Books discovered

Sally Campbell sends us this month’s discovery, whose author has an Arran connection.

The Science of Economics
by Raymond Makewell

This is a book that should feature at the top of your reading list if you have ever tried to grapple with economics. Its author, Raymond Makewell, lived and worked across the world in banking and the computer industry, but when he came across the work of Leon MacLaren, a Scot born in Glasgow in 1910, it catapulted him into a new interest in economics.

MacLaren had campaigned for land and tax reform while barely out of his teens, having witnessed at first hand the misery and poverty in the city in which he lived. He became a barrister, politician, and philosopher and founded the School of Economic Science in London. The school took as its basis the conviction that there are natural laws governing the way the living world behaves, and that these same laws lie at the basis of economics. It is essentially a study of how human nature interacts with the natural universe.

When the school was founded in 1937 Britain was struggling to emerge from the worst economic depression ever to afflict the industrialised world. Poverty, disease and crime were widespread, arising from shattered morale and frustrated lives. Yet, MacLaren saw, some individuals and corporate entities amassed huge fortunes while ordinary folk found their wages reduced to a bare minimum and they faced cut-throat competition for every job.

Sounds familiar? Yes, in 2013 we have all these ills, and politicians lay the blame for them on out-of-work and disadvantaged individuals themselves. But what should we be doing? Makewell’s captivating book argues strongly for an economics system founded in justice and a recognition of the needs of our time, just as Leon MacLaren did in the late 1930s. The main points it makes are as follows:

1. Man is a land animal. Given access to land and to capital, people can produce all they need.
2. Simple justice. Render to everyone their due. This gives them the opportunity to create wealth for themselves and their families. Economic disparities are caused when people are denied the full fruits of their labour, allowing some to accumulate wealth at the expense of others.
3. Human beings are gregarious and naturally work together to create and share wealth and improve their collective lives. They are much more economically productive when they work together.
4. The principle of natural development. Both the universe and human society are natural hierarchies, containing every level of ability. Human beings have immense potential, and their happiness and well-being depends on the freedom and ability to fulfil that potential. When economic arrangements deprive people of freedom and capacity, it condemns many of them to ignorance and starvation.

These simple principles provide the basis for a fresh approach to modern economics. Money and banking, markets and international trade, public revenue, taxation, the role of governments and environmental impacts can all be freshly and cogently re-assessed in the light of an understanding that human beings, even in their current unprecedented numbers, can interact harmoniously with each other and the Earth. Freedom, mutual respect and peace are still there to be found.

ISBN 9780856832918 Price: £14.95

Published by Shepeard-Walwyn Ltd (see.www.ethicaleconomics.org.uk) in association with The School of Economic Science