A Serious Group of UNB Economists (young economic students for the most part) are saying this in their recent study with recommendations for the NB economy:
GOAL: GDP GROWTH By 2028, New Brunswick will experience an upward trend that returns its GDP growth rate to 2008 levels.
In the recent historical NB election campaign …
The Liberals are saying this: WE’VE TURNED OUR ECONOMY AROUND … And we’ve gotten results—the New Brunswick economy grew in each year of our mandate… Continue to implement our multi-year Economic Growth Plan with a continued focus on priority sectors: cyber security, the New Brunswick smart grid, tourism, maple syrup, blueberries, mining, agriculture, cannabis, business support services, and home-based work. … We will continue to INVEST IN INFRASTRUCTURE to improve our roads, schools, and hospitals.
The Progressive Conservatives (PCs) are saying this: We choose growth • Through focused policy initiatives, we will support the business community’s call for a growth agenda that includes a stronger private sector, responsible resource development, a focus on exports, labour force development, and a real effort to tackle our province’s debt.
The Greens are saying this: We do not support simplistic policies that cut public services to reduce budget deficits while continuing with unjust taxation policies. While past governments only paid attention to the financial accounts, we also consider the ecological balance sheet. We are not getting ahead if we degrade our air, water and land, and endanger wildlife, to reduce fiscal deficits. A Green Government would: Institute a public inquiry into the sustainability of the province’s financial and ecological deficits. Its mandate would be to recommend a strategy to reduce our long term financial and ecological debt. It would examine the fairness of our tax system …
The People’s Alliance (PA) are saying this: New Brunswick is facing some very trying times. Increases in taxes, decreased services, a ballooning debt, and out of control spending has our province on the brink of serious consequences. … RETURN TO FISCAL BALANCE Without question, our first responsibility to the long-term prosperity of New Brunswick is proper management of the public purse. Investing in needed areas while eliminating redundant and wasteful spending will be our top priority.
The NDP are saying this: The NDP is presenting a plan that will make a powerful difference for people now—because investing in our future cannot afford to wait… Fair Taxation Many New Brunswickers support investments in new social programs, including measures to ensure we live in a more equitable society—but only if they feel that the tax system is fair. Today it is not. It is time for New Brunswick to implement a more progressive income tax and undertake a comprehensive review of our property tax system.
My Commentary [on a recent email exchange]: Jim Asher recently wrote –
If we examine the platforms of the political parties in the election just completed we will find platitudes a-plenty about prosperity just votes away. Even these platforms soon fall prey to the later stages of elections where defensive off-the-cuff modifications are announced along with specific policies or programs unattached to key platform principles—just pile on promises and the electorate will be sure to follow.
With a few (Green) exceptions, we would be better off without the current crop of newly electeds and re-electeds allowing new economic understanding to combine with radical rethinking of the purpose of the political sphere and so lead to innovative and sensible approaches being tried, tested and decided.
I do believe that the above articulated excerpts from the UNB economic students and the political platforms of the five Parties do represent various important assumptions about economy and the NB economy in particular. The range of variations I would suggest based upon Bernard Lonergan’s theoretical lens are as follows:
- The assumption of the good of economic growth and development communicated by UNB economic students is unquestioned in all political party views with the exception of an aspect of the Green position whose view I sense still implies a notion of ‘sustainable growth or development’ that would be based upon a needed new and better understanding of both financial and ecological sustainability.
- The Liberals, Greens, and NDP are all ‘hopefully’ focused on ‘some form of material and cultural prosperity’ that will involve a strong government role, public spending, and tax reform especially progressive tax reform emphasized by the Greens and NDP. The Liberals perhaps because they have been closer to actual political power in NB are more muted regarding significant or progressive tax reform.
- The PCs and PA both see the need for ‘austerity’ in public spending and in government’s role in the economy. Much more emphasis is placed upon ‘encouraging’ the ‘private sector’s’ role in the economy and any tax reform would have that as its goal.
Lonergan’s theoretical speculations call our attention to the need for a better understanding of what he calls the pure or natural economic cycle which involves four distinct phases – static or steady state, capitalist, materialist, and cultural. It is important in the effort to understand economy to understand this pure theoretical cycle and where the economy one actually lives in with others is at in relation to this pure cycle. Furthermore, economic theories tend to be adapted to the different phases of this large historical cycle.
Bernard Lonergan writes: … “different economic theories are adapted to different phases of this economic cycle. The medieval doctrine of economy works well for the static or cultural phase; the classical theory works well for the capitalist expansion phase and only tolerates the materialist phase.”
I suspect these various platform articulations involve deeper assumptions that are suited to particular phases that perhaps do not accurately or fully reflect where the NB economy is in this economic cycle. The great tension in our ‘time’ seems to be between assumptions rooted in the capitalist ‘austerity’ phase (of thrift and enterprise) and those rooted in the materialist and cultural ‘prosperity’ phases (of a ‘chicken in every pot’ with a good book to read or write, or theatre/concert to attend or produce). There are some in the Green camp who are arguing for a serious reconsideration of the need for the static or steady state phase (of ‘the steady hand to the plough’).
Throughout the capitalist phase there has been tremendous capital and wealth accumulation in NB but when there is the ‘scheduled’ rise in the standard of living signalling surplus profit’s deceleration investors and bankers, and those whose ‘thinking’ may be uncritically aligned with those interests and viewpoints, tend to become fearful and even succumb to panic. This cannot be entirely reduced to ‘greed’ because there is considerable ignorance of the economy’s dynamics of surplus and basic production expansion, and income. And so without understanding, there can be no intelligent institutional response or adaptation, and the first law of ‘nature’ tends to dominate – expressed in various forms of ‘self-preservation’. It is this unthinking or thoughtless reaction that has turned, and so can turn, a recession into a depression and a crash with all the disasters, human misery and suffering that go with it.
Lonergan’s radical proposal is for the transformation of the business cycle into a pure cycle where development and growth are understood to have both rapid and slow phases that can be ‘managed’ intelligently and carefully without the booms and busts of the typical business cycle. And this must be said also … ‘managed’ in a way that is democratic, ensuring the health of our democratic institutions.
Is this transformation humanly possible? Yes, according to Lonergan, but there is an intellectual and moral conversion required – not so much from greed, but firstly from a culpable ignorance in our institutions of higher learning, most especially in our schools of economics, and then in our more practical institutions of political-economy.
Note the related yet stand-alone lecture and seminar on The Economic Thought of Bernard Lonergan: Functional Collaboration in a Time of the Post-Normal, Part 1
Presenter: Dr. Michael Shute, PhD, Memorial University in Newfoundland
Friday, October 19, STU Brian Mulroney Hall, 101, 7 pm – 10 pm Saturday, October 20, STU, Edmund Casey Hall, 9 am – 4 pm
[A retrospective collage on Lonergan is available on YouTube. Ed.]
Hugh Williams
