In association with mapmakers at valuetrue.com worldeconomist.net trilliondollaraudit.com usgreen.tv worldclassbrands.tv and worldentreprenneur.net  FutureCapitalism Ning (join us...) info@worldcitizen.tv  (Washington DC bureau 301 881 1655) asks for your nominations of journalists who do most to unite nobel prizes of economics and peace -100 = best -some examples from early searches of 008

100 Alan Webber
99 Jane Wales
98 Kuttner
91 Team Huffington
90 Ms Magnusson
80 Rick Wartzman
30 Wall Street Journal
0 Financial Times & The Economist and BBC


Community Crises of Banking*Solar Energy*Media Truth

There are some variations on your theme jerry but yes unless a nobel prize is awarded to those who practice the social business economics of 10 times lower cost branding and marketing channels we will never get there

... systemicly we, the networking generation,  will never see maps of how a humanly sustainable globalisation is possible that much was made clear by my father's work at The Economist and written up in 1984 http://www.normanmacrae.com/netfuture.html   ; we will consign my 11 year old daughter's generation to the Big Brothered hell of seeing the planet fall apart naturally, economically and socially- something up with which I will not put

MICRO VERSUS MACRO

(in this sense

macro systemisation = wall street economics sponsored by the biggest and most short-run and what my father's 1984 published works called disgraceful political chicanery accidentally created by tv mass media (non-free market) age;  in every way the oposite of hi-trust service economics http://www.normanmacrae.com/intrapreneur.html

micro = economics sponsored by those who believe in microentrepreneuship and transparency's mediation of exponential sustainability around context/community purposeful compound investment)

YES WE CAN use millennium goal mediated www to map free market of ending poverty

 OK , so the 2 economics -competition between micro (goodwill transparency networks) and Macro blindwill (see year 2000 book Unseen wealth Brookings/georgetown Law school)  -  can exist side by side with people in rich cities continuing to make choices: do we want to buy images that cost 10 times more than the basic product if they wish;

 yunus future capitalism, mackey conscious capitalism, kuttner's 2007 book debating capitalism www.squanderingofamerica.com - see & help co-create events at http://futurecapitalism.ning.com/events (sadly I cannot see how gates creative capitalism genre connects with yunus. mackey, kuttner, obamanomics but I am delighted if a transparent debate of this proves me to have missing info)

NB Whole Truth of Economics assumptions

but we certainly dont have 'free marketing principles' existing until there is space for every youth to know that if they want to explore how to compound 10 times less cost or less risk marketing in each specific global market sector there is a way in to connecting to practitioners of this

1 one way to make it clear of what is involved is to award the nobel economics prize jointly to yunus and any national leader who does the following

ok banks we have bailed you out - part of the deal is we want one nationwide mutual chain of microcredit banks; this will be run by and for the taxpayer but by the smartest microcredit people not politicians and mr banks we expect in 10% of your outlets you to put a desk where poor people who want to get loans to invest in their producivity can get in touch with this nationwide mutual bank- the same desk can have local contact points of how to practice mutual solar energy; how a community can insure its own health service -other innovations that community-up banking is now proving how to sustainably invest in

In each country you have to ask yourself why would this be politically, culturally or socially incorrect. I cannot think of a single reason why it would be politically incorrect for obama to annonce this on day 1 of hius inauguration - isnt its simply economics true to the yes we can party

way 2 at http://journalistsforhumanity.com  http://socialaction.tv we log up journalists and other people who host public media who get this; the list is already far longer than I know and so please email me in whenever you see someone. just as examples:

2.1 http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20080521/oplede_wednesday.art.htm alan webber specifically proposed the double nobel prize in usa today -previously alan had been a co-creator of fast company the magazine that started up as an alternative to the harvard businass review; at its height held 100 person monthly social capital meetings in over 200 cities across the world but got caught up as being seen as a dotcom thing whereas it needed the depth of real microcredit

2.2 there are many amazing california hosts who have Q&A's yunus in public- the 2 I remember most are :

rick wartzman, a journalist who is now head of the Drucker Institutes http://www.smbaworld.com/id42.html (a space where we transcibe yunus public debates and will add in videos from http://yunus10000.com - work in progress)

jane wales http://wacsf.vportal.net/?fileid=5634 whose interview last month of yunus as the number 1 problem solver she ever met has extraordinary advice on choices facing obama that any economist should have to debate

when dr yunus was in glasgow last month, the daughter of the BBC's famous quizmaster magnus magnussoon very postivively interviewed dr yunus on bbc radio; magnusson came from iceland in 2008 the first nation whose people were bankrupted by international financial corruption since the same happened to scotland in 1700 - it was because of the hostile takeover by england of scotland that adam smith developed both his frameworks of free markets and relative advantages of nations but most of what he framed is now quoted 180- degrees against the logics he was actually proposing; we face the same danger todays with MFIs being designed around opposite system of microcredit which is another erasone why yes we can economics needs the nobel prize in 2009

Inger how can we help you organsise colaboration cafes in norway around the topic of merging nobel economics and peace celebrations?

chris macrae washington dc 301 881 1655

==============

Kuttner The Post, Post Partisan President

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/the-post-post-partisan-pr_b_150938.html

Barack Obama has made it very clear that he intends to govern as a bridge-builder. Ideology is a bad word in Obamaland. He will lead as a pragmatist, and also reach across the aisle to Republicans.

This stance has stimulated a passionate debate among progressives, on HuffingtonPost and elsewhere. For some, this is just the latest disappointing case of a candidate arousing the hopes of the center-left but governing from the center-right (viz. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhardt Schroeder). Hey, it's capitalism, what did you expect?

