Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Simon Retallack: Well, the devising of a new economic system is an enormous challenge. Economic systems, on the whole, evolve and it isn't possible simply to sit down and write a new one. However, that said, the process of devising any economic system -- however long it takes and however evolutionary it is -- should be done democratically and the moment -- far too often, in negotiations at the World Trade Organization or in discussions at the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, the organizations of the global economy that essentially shape the economic system that we have today, the negotiations and the positions that are ultimately agreed do not derive from any strong sense of Democratic legitimacy. In fact, far too often they represent the interests of powerful -- the powerful vested interests who want an economic system that profits them. Now that has to change. If we're devising a new system, we must involve people far, far more than we have up to now: the public, the electorate, civil society groups, people that represent interests of other species other than our own. And that means, I think, taking the global capitalists’ free market system that we have and insuring that it internalizes the externalities, that we in all the products we trade across the world internalize the price of the pollution that those products are responsible for by the way they’re made, that we pay people fairly through the products that we buy and that we encourage respect both for social cohesion, communities, the family, fairness for workers and sustainability for the planet. And we can use tax systems to do that, but we should also reform the prescriptions that the international or financial institutions hand out to governments to insure that when they're in trouble financially they're not made to devise systems that are not in their or their peoples’ or their environments’ interests. And that can be done bit by bit. The world trade rules are written, they are devised, and they can be reformed.

by Simon Retallack

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Sohrab Mahdavi: Some people question the fact that human beings can actually device systems that are from bottom up with function naturally, and I think I'm one of them. I think that, planning, too much planning, a drive for efficiency, a drive for becoming developed, all these desires will lead to a system, the top down system that no matter how noble the intentions, the original intentions, the end result is detrimental to humans, to animals, or plant life.

by Sohrab Mahdavi

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Song Kosal:

by Song Kosal

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Stephanie Robinson: I think the first thing that I would say to this is that this is a very long and detailed response that I probably am not equipped with the right expertise around economic structures to probably respond to efficiently. But what I would say is that I think that there is a way in which these economic systems should not be devised and that’s by letting corporate interests make or unduly influence policy. And by approaching all policy from a short term sort of perspective, from a short term view and those two factors, those two components will be one put together would be my thought as to what we should not do in devising an economic system. With respect to the question, which I think is not necessarily a different question but it’s one as to whether or not fundamentally this idea of planet rights, if there truly is one, but the idea of planet rights and animal rights and human rights whether they will exist in an economic system whether they are in conflict and I think that there is probably inevitably some tension between these various spheres within the world that you won’t be able to get around. I think however it is possible to minimize those conflicts by bringing together the best minds and the best expertise and skills to be able to construct a system that would go further in being able to somehow minimize the tensions.

by Stephanie Robinson

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Steve Earle: I think the question is interesting. I had to read it twice, I think, to understand how exactly how I was going to approach answering it. An economic system should be secondary to human, animal rights, our environment; things that affect living, breathing things. An economic system should be a matter of convenience, just a way for us to communicate the value of material things between each other, rather than the end all and be all, the driving force in all of our lives. The economic system in my country is the economic system that we're exporting all over the world right now.

by Steve Earle

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Sulak Sivaraksa: The economic system could be devised appropriately, justly, only when one consider economy as if human beings matters, and not only human beings, all sentient beings matters. Economic system right now only serve capitalist system, or in the olden day, economic system serve the Bolshevik, the socialist systems. But economic should serve humans, animals, and of course environment. You could do this only you must also having spiritual dimension. But men are not economic animals; men are spiritual being, men here of course including men and women, and men must also learn to care for other sentient beings. We are related. Animals are as important as men. Trees, oceans, earth important also. Without them men cannot survive. So, once you realize that, then I think economic system would really be beneficial, not destructive as it is nowadays. Schumacher, E.F Schumacher was the first to mention what is economics in his famous book, “Small Is Beautiful”. And now there are more and more people pursuing these issues, including [Copp] and Dali on Christian economics. I hope there will be some books also in Islamic economics, but is we need spiritual dimension to economic, as indeed any other social sciences. And even natural sciences should have spiritual dimension, not only materialistic as it is right now.

