1) What is real in Economics? 2) Forthcoming Events 3) Associate! May 2009 - Concerning Rights
4) How to Build a New Economic Model - A Report
5) Money Means Not Money
In usual discourse the 'real' economy is contrasted to the 'financial', and not always with the connotation that finance is unreal: rather it has a 'reality' different to that of the 'real' economy.
In his 'twin value theory' Rudolf Steiner describes how values arise: - both through the application of labour to land - V1, to produce goods for example, what we naturally think of as real.
- and through the application of intelligence to labour - V2, akin to the realm of finance
Work always involves an element of each - the problem arises when one prefers one to the other. V1 is connected with tangible work (land transformed by labour), V2 is connected with intangible work (labour saved by insight). One is not more real than the other.
It is often unclear in everyday discourse whether 'real' is meant philosophically, in which case 'nominal' would be its opposite (as when speaking, for example, of real and nominal interest rates ), or in some other sense. Presumably the reference must be to some economically 'not real' thing such as ... a right or an idea.
The red thread of the May issue of Associate! concerns our understanding of rights in modern economic life. Rights are usually thought of and treated as commodities, but this disguises both their true social nature and deeper economic effects. While a goods market need not raise concerns, a rights market (for what else is the property market) is quite another kettle of fish.
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Lead: Capitalised Debt and Compulsory Gift. Michael Spence
A Sign of Our Time: It?s Time to Explode the Myth of the Shareholder.
Feature: Sovereignty, Land and Succession. Lowell Reinheimer and Arthur Edwards.
Archive: Land in a World Economy. Stephen Vallus
21 Policies: Towards True Pricing
Glossary: Zero-sum Economics
AE Hero: Tom Greco's The End of Money and The Future of Civilisation
Accounting Corner: Valuing Land
Thoughts on the recent Colours of Money Seminar (Stroud UK, April 2009 - Catherine Rayne)
There seems to be a general feeling through all levels of society that the recent events in economic history could mark a real potential space for change and a movement in a different direction. While many people want and feel the need for deep and sustained reform, far removed from the quick fixes and patching up currently offered by governments, there is very little inspiration coming from academia or elsewhere on how to build a new social or economic model which values all peoples and the planet equally ... Read the report
A seminar is being convened this autumn to celebrate the centenary of the publication of Hartley Withers' classic work The Meaning of Money. Steiner referred several times to Withers, describing him as a discriminating observer whose book was 'the best that had been written on [the] subject and which [was] the outcome of real insight into social conditions.'
The seminar will bring together monetary economists and financial journalists: it is
accompanied by an essay, Money Means Not Money, to published in the June issue of Economic Affairs - which looks at the evolution of money from a 'physical' to a 'fiscal' phenomenon and indicates that Steiner?s idea of money-as-bookkeeping differentiated money) offer a further evolutionary step.
The Friends of Associative Economics Bulletin provides an overview of what is going on around the world in the associative economics movement. The bulletin is viewable as a webpage at www.cfae.biz/fae-bulletin/09May/
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