Where do we go from here?

The failure of a dominant narrative & the need for a new social imaginary

I was recently introduced to a magazine called Prospect by an Anglo-Irish friend, Colin Greene. It offers a regular series of cultural and political essays that cover current affairs, the arts, economics and culture. The lead article in the latest edition is by Robert Skidelsky. Entitled “Where do we go from here?“, it addresses some key issues in the current global crisis. (You can also connect with several short pieces Colin Greene and I have written.) Skidelsky argues that the current financial crisis is a failure of the market system: it is a crisis generated by the system itself, not some outside agent or actor. He then outlines three levels of failure.

1. First, institutional: banks, regulators etc., succumbed to the ‘efficient market left to itself’ hypothesis.
2. Secondly, the crisis was intellectual. Alan Greenspan’s confession to the US Congress earlier this year epitomizes this failure: ‘I never saw it coming!’ Why? Because he wore a set of intellectual lenses that blinded him to alternative explanations.