No one saw this coming: understanding financial crisis through accounting models' by Dirk Bezemer.

The paper's starting point is the mainstream media idea that no one saw the financial crisis coming. Of course there were those who saw it, which forms the substance of this paper: 'We need to understand how dynamics in accounting relations underpin and shape our economies. The underlying reason is that economic relations and transactions in modern economies are embedded in the double-entry accounting framework. All transacting is predicated on economic agents extending credit to each other, and credit (whether trade credit or bank credit) is fungible with money. Money is not just a unit of account; it is the reflection of relations of debit and credit, and thus money itself is an accounting concept.'

The author calls for accounting researchers to make contributions to economics, rather than the reverse which seems to be the usual thought.