Constraints And Opportunities In Shaping The Future New Approaches To Economics And Policy Making

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

Mike Cooley One of the most remarkable features of modern industrial society, is the gap between that which technology could provide for society (its potential) and that which it actually does provide for society (its reality). We have for example, complex control systems which can guide a missile to another continent with extraordinary accuracy, yet the blind and the disabled have to stagger around our cities in very much the same way as they did in mediaeval times. There are advanced communication systems enabling messages to be sent around the world in a fraction of a second, but it now takes longer to send an ordinary letter from Washington to New York than it did in the days of the stage coach. Such a growing chasm between potential and reality, is giving rise to a thorough questioning of many of the orthodoxies in these areas and the priorities on which they are based. Similar contradictions, even if at this stage less obvious and dramatic, abound in the field of manufacturing technology. There, we find technologies which have the potential of liberating human beings from soul destroying, routine, backbreaking tasks and leave them free to engage in more creative work, but which in reality, often end up reducing the human being to a mere machine appendage, acted upon by the technology and becoming a passive, pathetic element in the productive system rather than a creative, dynamic human being.

Uncertain Futures considers how economic actors visualize the future and decide how to act in conditions of radical uncertainty. It starts from the premise that dynamic capitalist economies are characterized by relentless innovation and novelty and hence exhibit an indeterminacy that cannot be reduced to measurable risk. The organizing question then becomes how economic actors form expectations and make decisions despite the uncertainty they face. This edited volume lays the foundations for a new model of economic reasoning by showing how, in conditions of uncertainty, economic actors combine calculation with imaginaries and narratives to form fictional expectations that coordinate action and provide the confidence to act. It draws on groundbreaking research in economic sociology, economics, anthropology, and psychology to present theoretically grounded empirical case studies. These demonstrate how grand narratives, central bank forward guidance, economic forecasts, finance models, business plans, visions of technological futures, and new era stories influence behaviour and become instruments of power in markets and societies. The market impact of shared calculative devices, social narratives, and contingent imaginaries underlines the rationale for a new form of narrative economics.

This book offers a comprehensive perspective on policy theories, policy formulation and implementation, and alternative paradigm for dealing with complex social and economic systems. It presents insights into policies on major development sectors, including health, education, urbanization, climate change, innovation, advanced manufacturing, and economic growth. It delves into why public policies matter more than resources and are crucial for shaping the future of a country. It attempts a pioneering effort and delineates a complexity theory framework to deal with uncertainty, nonlinearity, emergence, and evolution. It comprises systems thinking, design thinking, complexity thinking, and tools for complexity analysis. Applicable to a policy system, economy, business, and organization, the complexity theory relies on phenomena like emergence, self-organizing property, adaptation, coevolution, and path dependency, in a clear departure from reductionism and Newtonian paradigm. Through academic rigor, it makes a convincing case for better understanding of application of complexity theory. It covers real-world examples and case studies related to evolution of economies of silicon valleys – Bengaluru (India) and San Francisco Bay (USA). These cases underscore the essentiality of complexity theory. In terms of policy formulations, the book contains a policy design framework covering the science of policymaking, innovative approaches, and methodology for policy design. To deal with dynamic systems, it includes a step-by-step guide for the application of system dynamics. It articulates alternative paradigm – adaptive policies and policy design; alternative theory – complexity theory; and new public organizations and institutional development for meeting the challenges of the 21st century. Aiming to reduce fuzziness, the book combines both researcher’s in-depth analysis as well as practitioner’s perspective, thus serving as a vital read for scholars of public policy, management, and economics. It emphasizes the primacy of policy process to discern deep understanding from the ground and to integrate micro-level realities and macro-level requirements. It argues for change from Weberian bureaucratic model to adaptive approaches and recommends policy system reforms, highlighting that countries should make the right policy choices early to steer ahead. In doing so, the book serves the requirements of policymakers and thought leaders.