Opinion (Gordon Brown, former British Prime Minister and Leader of the Labor Party from 2007 to 2010): “In the patterns of borrowing today, we can already detect parallels with the pre-crisis credit boom. We’re seeing the same over-reliance on short-term capital markets that ultimately brought down Northern Rock, Iceland’s banks and Lehman Brothers. …

“International rules are needed for international banks. Without them, as the International Monetary Fund has warned, global banks will evade regulation ‘by moving operations, changing corporate structures, and redesigning products.’ …

“Political expediency, a failure to think and act globally, and a lack of courage to take on vested interests are pushing us inexorably toward the next crash. We will have another crash soon … because absolutely nothing has been fixed. Indeed, things have only gotten worse since the last crash.

My Comment: As long as we have not defined our own restructuring as a necessary and sufficient condition for the solution to all our problems, we will inexorably approach new problems.
[124605]

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Question: Do you have economists who would be able to develop a model of the economy of reasonable consumption?

Answer: No, we are not involved in that area. After all, as they become an integral society, it will create its own environment for itself.

Instead of regular banks, there will be banks that engage only in service to the population and will not take anything more than what is needed for the bank to exist. The same thing relates to the rest of the social systems. They will function only in order to give service to people and not to make profits from them.

The economy will gradually shrink to a normal, logical volume and will stop being a growth economy pursuing increasing percentages each quarter. What for? In order to pollute the atmosphere, to pump out energy resources from the earth, to accumulate “green paper” and just store them in banks? Is that called “progress”? It’s certain that the present crisis is designed to regulate this situation.

The economy of growth will die out on its own. For this to happen, there is no need for revolutions because everything will be realized through the integral education of the people! Masses of people in cities and different countries will gradually make the transition to a different system of communication between them. Think about it, what is economy, finance, and exchange of merchandise if not communication between people, which is expressed in a material form.

Question: It is possible, of course, to switch to barter exchange.

Answer: There is no need for any exchange; society will create new structures of mutual service for itself.
[124073]
From Kab TV’s “An Integral World” 10/24/13

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Opinion (Michael Khazin, economist and political research analyst): “Modern society bears a heavy contradiction within itself: it is organized post-industrially; its management system is built on the feudal principle of a rigid vertical; the elite is arranged by tribal lines. As a result, problems arise all the time.

One of the ways to overcome them is to increase the number of wealthy people – the financial elite. Due to the credit system, the number of rich people increased by 10 times compared with what the economy can sustain. This allowed to greatly decrease the destructive activity of talented and energetic people, who normally could not have access to the “system” since it is just not big enough.

“Two questions arise: First – What can be done with those who are active, but not rich yet? Where could they be pushed? To fascists? To communists? To Wahhabis? All three options are extremely dangerous for the government and the elite, but the alternative is not visible. Second – What can be done with those active and already competent, who are still rich, but due to circumstances will soon cease to be?

“To put it bluntly, using the activity of those who have already lost all hopes for the future (including those who have already become either a Wahhabi or a fascist), the nouveaux riches may try to topple the current government and its elite under the pretext that they could not avoid a huge crisis, with which they do not know what to do. In my opinion, this is the main danger for the modern elite.

“In the past decade, the share of profits which the financial sector redistributes in its favor grew at least 5 times – from 10 to 50%.  As the crisis develops, it will fall in the best case for financiers to the same 10% (and most likely even more). The economy itself will fall by 50% in the developed countries, which means that in absolute terms the financial sector will be reduced by an order of 10 times. How many people who will be left in it who will be able to maintain a standard of living above the average? Where will those who today provide luxurious consumption go?

“This conflict – between the elite and the “nouveau riche” who have grown over the past decade – will become the basis for the destruction of Western society and the entire liberal ideology.

My Comment: The egoistic ties that held and developed society throughout centuries are broken, and the egoistic society that developed naturally and existed for tens of thousands of years is beginning to break down. This destruction is not like the transition from one regime (formation) to the next; it is the destruction of all the foundations of society; it is the transition to new, altruistic ties, through suffering or the awareness of the need.

This type of public relations needs new people for whom a feeling of life is in the property of bestowal upon others and not in the property of reception from others. This is a form of anti-world. It can be obtained only under the influence of the Upper Light that can be attracted only by the method of integral education (Kabbalah).
[124369]

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Opinion (Igor Agamirzyan, CEO Russian Venture Company): “Robotics and new production methods will turn factories into deserted premises, which will be run by a dozen of operators. What could be done with free time that people all over the world will have?

“The first industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18^th century with the mechanization of the textile industry. The culmination of the second industrial revolution became Ford’s assembly lines.

