Querying economic orthodoxy
Are you weary of the hectoring message of free-market economists and their followers, that there can be no escape from the relentless pressures of deregulated global markets?
Are you disillusioned with the laisser-faire economy and its instabilities, its gaping inequalities, its ugly aggressiveness, its endless upheavals and too rapid changes, its deteriorating public services?
Have you had enough of the obsession with cost-cutting, which persistently destroys jobs or diminishes their quality?
If your answer is yes, this site is for you. It offers a series of more than 50 articles, with a new one every three months, which attack fashionable economic doctrines and also explore the writings of "heterodox" economists who propose better ideas. It exposes the glaring or hidden flaws in the underlying philosophy of the free-marketeers. It undermines their basic assumptions. It shows that there are indeed other possibilities; that we are not fated to suffer the destiny wished upon us by economists in Chicago and elsewhere.
The inaugural page, The Tyranny of the Market, looks briefly at some of the topics to be covered. See also the Table of Contents.
Why the site name equilibrium-economicum? Because this site will argue that sound economic policy means finding and preserving acceptable equilibrium between opposing principles. Between the need for competition and the damage caused by its excesses. Between the need for freedom of enterprise and the abuses of the deregulated jungle. Between the virtues of international trade and the error of allowing foreign competitors to destroy our industries just because, for the moment, their costs are lower then ours. Would they still be cheap once we had become dependent upon them?
Angus Sibley, webmaster, is an actuary and former member of the London Stock Exchange. After a career in the City, where he was a specialist in bonds, he is now retired and lives in Paris.
He is the author of more than eighty published articles on finance, on economics and on religious and philosophical topics as well as a recent book, The 'poisoned spring' of economic libertarianism. He has a special interest in the conflicts between Christian doctrine and current economic theory and practice.
Among his other interests are music, architecture, literature and travel.