For others, this is neither politics as usual nor capitalism as usual, Nor is Obama the president as usual. And so it will not be opportunistic pragmatism as usual.

In the new normal, what is pragmatic is actually fairly left wing. If massive public spending, and re-regulation of Wall Street, and green energy, and universal health coverage can be characterized as mere pragmatism, bring it on. We can acknowledge later that we have moved the center to the left and shifted the prevailing ideology. Clever guy, this Obama.

But what about the post-partisan part? Here again, it may just be shrewd positioning. But if President-elect Obama actually believes that this is a bipartisan moment, he is in for a rude awakening.

The lame-duck Senate Republicans have just blocked the bill to provide temporary financing for the auto industry needed to give the new administration and Congress time to work with the automakers on a restructuring plan. Not much bipartisanship there. Indeed, it was George W. Bush, the least bipartisan president in decades, who came to the rescue of the industry and the Democrats by relying on emergency use of the bank bailout funds. Just imagine what Republicans will do in the next Congress.

If you have been watching or reading Republican pronouncements lately, just about nothing in the Obama program is likely to get the support of the Republican leadership. Bank re-regulation? The Employee Free Choice Act? Hundreds of billions for green energy? Universal health insurance? A trillion dollars of stimulus as the downpayment on a permanent increase in public investment?

The Republican story is that the best stimulus is more tax cuts, and that the money should be found by reducing the deficit. That leaves no room for more public spending, only for more spending-cuts. And despite the fact that deregulation caused the financial collapse, Republicans still insist that regulation did it--the evil Community Reinvestment Act (which in fact explicitly required that sound lending standards were not to be waived. Most subprime lenders were not even covered by CRA.)

Here is an easy prediction: When President Obama reaches that hand of bipartisanship across the aisle, he will find that the Republicans bite it.

Of course, it is smart politics to pick off Republicans for a progressive agenda wherever possible. Splitting the Republicans is much better than splitting the difference. By January, when Congress takes up the emergency stimulus bill, unemployment will be heading toward double digits, and state and local governments will be slashing public services. In that emergency climate, Obama may well get some Republicans to cross over and vote for a Democratic plan.

But that strategy is not being bipartisan. It is being an astute partisan. And there will be many other times when Obama will need to rally all of his Democrats to enact progressive legislation over the strenuous objection of most Republicans. This economic emergency and its political opportunity is no time to compromise for the sake of hollow unity. If Obama can win over a few Republicans for a progressive program, great. If he put can Republicans in the position of haplessly opposing popular and urgently needed legislation, so much the better.

By the end of his first year, either Obama will have put the economy on the path to recovery based on a progressive program that represents a radical ideological shift; if he achieves that, he will have done it with precious little Republican support. Alternatively, much of his program will have been blocked by Republican filibusters enabled by a few conservative Democratic allies.

Let's hope it's the former. And let's hope he has the audacity to call progressivism by its name. Either way, one thing Obama will not be is post-partisan.

Robert Kuttner's best selling book is "Obama's Challenge: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency."

This, in short, is a time for humility. Why did we mostly get “it” so sensationally wrong? How did something that looks increasingly like the precursor of a slump creep up on almost all of us this year? It is a pretty good question. It is a pretty embarrassing one, too. 

I do think we need to ask ourselves whether we could have done a better job of understanding the processes at work.

The difficulty was that we all tend to look at just one bit of the clichéd elephant in the room. Monetary economists looked at monetary policy. Financial economists looked at risk management. International macroeconomists looked at global imbalances. Central bankers focused on inflation. Regulators looked at Basel capital ratios and even then only inside the banking system. Politicians enjoyed the good times and did not ask too many questions. And what of commentators? Well, they tended to indulge in the fantasy that the above knew what they were talking about. I am embarrassed to admit this.

I am not seeking to deny that a few people saw important pieces of the emerging puzzle and some saw more than a few pieces. In my gallery of heroes are Avinash Persaud, who told us early and often that the risk-management models on which regulators foolishly relied were absurd individually and lethal collectively, a point also made by John Eatwell; Kenneth Rogoff, who warned of the US external deficit; Wynne Godley, who warned no less powerfully of the domestic financial imbalances associated with those external imbalances; Charles Dumas and Brian Reading of Lombard Street Research, who warned of the global imbalances; Roger Bootle of Capital Economics, who pointed out the fantasy of believing that we could become rich by selling second-hand houses to one another at ever more exorbitant prices; Raghuram Rajan of Chicago Business School, who identified the frailty of the new financial capitalism; Bernard Connolly of AIG, who warned of the ongoing “Ponzi game” and George Magnus of UBS, who foretold the consequent “Minsky moment”; Stephen King of HSBC, who argued that US growth was built on sand; Andrew Smithers of Smithers and Co and Martin Weale of the National Institute, who told us that UK fiscal policy was far too loose; Bill White of the Bank for International Settlements who insisted again and again that monetary policy should not ignore asset prices and associated credit explosions; and Nouriel Roubini, of course, who was Dr Doom before almost anybody else.

The list is not exhaustive and I apologise to all those offended by my omissions. But I would insist that one of the big lessons of this experience is that economics is too compartmentalised and so, too, are official institutions. To get a full sense of the risks being run, we needed to combine the worst scenarios of each sets of experts. Only then would we have had some sense of how the global imbalances, inflation targeting, the impact of China, asset price bubbles, financial innovation, deregulation and risk management systems might interact.