Today, on 31 December 2020, at 23:00 local London time, the UK will formally leave the international socio-economic space created by European nation-states through a number of international treaties since the end of the second world war. It is a turning point in the sense that the UK deliberately diminishes its reach in the global…
Author: Robert Gilles
Commodities: II―A property-based approach to economic goods
In the first instalment of this set of posts on the conception of economic commodities, I discussed the standard economic market approach to commodities: Commodities are determined fully by their market properties. This is rather limiting view of the important concept of economic commodities. It seems more logical and productive to have a property-based conception…
Crisis (in) management
The global Corona pandemic has now resulted in a collapse of GDP in many countries. Recently, it was reported that UK GDP reduced by 20.4% in the month of April. What surprises is the reaction to this. Some economic commentators reacted in panicky terms to this news and talk about the economy dropping off a…
A missed opportunity: The Corona crisis and the reformation of the global economy
A number of recent videos uploaded on YouTube on the effects of the Corona crisis on the global economy and the state of political economy to deal with this crisis. Is the reaction to the corona crisis by the governments a missed opportunity for global economic reform? PS An interesting article on the missed opportunity…
Commodities: I―What are they?
Recently the world was confronted with the phenomenon that oil had a negative price due to the tremendous drop in demand for oil due to the worldwide Corona crisis lockdown, as widely reported in the media. From an economist’s perspective this should be quite shocking and worrying, since traditional market theory does not really allow…
Thoughts inspired by Rutger Bregman
Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian, who recently published some interesting and rather inspirational books in the Dutch language. Several of these have been translated now. The two main books I am referring to are: Bregman (2017), Utopia for Realists: and how we can get there, Bloomsbury, translated by Elizabeth Manton, originally published as Gratis…