At first I did not know what to say about the article. It was refreshing to read something about dynamic economics rather that the plan old static analysis that dominates the economic profession. And the ideas and concepts expressing in the article were enticing and I had to think hard about it. After an hour of hard labor working on the yard I was able to put some of my thoughts together.



The first issue is whether the economic world is moving forward or backwards. We know it is changing but we do not know how. The personal world of Adam Smith is slowly fading away and the faster it does then the faster we can understand where we are going. When I say that we may be going backwards I think of the 1500s when the peasants were kicked of the lands they live on for centuries to migrate into the cities which assisted in the rise of the industrial revolution. This was done by the landed gentry by hook or crook and there were serious violations of laws that assisted them in changing their estates to raising sheep for wool to sell to the emerging textile industry. Adam Smith understood this class of people and he never understood the class that were removed from the land. They had a hard life, there was starvation, extreme poverty and desperation. A major cause of death within this class was suicide when a person lost a job. This cavalier attitude by the rich to the rest of the popularization is happening again. We see it in many different and shuttle ways. It is the attitude the upped class has in that they can do what they want because no one else has a way to stop them. During the last housing crisis huge numbers of people were forced out of their houses even though there was a strong pattern on irresponsible behavior by the banking industry. Many were forced to leave because they could not afford the legal cost to claim that the process was improper or illegal. The dynamics is in the healthcare sector where many people are forced to give up their health insurance policy for a weaker one and at the same time to give up their relationship with their primary care doctor and instead have to join an HMO where they are nothing but a number and a computer file. The hospital claims they own the patient and the patient doctor relationship is dead. The doctor the person sees in the clinic will look at the computer report and send the person down the line to get x-rays and blood tests or operations that the system ordains. A brokerage firm may hold their savings and the law says that once the firm has the money they own it. While it may be owned on behalf of the customer, they technically own it and does not take much of a change in the law for the firm to keep it forever because trust relationship are always precarious.



These folks live in a word without security. They are not secure in their homes, they are not secure with their healthcare (which amounts to about 20% of the GDP), they do not trust the government to provide the support they need since medicaid, medicare, social security and pensions funds are always being attacked and can quickly disappear. And they all realize that the rich are getting richer as they get poorer and more insecure. These are the basic ingredients for social changes. It is like two whirlpools that exist next to each other that are constantly exchanging energy and other ingredients to keep then going. One whirlpools is where the rich and upper class operate. They have their own value structure, they control the courts and they seem to be in charges. The other whirlpool is where the masses ( as Karl Marx would call it or “Joe Lunchbox” as George Bush called them)They need each other to continue but the dynamics are such that one of the whirlpools will eventually over power the other and when that happens they both will fail.



Once they fail, the question is where does the society go. To Marx it will be a violent revolution until communism takes over. To Peter Schumpeter it will be a slow evolutionary change. The revolution may be slow in coming, it may be started by a major war that was too costly in human life as was World War I. Or it may come from a street vendor who cannot take the chaos anymore and sets himself on fire, or a message on the internet that goes viral. As I said in the beginning of this comment, it depends on whether we are going backwards or forwards. The world to me looks as if we are going backwards more than we are going forward and I look to other economists to argue that I am wrong.