“In less than two centuries, the economic, political and social structure of the world became completely subordinated to the new industrial reality. Now we live in the era of the third industrial revolution. However, not everyone understands that it is radically different from the previous two. And together with it, our life will be fundamentally different.

“The main feature of the new industrialization is the shift of the center of the added value from manufacturing to the development, engineering and design. In the modern technological economy, the replication of complex objects became practically free.

“In the pharmaceutical industry, the production cost of a pill is nearing zero, while corporations spend billions of dollars on the development and marketing of new drugs. In the near future, the production capacity will be in the form of a home printer.

“Production returns from developing countries to the developed ones because now goods are created in shops without people. As a result, the role of the various states will change in the global world.

“The first two industrial revolutions brought changes to the structure of society. In a short time, the number of people in the world grew from tens of millions to seven billion. The average life expectancy has doubled; for the first time in human history, the majority of the population do not starve; only 5% of the population can satisfy the basic needs of humankind. The main outcome of this transformation is the emergence of surplus of the free time that people have. The third industrial revolution will fill this time with ideas and meaning.”

My Comment: Our development is heading towards freeing the human being from the animal level where it is necessary to take care of the body, so that at the moment when we begin to recognize the evil of our egoism and its finality, we could become fully engaged in our re-education and similarity to the next degree of our —the level of “human,” in the implementation of the Biblical condition of “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
[124042]

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In the News (from The Guardian): “Limitless growth is the fantasy of economists, businesses and politicians. It is seen as a measure of progress. As a result, gross domestic product (GDP), which is supposed to measure the wealth of nations, has emerged as both the most powerful number and dominant concept in our times. However, economic growth hides the poverty it creates through the destruction of nature, which in turn leads to communities lacking the capacity to provide for themselves.

“Thus nature’s amazing cycles of renewal of water and nutrients are defined into nonproduction. The peasants of the world, who provide 72% of the food, do not produce; women who farm or do most of the housework do not fit this paradigm of growth either. A living forest does not contribute to growth, but when trees are cut down and sold as timber, we have growth. Healthy societies and communities do not contribute to growth, but disease creates growth through, for example, the sale of patented medicine. …

“Both ecology and economics have emerged from the same roots – ‘oikos,’ the Greek word for household. As long as economics was focused on the household, it recognized and respected its basis in natural resources and the limits of ecological renewal. It was focused on providing for basic human needs within these limits. Economics as based on the household was also women-centered. Today, economics is separated from and opposed to both ecological processes and basic needs. While the destruction of nature has been justified on grounds of creating growth, poverty and dispossession has increased. While being non-sustainable, it is also economically unjust.”

My Comment: Our evil inclination, egoism, plays with us and drives is into crisis and a dead end, so that we recognize its evil and begin to seek the way to correct it, until we find the wisdom of Kabbalah and take over its realization and goal. This happens according to plan: “I have created the evil inclination, I have created the Torah as a spice. This refers to the Light in it, since the Light in it reforms it.” First, there is the recognition of evil of our nature, and then search for the means to correct the evil.
[121598]

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In the News (from Business Spectator): “A Pew Research Center opinion survey, conducted in 39 countries this spring, asked: ‘Will children in your country be better off than their parents?’ Only 33 per cent of Americans believed their children would live better, while 62 per cent said they would live worse. Europeans were even gloomier. Just 28 per cent of Germans, 17 per cent of Brits, 14 per cent of Italians and 9 per cent of French thought their children would be better off than previous generations. This Western pessimism contrasts strongly with optimism in the developing world: 82 per cent of Chinese, 59 per cent of Indians and 65 per cent of Nigerians believe in a more prosperous future.”

My Comment: Do we really need to wait until the deadlock is right before our eyes and there will be no escape from the deadly clash with it? Human egoism does not allow him to really see the future.

It is said that the angel of death offers a person a knife with a drop of poison on its tip, and a person inevitably opens his mouth and swallows the poison because he cannot refuse the egoistic pleasure contained in it. There is no other way to escape death but to obey the wisdom of those who foresee the future.
[123357]

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Opinion (Sir Christopher Pissarides, School Professor of Economics & Political Science and Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, Nobel Prize winner for economics in 2010): “One of the world’s leading economists will today admit he was wrong to back the creation of the euro – and call for it to be dismantled.

“Sir Christopher Pissarides, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2010, was once a passionate believer in the benefits of the single currency.

“But in an extraordinary change of heart, today he will warn the euro is creating a ‘lost generation’ of unemployed youngsters and is ‘dividing Europe.’

“The Cypriot-British economist will call for action to ‘restore the euro’s credibility in international markets’ and to ‘restore the trust that Europe’s nations once had in each other.’

