• by Hazel Henderson
• Tuesday, November 29, 2011
• Inter Press Service

High-speed trading and cloud computing have far outrun government oversight and control; can we learn to master our tools? The jury is still out, writes Hazel Henderson, author of award-winning "Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy" and other books, and founder and president of Ethical Markets Media.

In this article, the author writes that new evidence of the concentration of corporate and financial power was finally mapped by complexity systems analysts at the Zurich-based Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. They revealed a core of 43,000 transnational corporations, all tightly interlinked, with 147 (i.e., less than 1 percent) controlling 40 percent of the global wealth network. And once again, citizens and their civil society organizations (CSOs) are ahead of governments and academia in forcing reforms.

Macroeconomics methods are now threadbare and daily sinking further into disrepute. Mainstream economics orthodoxy still disempowers us by claiming that markets come from God's "invisible hand" rather than human ingenuity. Mathematicians John Geanakoplos of Yale and Doyne Farmer of the Santa Fe Institute confirm the economists' blindness. They call for lowering discount rates used by short-term-focused economists which ignore future events.

(*) Hazel Henderson, author of award-winning Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy and other books, is founder and president of Ethical Markets Media.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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