Not employment or inflation as argued during the Great Depression and years of Reaganomics, the mechanism that drives the business cycle is proven to be the housing and property market in this analysis of the instability of financial markets. The consequences of how neoclassical economics ignores the importance of land are presented in a discussion of the dot-com crash. Agricultural, industrial, and commercial property and the housing market are examined to suggest that policymakers must revise their treatment of land in economic decisions to avoid the next economic crash, predicted for 2010.
Fred Harrison's thesis is that land speculation is the major cause of depressions. He shows how the land market functions as a junction box which regulates the power flowing between Labour and Capital. And how land speculation periodically throws the switches on the productive power of men and machines, causing economic stagnation. This theory was acknowledged by philosophers such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and social reformers ranging from Winston Churchill to Leo Tolstoy, but it has been forgotten by today's economists and policy-makers. The hypothesis is tested against the historical facts and the recent booms and slumps, and is found to offer a powerful explanation for postwar trends in unemployment and the distribution of income.
Presenting insights into how income and wealth are produced and distributed, this study analyzes how, despite two centuries of capital accumulation, poverty persists in rich nations. Relying on the theories of David Ricardo—a 19th-century economist credited with developing the theory of rent—a thorough presentation of the history of this economic law, from the inscriptions on the clay tablets of ancient Babylonian merchants to statistics that portray the modern economy, is provided. Presenting readers with conceptual tools that will motivate them to reengage in the democratic process, this examination dispels the myths of contemporary fiscal policy while providing keen insights into the history, and future, of economics.
The author was the first to forecast (in 1997) the events that ruptured the global economy in 2008 by applying an analysis that exposes the fault lines in the structure of the market economy. Now, he extends his analysis to the future of the West, to evaluate fears from distinguished commentators who claim that European civilisation is in danger of being eclipsed. He concludes that the West is at a dangerous tipping point and provides empirical and theoretical evidence to warrant such an alarming conclusion. But he also explains why it is not too late to prevent the looming social catastrophe. Attributing the present crisis to a social process of cheating, he develops a synthesis of the social and natural sciences to show how the market system can be reformed. He introduces the concept of organic finance, which prescribes reforms capable of delivering both sustainable growth, with a more equitable distribution of wealth, and respect for other life forms. To explain the persistent failure to resolve protracted social and environmental crises, the author introduces a theory of social trauma. Populations have been destabilised by the coercive loss of land to the point where they have lost their traditional reference points. No longer able to live by the laws of nature, they are forced to conform to laws that consolidate the privileges of those who had cheated them of their birthright: access to nature’s resources. Many pathological consequences flow from this tearing of people from their social and ecological habitats. To recover from this state of trauma, the author argues, people need to use the new tools of communication, such as social media, to regain control over their future destiny through a kind of collective psychosocial therapy. The author challenges the view that the West can climb out of depression by applying the financial measures known as “austerity”. He outlines a new strategy that would restore full employment and reverse the decline in midd
Drawing on case studies of organized violence—ranging from territorial wars and colonial conquests to non-state variants such as organized crime—this record offers a general theory to account for the use of force in both the state and civil sectors of society. Challenging the popular views that the dominant forms of violence are due to failings of human nature, this volume suggests that the laws and institutions favoring an approach to property rights that encourage rent seeking are responsible. Addressing issues such as genocide and the gap between the rich and poor, this record proposes policies to dismantle the incentives that nurture the resort to violence by redistributing power to the individual.
The shocking true crime story of child murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Great Britain’s most horrific serial killers. During the early 1960s, just as Beatlemania was exploding throughout the United Kingdom, a pair of psychopathic British killers began preying on the very young, innocent, and helpless of Greater Manchester. Between 1963 and 1965, Ian Brady and his lover and partner, Myra Hindley, were responsible for the abduction, rape, torture, and murder of five young victims, ranging in age from ten to seventeen years old. The English press dubbed the grisly series of homicides “the Moors Murders,” named for the desolate landscape where three of the corpses were eventually discovered. Based in part on the author’s face-to-face prison interviews with the killers, Fred Harrison’s fascinating and disturbing true crime masterwork digs deeply into Brady and Hindley’s personal histories to examine the factors that led to their mutual attraction and their evolution into the UK’s most notorious pair of human monsters. It was during these interviews that new details about the killers’ terrible crimes surfaced, compelling the police to reopen what was arguably the most shocking and sensational homicide case in the annuls of twentieth-century British crime. With a new introduction by the author, meticulously researched and compellingly written, Brady and Hindley is the definitive account of Britain’s most hated serial killers.
The mystery of persistent economic failure is explained. The authors accuse the founders of neoclassical economics of distorting the science to protect vested interests and preventing governments from adopting policies that would yield prosperity for everyone.