But, in a lecture at the London School of Economics, where he teaches, he will add: ‘Regretfully, I do not see either materializing.’ …

“Experts believe Europe will never be able to implement the policies required to boost growth and create jobs because of the huge differences between economies across the region. …

“He will say that unless there is a dramatic change of policy the euro should be broken up.

“‘The euro should either be dismantled in an orderly way or the leading members should do the necessary as fast as possible to make it growth and employment-friendly,’ he will say.

“‘We will get nowhere plodding along with the current line of ad hoc decision-making and inconsistent debt-relief policies.”

My Comment: Such views are increasingly heard among specialists. But how can this project be rolled out without destroying all of Europe and plunging it into a deadly conflict? Isn’t it better to accept the program of the integral education and transformation of the EU that should have been done before forming the EU?
[123360]

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Opinion (Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, interviewed by Piotr Dutkiewicz): “With the global crisis ongoing and the ruling class tittering on the verge of panic, there is a real possibility of a massive shift to the right, not unlike that of the 1930s. I think that such a shift will be difficult to prevent, let alone counteract and reverse, without a totally new theoretical alternative. …

“In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when capitalism was just taking hold, there was nothing apologetic about the market. On the contrary. The market was seen as the harbinger of progress – a powerful institution that heralded liberty, equality and tolerance. …

“The political system, by contrast, is wasteful and parasitical. Its purpose is not production, but redistribution. Its members – the politicians, state officials and bureaucrats – seek power and prestige. They eagerly ‘intervene’ in and ‘monopolize’ the economy. They tax, borrow and spend – and in the process stifle the economy and ‘distort’ its efficiency.

“The market became the chief ideology of the triumphant capitalist regime. It helped spread capitalism around the world, and it assisted in the fight against competing regimes, such as fascism and communism. In the Soviet Union, where production was besieged by chaotic planning and accompanied by tyrannical rule, organized violence, open corruption and restricted consumption, the market symbolized the ‘other life.’

“When economics first emerged in the late nineteenth century, capitalism was already victorious. But it was also highly turbulent and increasingly contested by critiques and revolutionaries, so it had to be defended; and the ideological part of that defense was delegated to the new priests of liberalism: the economists. In order to perform their role, the economists have elaborated an intricate system of mathematical models. This system, they claim, proves that a free, totally unregulated economy – if we could ever have one – would yield the best of all possible worlds, by definition.

“The conventional counterclaim, marshaled by many heterodox critiques, is that neoclassical models may be elegant, but they have little or nothing to do with the actual world we live in. And there is certainly much truth in this observation. But the ‘science of economics’ is besieged by a far deeper problem that rarely if ever gets mentioned: it relies on fictitious quantities.

“Every science rests on one or more fundamental quantities in which all other magnitudes are denominated. Physics, for example, has five fundamental quantities – length, time, mass, electrical charge and heat – and every other measure is derived from those quantities. For instance, velocity is length divided by time; acceleration is the time derivative of velocity; and gravity is mass multiplied by acceleration. Now, as a science, economics too has to have fundamental quantities – and the economists claim it does. The fundamental quantity of the neoclassical universe is the unit of hedonic pleasure, or ‘util.’ …

“Now, in the final analysis, all economic quantities are reducible to utils. The util is the elementary particle of economic science. It is the fundamental quantity, the basic building block everything economic is made of. The utils themselves, like Greek atoms, are identical everywhere, but their combination yields infinitely complex forms that economists call ‘goods and services.’ Every composite of the “real economy” – from the aggregate quantities of production, consumption and investment, to the size of GDP, to the magnitude of military spending and the scale of technology – is the sum total of the utils it generates. And the price magnitudes of the “nominal” economy – for instance, the dollar prices of an industrial robot (say $5 million) and a trendy iPhone ($500) – merely represent and reflect the util-denominated quantities of their respective ‘real’ quantities (whose ratio, assuming the reflection is accurate, is 10,000:1).

“And, yet, and here we come to the crux of the matter, this util – this basic quantum that everything economic is supposedly derived from – is immeasurable and in fact unknowable!

“Nobody has been able to identify the quantum of a util, and I very much doubt that anyone ever will. It is a pure fiction. And since all ‘real’ economic quantities are denominated in this fictitious unit, it follows that their own quantities are fictitious as well. To measure ‘real GDP’ or the ‘standard of living’ without utils is like measuring velocity without time, or gravity without mass. (I should note here that a similar critique can be leveled against classical Marxism. The elementary particle of the Marxist universe is socially necessary abstract labor. This is the fundamental quantity that all “real” magnitudes are made of and which the nominal spheres (should) reflect – and yet no Marxist has ever measured it.)

