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The Unsucking Of Economics

November 20, 2014 By Genevieve Tran 3 Comments

I grew up in the Toronto District School Board being able to complete the square, calculate the hypotenuse and most importantly, conjugate irregular French verbs. Armed with these life-affirming skills, I ran headlong into adulthood confident that I’d be able to slice and dice anything life threw me, Fruit Ninja-style.

I was taught that what awaited me, was what awaited other creatures of a grandly designed natural order: a meritocracy that would reward hard workers and solvers of x. And hadn’t I seen it in my own family of 1980s Vietnamese boat refugees who had foregone welfare and worked their way up in Canadian society? Freedom and rights, democracy, and capitalism, I learned were the foundational pillars that made the society that I knew, great.

What took me decades to figure out was that capitalism was the one pillar most often #$%&ed with by a bunch of guys not elected by any citizenry. After the damage was done I realized that, as a population, we’re not taught about the Rube Goldberg-esque mechanisms of the global economy. We have been content to outsource that thinking to academics, regulators and government consultants — who often work in parallel for investment banks or hedge funds (i.e. institutional gamblers of our money). This conflict of interest isn’t something we’re even aware that we should question.

Filed Under: Media & Culture Tagged With: 7Robots, Ann Pettifor, banking crisis, banks, Canada, capitalism, City of London, comics, Critical Economic Thinking, crowdfunding, democracy, economics, economy, education, Finance, financial crisis, freedom, freedom of speech, graphic novel, Great Depression, Great Moderation, Ha Joong Chang, history, Human Rights, IDEAeconomics, immigration, Inside Job, Karl Marx, Kickstarter, Kingston University, London, Michael Hudson, Miguel Guerra, Noam Chomsky, Seattle, Steve Keen, Suzy Dias, The Responsibility of the Intellectual, Toronto, United Kingdom, Vietnam, Wall Street, World War II

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