There has to be a paradigm change ... we have the metrics to support it!

Dear Colleagues

A new book "Rebooting the American Dream" by Thom Hartmann has recently been published. I have only read some excerpts and they are quite thought provoking. The following caught my attention:

"... when Ronald Reagan came into office, as the result of 190 years of Hamilton’s plan, the United States was the world’s largest importer of raw materials; the world’s largest exporter of finished, manufactured goods; and the world’s largest creditor.

After 30 years of Reaganomics, we’ve completely flipped this upside down: we’ve become the world’s largest exporter of raw materials, the world’s largest importer of finished goods, and the world’s largest debtor. We now export raw materials to China, and buy from it manufactured goods. And we borrow from China to do it.

Part of the reason why this got my attention is that there was a time when the British economy was very powerful ... importing raw materials and exporting manufactured goods.

In True Value Metrics there can be a good quality of life ... but there cannot be a money wealth redistribution along the lines of what has been happening for the past several decades ... which some eminent economists and business journalists have described as a period of some of the greatest sustained economic growth ever. The money metrics might have given this impression, but the reality is that it was being done on top of what eventually turned out to be a bubble of historic scale!

Peter Burgess