Purposive Drift

A different approach?

In an earlier piece I was lamenting that current political and economic thinking doesn't seem to be getting us very far and went on to say "Conventional wisdom seems to be heading us in a downward spiral, maybe some unconventional wisdom will help us move in an upward direction."
The question, of course, is where is that unconventional wisdom going to come from?

As so often happens, the other day, I was following another, quite unconnected, thread on the web, when I bumped into a reference to Roberto Unger, a Brazilian law professor who teaches at Havard. He seems to have some interesting political and economic ideas, which can be found on his web site in PDF format. I still haven?t had time to digest what he has to say and make my own mind up as to their value, but my intuition tells me that he is someone worthwhile engaging with. The following sample from an interview gives something of the flavour of his thinking:

?The market economy has no inherent form. Contrary to what the conservatives think, the market does not have a natural and necessary form. The market can be reinvented, it can be redesigned -- it can be either more concentrated or more participatory. We cannot solve the crucial problems of the informal economy by imitating the forms that the market now takes in the rich countries. We must have a different kind of market economy -- one based on a decentralised alliance between the little guy and the government. Today, the world over the progressives generally have no programme -- their programme is the programme of their conservative adversaries with a ten per cent discount. My main effort in debates throughout the world has been to demonstrate that there is a sequence of institutional changes that allow us to do something more than put a human face on the globalised market -- that allow us to actually reorganise our societies.?