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Thus, exactly because finance is efficient at responding to changing profit opportunities, it can become harmful for the rest ef the economy. And this is why James Tobin, the 1981 Nobel laureate in economics, talked of the need to 'throw some sand in the wheels of our excessively efficient international money markets'. For this purpose, Tobin proposed a financial transaction tax, deliberately intended so slow down financial flows. A taboo in polite circles until recently, the so-called Tobin Tax has recently been advocated by Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister. But the Tobin Tax is not the only way in which we can reduce the speed gap between finance and the real economy. Other means include making hostile takeovers difficult (hereby reducing the gains from speculative investment in stocks), banning short-selling (the practice of selling shares that you do not own today), increasing margin requirements (that is, the proportion of the money that has to be paid upfront when buying shares) or putting restrictions on cross-border capital movements, especially for developing countries.
The economics of Herbert Simon and his followers has really changed the way we understand modern firms and, more broadly, the modern economy. It helps us break away from the myth that our economy is exclusively populated by rational self-seekers interacting through the market mechanism. When we understand that the modern economy is populated by people with limited rationality and complex motives, who are organized in a complex way, combining markets, (public and private) bureaucracies and networks, we begin to understand that our economy cannot be run according to free-market economics. When we more closely observe the more successful firms, governments and countries, we see they are the ones that have this kind of nuanced view of capitalism, not the simplistic free-market view.
Even within the dominant school of economics, that is, the neo-classical school, which provides much of the foundation for free-market economics, there are theories that explain why free markets are likely to produce sub-optimal results. These are theories of 'market failure' or 'welfare economics', first proposed by the early twentieth-century Cambridge professor Arthur Pigu, and later developed by modern-day economists such as Amartya Sen, William Baumol and Joseph Stiglitz [...]
But we are material beings and cannot live on ideas, however great the knowledge economy may sound. Morever, we have always lived in a knowledge economy in the sense that it has always been a command over superior knowledge, rather than the physical nature of activities, that has ultimately decided which country is rich or poor. [...]
his argument here is that countries need to shift away from services, which are 1) not tradeable and 2) often highly dependent and even parasitic on the manufacturing sector, and instead invest more in infrastructure (more basic than the Internet) and industry
This book is not an anti-capitalist manifesto. Being critical of free-market ideology is not the same as being against capitalism. Despite its problems and limitations, I believe that capitalism is still the best economic system that humanity has invented. My criticism is of a particular version of capitalism that has dominated the world in the last three decades, that is, free-market capitalism. This is not the only way to run capitalism, and certainly not the best, as the records of the last three decades shows. The book shows that there are ways in which capitalism should, and can, be made better.
baby steps I guess