Economics for Everyone (3rd Edition)

Book excerpt: The present state of economics is a very fixed culture of one-flow analysis, symbolized in the culture by talk of GDP. Lonergan’s breakthrough was to identify, after a more than a decade of historical and theoretic work, the historical reality and scientific identity of two flows. So, very simply, where Newton leaped from 2 to 1, Lonergan leaped from 1 to 2. The operable heuristic comes from a clear leap, e.g., from viewing economic output as GDP to arrive at an empirically defined GDP' and GDP", where the single prime points to consumer goods and the double prime points to producer goods. The leap seems simple but it requires very precise thinking about the relations between the two economic flows, a relation that, when not understood and controlled, gives rise to the booms and slumps named and studied by Kondratieff, Juglar, Kitchin, Schumpeter, and later authors. Why should a reader buy this book? It offers a long-term optimistic view of how transformations of the current mess in pseudo-economics—whether in the form of abusive textbooks and well-intentioned abusive teachers, or in the form of the daily “business news,” which has more to do with gambling than business—will lead to a just and shared greatness way beyond current proclamations about America being or becoming great. The Preface to the 3rd edition adds a key simple exercise that can get the reader right into the ball-park of the new economics. The first two chapters should bring a serious reader to the startling conviction that we have been trapped in an alchemy of money for centuries.