Face it. The world is no closer to consigning poverty to history. Why is there still poverty-from whole countries of the poor South, to the back streets, slums and trailer parks of the rich West? The good intentions, the money, the rhetoric, the pity and the media histrionics are but pinpricks to a worldrampaging monster. They say there is no silver bullet. Neither Geldof or Bono, nor the United Nations, nor the vast assembled hosts of international aid and development agencies have the answer. Doesn't every citizen of the world have an equal right to the good life? With so much wealth in the world, why are so many of us so poor, when we could rid ourselves of this monster? And the fact is, there is only one way to kill poverty...
With an updated introduction by Fred Harrison, Shepheard Walwyn has now published this classic book as an eBook. Economists know that the optimum conditions for private enterprise are achieved when taxes on the earned incomes of labour and capital are reduced to zero but, because neoclassical economic theory insists on treating land as capital, they dismiss the obvious alternative to taxing labour and capital – the unearned income from land. Mason Gaffney explains the importance of recognising land as a distinctive factor of production and the consequences of its uniqueness for economic policy, for example, that income from land is subject to market forces quite different from those that determine a return on capital. Nic Tidman brings together the classical literature on land taxation to explain the argument that such taxation is an economically efficient and ethical revenue source. The authors argue that reform of the structure of public finance would make it possible to restore full employment without causing inflation and to reduce the overall tax burden. Once again, Shepheard Walwyn presents a different approach to an old problem.
The key role that farming plays in the economy of Indiana today owes much to the work of John Harrison Skinner (1874-1942). Skinner was a pioneering educator and administrator who transformed the study of agriculture at Purdue University during the first decades of the twentieth century. From humble origins, occupying one building and 150 acres at the start of his career, the agriculture program grew to spread over ten buildings and 1,000 acres by the end of his tenure as its first dean. A focused, single-minded man, Skinner understood from his own background as a grain and stock farmer that growers could no longer rely on traditional methods in adapting to a rapidly changing technological and economic environment, in which tractors were replacing horses and new crops such as alfalfa and soy were transforming the arable landscape. Farmers needed education, and only by hiring the best and brightest faculty could Purdue give them the competitive edge that they needed. While he excelled as a manager and advocate for Indiana agriculture, Skinner never lost touch with his own farming roots, taking especial interest in animal husbandry. During the course of his career as dean (1907-1939), the number of livestock on Purdue farms increased fourfold, and Skinner showed his knowledge of breeding by winning many times at the International Livestock Exposition. Today, the scale of Purdue's College of Agriculture has increased to offer almost fifty programs to hundreds of students from all over the globe. However, at its base, the agricultural program in place today remains largely as John Harrison Skinner built it, responsive to Indiana but with its focus always on scientific innovation in the larger world.
Review: This volume discusses and illustrates the effects of the world's population on natural resources, land use, atmosphere, chemicals, wastes, ecosystems, and biodiversity. It is filled with high-quality maps, charts, and informative illustrations."--"Outstanding Reference Sources," American Libraries, May 2002
Western civilisation is threatened by the cannibalistic phase of what economists call free riding (or rent seeking), and which the author characterises as the culture of cheating. This culture was the source of the social pathologies that caused the collapse of the civilisations of antiquity, and the Fall of Rome. Fred Harrison explains that the global house price peak in 2026 will provoke the Great Convergence of four existential crises - social, economic, climatic and demographic. That convergence will overwhelm governments and result in the collapse of western civilisation, and may even threaten the viability of humanity itself. But there is just enough time to mobilise people's understanding of the driving force behind this cataclysm, and to institute the financial reforms that would rebuild social resilience. The democracies, however, will have to overcome the continuing threat from Donald Trump - the arch rent seeker - and the policy paralysis that afflicts governance today. The Westminster model is interrogated to reveal how the aristocracy of old, who grabbed the commons and turned the peasants into hostages, produced a political system that is not fit to meet the needs of the 21st century. The author deconstructs the history of the Mother of Parliaments to lay bare the character of the power that inflicts poverty and premature death on millions of people in the rich nations. That politics, he claims, is guilty of the greatest crime against humanity.
Dr John West, Cambridge don and private investigator, was present at the trial of an odd duck, R. A. Adcock, who was being most uncooperative in answering questions about a bank robbery. At length, Adcock had made a dash for it from the courtroom - through a glass window, and what should have been a three storey drop to the street. But suddenly, Adcock wasn't there, and at once a swarm of bees came into the courtroom. Thus begins The Molecule Men, which takes many fascinating and terrifying turns to its chilling conclusion. In the second story, the Monster of Loch Ness, Tom Cochrane, an independent scientist, determines to find out why the waters of Loch Ness are inexplicably warming up. What was it that caused the waters of the loch to pour up into the air like the worst rainstorm any of the observers had ever seen? What was at the bottom of the loch? These two short novels by a celebrated father and son team will hold the interest of the science fiction fan from page one on.
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