“The students, dazed by the endless drill of ‘practical’ assignments, do not even suspect that their ‘computations’ are practically meaningless. Most professors, having graduated from the meat grinder of neoclassical training, have had all traces of the problem safely erased from their memory (assuming they were aware of it in the first place). And the statisticians, whose job is to measure the economy, have no choice but to concoct numbers based on arbitrary assumptions that nobody can either validate or refute. The entire edifice hangs in thin air, and everyone keeps quite lest it collapse.”

My Comment: But today the edifice is crumbling, and we need a new economy: an integral interaction. Production is necessary only to meet the required needs. Distribution is equal, in accordance with everyone’s needs. Money is void. To receive necessities, it is mandatory for everyone to take part in the life of society and most importantly in integral education and upbringing. Thus, society will come to its natural balance, in itself and with nature.
[123333]

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In the News (from Strategic Culture Foundation): “Social protests are on the rise in France. At the beginning of November a wave of Bonnets Rouges (red caps) meetings hit the region of Brittany in the north-western part of France. Thirty thousand people held a demonstration in Rennes, the capital of the region, to protest unemployment and ‘ecology tax.’ There were clashes with police, which used water cannons and tear gas, one of the protesters lost his hand when a gas grenade was tossed. French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said the violations of law and orders were inadmissible. It’s not Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, where everything is allowed! Some say France will have to get out of the crisis with other politicians at the helm. If it will ever get out of it…

“It’s the second economy of the European Union. Still the government fails to cope with social and economic crisis. …The growth of French economy has stopped. Unemployment was 10.9% in the third quarter of the year compared to 10.8% in the second. France has not seen such level of unemployment since 1998. It is especially severe for the young. …

“Standard & Poor’s rating agency brings down the France’s rating for the second time in two years. Looks like France is to join the list of European Union members that face solvency problems like Italy or Spain. The financial situation really makes France a problematic country. …

“The lack of income was compensated by raising taxes and increasing the debt. It has limits. In 2015 the government is to start reducing state expenditure to cut the deficit to the required level of 3%. That is exactly what Standard & Poor’s has doubts about. …

“According to polls, the two French leading political parties led by Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy have actually lost popular support. Their place is being confidently taken by the National Front led by Marine le Pen. … The main political slogans of the new French leading political force include: the withdrawal from NATO and the European Union, the return to the former currency – the franc, building a continental alliance of states from the Atlantic to the Pacific along with Russia but without immigrants, going back to traditional family values (to exclude the perversions like the same sex marriages).”

My Comment: The ideas of revolution and socialism have always been close to the French. But, on the other hand, it is in France that we see indifference to the ideas of integral education and upbringing, not to mention Kabbalah. Perhaps, in contrast to the Russian people, it is inherent in the specificity of the French revolution and in general in the French character.
[123368]

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In the News (from Christian Science Monitor): “The Great Recession helped reverse a decades-long rise in materialism among many young people. Despite a tough financial future, they are also more concerned about others. This shift is a gift for those seeking less spending at Christmas.

“Polls consistently show Americans wish they could spend less on Christmas gift-giving. Well, a new study suggests their wish could come true, at least among younger people.

“Researchers who have tracked the attitudes of high school seniors over decades find the Great Recession of 2007-09 has caused a great reversal: These young people of today are less interested in worldly goods.

“It is not only that they can’t afford all the flash and bling of American consumerism. Many simply don’t want it. This change of attitude ends a steady rise since 1980 in the materialistic desires of young people, according to researchers Heejung Park, Jean M. Twenge, and Patricia M. Greenfield of the University of California, San Diego. …

“But the researchers also found that today’s younger Millennials are more community-minded and show a greater concern for others. And they are not pessimistic about themselves. ‘The Great Recession was unique in leading to more, rather than less, positive self-views,’ they found. …

“To be sure, young people are less able to buy much, having been forced to temper their expectations. During the recession, the youth unemployment rate was nearly as high as for all adults during the Great Depression of the 1930s. More than 13 percent of people between ages 25 and 35 still live with a parent. By putting off a transition to settling down, they are putting off buying stuff.

“But many do not want to own a car, opting instead for using Zipcars, bike sharing systems, and mass transit. The wired generations connect with others digitally. They are more inclined to rent than own a home and to live in urban areas than the previous generation.

“A survey of 14-to-30-year-olds conducted for Junior Achievement in November found 71 percent would rather have a job that serves others than have a job that promotes their personal brand.”

My Comment: The crisis will lead its generation to being able to exist in an integral community, in the property of mutual bestowal and guarantee.
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