Economics for Everyone

Moving Beyond Arrogant Idiocy Towards Well-Being

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Mar 21, 2017, 08:30 ET

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 21, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Canadian Philip McShane, author of Profit: The Stupid View of President Donald Trump, publishes a third edition of Economics for Everyone: Das Jus Kapital. In the former McShane wrote of the possibility of doubling wages within a six-year period. In the Preface to Economics for Everyone he puts the challenge in its historical context:

Economics for Everyone: Das Jus Kapital (3rd edition) aims to get people to notice that the orthodox economics, which has been the economic diet of economic activity for some hundreds of years, leads not just to nowhere but to regular disasters, global and local, in financing and feeding and fun. The emergence of sane economics instead of number-laced present voodoo will slowly lift local and global economic activities to sanity and well-being.

Philip McShane was trained in mathematical physics, and later studied philosophy, theology, and economics. He has written extensively in diverse areas, including evolutionary theory, linguistics, economics, and methodology. He has also edited Bernard Lonergan's (1904-1984) major work *For a New Political Economy.* Twice nominated for the Templeton Prize, McShane has given conferences in Canada, the U.S., Korea, India, Australia, England, Mexico, Columbia, and Ireland.

An economic theory has hung around our little-incomed necks for more than three centuries. Helpless rants against that economic theory can be as lofty as Piketty's prose or as lowly as picketing Wall Street, but neither rantings shake the Wall that protects Wall Street. That Wall is not some Trumped-up thing, but a Jeri-code of arrogant economic departments that are firm in their teaching of nonsense. (i)

Economics for Everyone aims both to identify the abusive arrogance and to offer a hopeful, long-term view that has at its heart the economic well-being of all people. McShane claims that in good time an educated public will identify good and bad "driving" of the economy the way we identify good and bad driving of a car nowadays. In a recent interview he spoke optimistically of

effectively challenging present economics in its idiotic undergraduate content, an arrogant idiocy which leads young people by the not-knowing-nose into the slavery of present economic voodoo. Trump is poised to play that voodoo to the hilt, but the World Bank and the IMF are in the same ball park, and people like Piketty in his ongoing publishing and Stiglitz in his recent book The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe (2016) are only puttering along around the same voodoo.

As in prior books, McShane draws upon the works of Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) and Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984) to diagnose a fundamental yet deeply hidden oversight concerning a simple economic fact: there exist two distinct firms—one producing basic goods and services, the other producing non-basic (surplus) goods and services—and there are two respective counter-flows of "money." The two-flow analysis leaves behind both Marxist and Neo-Marxists critiques of "capital" and "capitalists" and Keynesian and Post-Keynesian growth models. "Economics must become more like [coaching] baseball, less like [predicting] Newtonian astronomy." (107)

The new Preface adds a simple exercise for understanding sane economics. Chapters 1. "Baskets & Handfills" and 2. "Flows & Surges" illustrate and expand the key insight, and poise the reader to see 3. "Beyond the Casinos" of electronic hedging and trillion dollar speculating. In chapter 4. "Government and Globe," McShane pushes towards an effective grasp of the dynamics of international trade. In chapter 5, "A Rolling Stone Gathers Nomos," he indicates a timely division of tasks that, when functioning, yields effective implementation of economic wisdom.

Philip McShane (D.Phil., Oxford University, 1965–68) was trained in mathematical physics, and later studied philosophy, theology, and economics. He has written extensively in diverse areas, including evolutionary theory, linguistics, economics, and methodology. His prior books on economics include Wealth of Self & Wealth of Nations (1974), Lonergan's Challenge to the University and the Economy (1980), Pastkeynes Pastmodern Economics: A Fresh Pragmatism (2000), Beyond Establishment Economics: No Thank You, Mankiw (with Bruce Anderson, 2002), Sane Economics and Fusionism (2010), Piketty's Plight and the Global Future (2014), and Profit: The Stupid View of President Donald Trump (2016). McShane has lectured on economics at universities in Mexico, Columbia, USA, Canada, Ireland, UK, Korea, Australia, and India.