Imagine that you go to take a train and are told at the station ...

“Sorry madam, your journey will take much longer today as all the trains are running slow.” 

“What everywhere!” you ask “How can that be, is there glue on the line? What do the engineers say?”

“The engineers are all on holiday madam, but our economist told us that it’s a worldwide railway ‘slump’ when railways all over the world slow down for a few years. He said technically it’s a ‘railway recession’ and we just need to wait for a year or two for the trains to recover their 'animal spirits'.”

All too familiar ...

Such explanations sound ridiculous ... yet if we ask questions about the economy, they sound all too familiar. Despite the triumph of free market capitalism and globalisation, we are beset by economic problems and problems with their roots in the functioning of the economy:

• Environmental destruction. Human economic activity is causing the mass extinction of other species and threatening the habitability of the planet, in particular by the rapid climate change caused by burning fossil fuels.

• Poverty in the midst of plenty. The persistence of unemployment and deprivation even in countries considered wealthy, plus widespread poverty in the world’s poorer and less industrialised countries.

• Insecurity. Prosperity and development have not brought security even for the better-off citizens of the world. Public infrastructure and facilities we could formerly afford are often under threat. New ‘labour-saving’ technology paradoxically results in pressure to work harder and for longer hours.

Politicians and economists claim that they want to tackle these issues but even in the wealthiest and most technologically advanced countries are apparently unable to do so. The only solution proffered is growth and more growth, despite the fact that in the richer countries we have already had centuries of growth, and despite the looming environmental catastrophe that has resulted.

We desperately need a straightforward explanation of how our economy operates and why it fails to solve such problems, or worse, actually creates them ... Not another ‘critique’ or list of things we ‘should’ do, but a believable economic analysis of the existing economy, on the basis that if you want to fix something you first have to understand what’s going wrong.

The first part of ‘An Economy of Want’ is an attempt to do just that. You could read it with no intention of changing anything. But of course most of us do want to solve these problems, so there is a second part that considers what sorts of changes we would have to make to get a fairer and more sustainable economy, and one that most people would hopefully find a happier and more fulfilling one to live in. Naturally that second part can only be speculative. Whether and how we can develop politics and policy that get us to that better world, must be the collective work of many of us - no one book can be more than a tiny contribution. The e-book is regularly free in the hope that others will take up the ideas and develop them further (... or correct or disprove them!).