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comment by theadvancedapes
theadvancedapes  ·  3576 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Jeremy Warner: Austria is fast becoming Europe's latest debt nightmare

This problem is essentially a neoliberal crisis brought on by too heavy a reliance on central banks and too little attention paid to sustainable local socio-economic development which needs to be carried out in a distributed self-organized way. I've yet to hear a long-term solution that doesn't include a basic income (which is being considered by Greece and now also, Portugal).





mk  ·  3576 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I agree about the over-reliance on central banks. Like many bipolar arguments, I feel that Austrian and Keynesian positions are probably both correct and wrong. When a few people get to exercise a theory upon many, things tend to go poorly. Central banks have been picking winners and losers based on their own assumptions which cannot reflect reality. Too much central planning is a bad thing.

It's quite possible that a basic income is going to be a component of a sound economic policy going forward. However, both Greece and Portugal are going to have to extricate themselves from what the markets consider to be their current obligations.

theadvancedapes  ·  3576 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    It's quite possible that a basic income is going to be a component of a sound economic policy going forward. However, both Greece and Portugal are going to have to extricate themselves from what the markets consider to be their current obligations.

Agreed, also it is not clear to me how one country in the EU could implement a basic income, without there being some type of cascade effect where all countries essentially have to adopt the new economic model. I guess the only sure thing at the moment is that the current economic paradigm is going to break - although the totality of a new system is hard to conceive - especially when you factor in large-scale automation which necessarily redefines the role of labour in economics.

In my opinion, fundamentally, economics is running into the problem of scarcity in a new way. The whole of economics is built on scarcity and we are now in abundance. How we implement and build abundance economics is the long-term challenge.