Just a note to encourage dailykos readers, especially those interested in the Anti-Capitalist group, to check out a talk by British economist, Lord Adair Turner, to the Bretton Woods economic conference recently sponsored by George Soros's Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET).
Soros gathered together many respected economists to discuss the current economic crisis and its solutions. There were some not-so-respected thinkers there too, including Larry Summers and former British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. Reportedly, both have drastically changed their tunes, singing to the conference about the benefits of government regulation. A bit late boys. (I guess Summers has now made sufficient money to abandon Milton Friedman, while Brown has been suddenly seized by a workingman's conscience and now regrets he didn't regulate the banks!)
Turner, however, is well worth hearing, and I've just spent a fascinating hour and a half listening to a video tape of his talk to the conference, which includes a valuable question and answer session. One questioner was, I think, Duncan Black, a long-time contributor to DailyKos.
Turner, who is chief of the British Financial Services Authority which regulates Britain's banking system, speaks about the need to depart from the obsession of the last thirty years that considered constantly increasing the GNP as the virtually exclusive measure of a society's economic "health". He would expand the concept of economic success to address moral and political issues, including ecological sustainability and social values.
While calling for the inclusion of moral and social values in judging economies and eschewing many of the free-market slogans of the past thirty years, Turner still naively assumes that there is such a thing as a free market under our capitalist system. He calls for its regulation through political debate, seeming to be strangely ignorant of the fact that such open political debate about regulation would only be possible in a society where the financial services industry did not own all the regulators, lobbyists and the politicians who make (or un-make) the regulations.
Turner did admit, however, in response to a question, that the thinking of all too many economists may be skewed by the fact that they are employed by the big banks. Be that as it may, it is interesting to learn the quasi-progressive thinking of a top British economist, who Soros considers to be the modern equivalent of John Maynard Keynes.
The video for Turner's talk appears on Steve Clemons blog. Clemons is a senior fellow with the New America Foundation.