CEMEditor

Most people today who pay any attention to the news will be familiar with key economic concepts – consumption, investment, public expenditure, output, exports, imports, unemployment, economic growth, the balance of payments, public borrowing, interest rates, inflation, the national debt. Yet the one measure we hear little about is saving. Saving has become the Cinderella of economic thinking. This is because saving was discredited by Keynes in his The General Theory of Employment, Interest & Money. In the nineteenth century and up to The Second World War classical British economists…

Link to Full Text: Who Needs Barns? - Bishop Peter Selby   About the Author: Peter Selby was the Bishop of Worcester and Bishop to HM Prisons until his retirement in 2007, and was President of the National Council for Independent Monitoring Boards from 2008 to 2013. He is the author of Grace and Mortgage: the Language of Faith and the Debt of the World (reissued 2018) and An Idol Unmaksed: a Faith Perspective on Money (2014). He is an Assistant Bishop in the diocese of Southwark and an Honorary…

Link to Full Text: The Case for Normalised Interest Rates - Dr Peter Warburton   About the Author: Peter Warburton has worked as an applied economist in the UK since 1975, starting out as a researcher at the London Business School. He gained his PhD from City University in 1987 and has worked as a City economist for Lehman Brothers and Flemings. He spent 15 years as an economist at Ruffer LLP and has run his own macro-financial consultancy, Economic Perspectives, since 1996. He is a founder member of the…

CEME hosted, in partnership with CCLA Investment Management, an online event entitled, "Invest or Divest in Brown Industries? The Moral Dilemmas". The purpose of this event was to bring together key speakers concerned with investment in, or management of, ‘brown industries’ from both the companies and the investment community. The discussion focused on the questions of investment and engagement versus increasing demands for disinvestment. Thursday 8th July 2021.   Chair:  Anne Devlin, Board member, Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics Anne worked for 22 years at BP Oil International, mostly…

Reimagining Capitalism: How business can save the world is a very didactic, easy to read book. Unfolding like a captivating lecture, it is highly structured and each point is illustrated with a wealth of business examples taken from a wide spectrum of enterprises, old and new. You can easily imagine Rebecca Henderson on the campus of the Harvard Business School answering the challenging questions of Millennials who fully embrace sustainability and inclusion topics. The resulting book challenges head-on the paradigm of business management theory over the last fifty years that…

The sub-title of The World Made Otherwise is “Sustaining Humanity in a Threatened World” and climate change or other environmental issues form the book’s starting point and backdrop. Gorringe sees climate change as creating a burning platform that makes thorough-going political, economic and social change imperative. His prognosis is dire. He opines that “civilisational collapse is likely” (page 19) and that, together, environmental issues and current socio-political trends “could suggest the ‘new dark ages’ of which MacIntyre spoke nearly 40 years ago” (page 153). He asserts that the resulting problems…

CEME was pleased to host an event on “Ethics and Economics” which took place on Wednesday 12th May 2021. The full audio recording of the event can be found here. Business and markets exist to serve society and not the other way round. Has our economic system become detached from its values and ethical moorings? Have we moved from Adam’s Smith’s concept of self-interest as bound up in the fortunes of others to a merely transactional system driven by selfishness? The discussion will consider how we can bring our moral…

  Jan Carlzon's book Moments of Truth comes from the depths of the 1980s. It is both prophetic and deeply inspiring and as fresh and relevant now as it was when he wrote it. Carlzon was the young and dynamic president and CEO of Scandinavian Airline Services (SAS). He faced an unenviable challenge with this part-state owned monolith. The Oil Crisis of the mid 70s had meant that the aircraft business had stagnated, and SAS was heading towards a $20 million loss. It was assumed that Carlzon would take the…

Capitalism and Democracy is a short book and, as Tomas Spragens admits, it does not contain “a great deal of cutting-edge scholarship” (page vii). Nonetheless, it deserves to be widely read. It comprises an explanation and analysis of “the sharp disagreement encountered these days between advocates of laissez-faire and champions of a more expansive welfare state” (page 10). Spragens suggests that, properly analysed, this debate involves disagreements in relation to three different issues: whether markets maximise prosperity; the moral defensibility of the distributions of resources produced by the capitalist marketplace;…

CEME was delighted to host a Zoom event on the highly topical issue of Inflation in the UK. Sir Robert Chote (Chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility, 2010-20) participated alongside Lord Griffiths to the discussion. The full title of the event was “How Serious is the Return of Inflation?”, and took place on Thursday 18th March 2021. This was a unique opportunity to hear two prominent economists debate a key moral issue in macroeconomics. Please find the full audio recording here.   Biographies: Lord Griffiths taught at the LSE…

  “Free Trade Under Fire” by Douglas A. Irwin is, as the title suggests, a book on the debate and defence of international trade. It covers a wide spectrum of (sometimes sensitive) issues on the subject. From national sovereignty and trade policies, to popular misconceptions about trade, the book tackles each argument with considerable depth and backed by evidence. Douglas Irwin is John Sloan Dickey Third Century Professor in Social Sciences at Dartmouth College. He speaks regularly on trade policy (particularly U.S trade), and writes for various news outlets including…