ER:  On the call for new text books for students, the way I see it is there is a large number of economic books as described by the RWEA however there are two authors whom i respect, that seem to be omitted from those lists. They are Bernard Guerrien because he cuts through the rhetoric and focuses o the cause of the problem, and g Tony Lawson ,because with his critical reasoning and his call for a new ontology where he argues for a better understanding of humanity, than the out-dated irrelevant concept of Homo Economicus.

Apart from that the way I see it there is a lot of good thought provoking reading available if the student is steered in the right direction. In other words the emphasis so far seems to focus on the needs for new text books, forgetting the important point of how the subject is taught. For example C T Kurien’s emphasis on the importance of teaching students how to think, not what to think. Ideally I think this should start in the home and school then be reinforced in the university, because unless people, students and teachers learn how to think they are indoctrinated into somnambulantly accepting the political economic garbage with its ulterior motives of increasing the wealth and power of the elite.

Me:  Excellent point Ted. It’s perfectly rational to try to re-write economic textbooks, but the best way to actually make an economic and monetary change in everyone’s life is to start a grassroots movement that shows all agents individual and commercial how a new economics will incredibly benefit them personally.

MM:  There can be no valid GUT of cultural economy (or economics) without a singular, unitive, substantially comprehensive, realistic foundation of holotrophic meta-theory, i.e., ethical meta-economics. Further, the forthcoming new Work on that requires ethical ecometrics to balance even next-gen econometrics. Clearly, Lawson’s call for a new ontology is well founded. What must it include for validity & viability? Predominantly, human reality and interaction involve qualitative issues, ethics, natural meta-ethics and meta-logic. Ignore all that and you ignore root causes and the nonquantitative factors that inform and affect sociocultural interaction. Furthermore, lacking ethical meta-economics and ethical ecometrics there is no way to measure, monitor and assess the toxic realities of kleptocracy, the parasitic cancer infecting & ruining civilization & our only habitat, Earth’s biosphere. Without a viable, bio-ethical holonomic paradigm of humane culture there can be no valid legal-financial paradigm and no global civilization worth sustaining. Yes, learning the realities of economics should begin in the home, but that will not become generally possible without an ethically viable cultural paradigm. Additionally, that seems an extremely unlikely possibility as long as the socioeconomic paradigm of kleptocracy rules the world. Hence, a truly effective evolutionary upgrade of text books and teaching of ethical meta-economics seems a vitally important necessity for fostering and supporting a sustainably sane civilization.

Me:  The very process of Wisdom is the integration of the truths in opposites and wisdom’s pinnacle is the utterly integrative natural philosophical concept of individual graciousness and grace applied to our systems. Do an exegesis of its many, many scientific and beatific aspects and craft philosophy and policy around it….and you’re on your way.

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MM:  We should remember or reread Moore’s “Utopia” before bandying it about while assuming it means something it wasn’t and isn’t. Utopia was a nightmarish mishmash of what was wrong with medieval feudalism and what might be beyond it. Neither case depicted an enviable state of sociocultural reality.

Me:  Correct. Utopias have generally been depicted as unreal, and historically that has also been how they have turned out for theories like capitalism and socialism. The trick with creation of an actually workable and beneficial utopia is to create it by empowering and freeing the individual instead of trying to enforce it from top down. What is required to resolve the conundrum is to find an un-impeachably ethical concept whose aspects are the integration of opposites itself and applying it both systemically and in a way that also simultaneously distributes freedom and personal empowerment “into the many hands of the individual.”

Such a concept is the natural philosophical concept of grace, and viz economics its aspect of Gifting.