by Sulak Sivaraksa

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Susan George: There is only one way to devise an economic system that isn’t in conflict with human, animal or planet rights, and that is to accept the notion of limits. We need limits on disparities in salaries. For example, we need to accept that the highest paid cannot earn more than a multiple of x, may be 5, may be 10, I don’t know, than the poorest paid worker. We need to accept limits on consumption, for instance, consumption of water by making it very expensive above a certain level. We need to accept limits on energy, limits on private transportation. We need to accept limits on the amount of resources that we can consume and encourage through that that people use public transport rather than private, that people accept to pay taxes so that every one can have access to the same public services, and that again means limiting one’s private consumption because one is going to be paying taxes to the public treasury. If we don’t have measures in limits, then the human animal, the species is going to take over the entire planet, and then every one will be losers. We are -- our tendency is to take everything for ourselves as if we were the only species on the planet, which is demonstrably untrue, but that we’ve already done. We are already taking over 85 percent of all of the resources for our own use as humans. We leave very little for other species, and this is increasing every year. So, the notion of limits on the size of the economy, the notion of personal limits, the notion of the limiting of how much we are able to consume as individuals but also as societies, is the only way that we can build a system that’s expressed in this question. System based on competition and accumulation can never achieve a rights based system.

by Susan George

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Swami Pragyapad: Answertext will be available soon.

by Swami Pragyapad

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Sydney Possuelo: Well, this is a big challenge: to generate a social system which could contemplate human diversity. Not only human diversity, but also this huge diversity of economical and political interests, concepts of right and wrong, so distinct and different among people. Each one has their way of being in the world, of viewing the world, of feeling the world. How to create paradigms which could be accepted by everyone? We look for answers and we want to change the world, very often thinking that, by changing the regimes, we are going to change the situation of the whole Earth. I think that maybe the greatest answer to this would be an inner change. The answers are inside us. It’s by changing ourselves, our concepts, our vision of solidarity, our being in the world, our feelings, mainly the loving feelings toward life and toward other people, respect, dignity, in short, I think the answers are more inside than outside us, at the regimes. Of course the regimes can always be changed, but they always end up by producing the same problems. Until we have this range of interests and keep being this “man's wolf to man”, the regimes will be far away from its justness.

by Sydney Possuelo

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Takashi Kiuchi: The economic system which we created is based on unfortunately on the selfishness and egoists reason. That's why it has a conflict with human, animal and planet rights. We've been having this kind of economic system for the last more than 1,000 years, and because of that selfishness, - selfishness and egoism, now we have started realizing the shortcomings and all kinds of defective aspects of the economic system we have. Since we now are aware of this, and not too much time is left in front of us, we have to put in new factors in order to create an economic system which is viable for this century. And I call it "natural economic system." We have to take into consideration what nature has. It's a design of nature and that is what we need to incorporate and accommodate into our economic system.

by Takashi Kiuchi

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Tamas St. Auby: We should not produce and consume the superfluous, namely the armament, like the oniomaniacs and the pleonexiacs armament regulates all. The global disarmament would regulate all.

by Tamas St. Auby

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Tania Bruguera: This is a very complicated question because precisely the economy is a more fundamental way of talking of exchange. Not always of the exchange of money, it can often be the exchange of money with objects, the exchange of ideas, it can be the exchange of actions. The economy is not only guided by money and I think that one of the things which have happened is that you always see the economic system related with money. Therefore it is logical that when a system is guided by money all of the decisions will define based on an efficiency of money [inaudible]. But if you refer to the economy as a system of exchange, which part play ethics, which part plays a whole conglomerate of ideas, of concepts concerning humanity, concerning the own process of exchange and change. Maybe one could take decisions which could not have exactly a tendency or a prosperity which is countable in money but in another element. I don´t know, maybe it could be a system guided by a kind of ethics instead of only money. I think that there was a reduction of terms, there has been a reduction and I think it is concerned with a capitalist system, which has dealed with regarding the economy every time more just like a system of profit and loss at the monetary level. But if one could integrate others, this means ethics and even an autoevaluation of the process of change and exchange which you autoanalize, and rather question and why this is done, how and for what it is done instead of how much profit you will make with it. Maybe this would be a possible solution.

by Tania Bruguera

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Tavis Smiley: I am not an expert in this area, but I’m not certain that an economic system can be devised that is not in conflict on some level with human, animal, or planet rights. Conflict is a part of life and public policy. There is no perfect public policy. That said, we can in fact develop an economic system that is not tilted against human, animal, or planet rights, and that means we have to take these things into consideration. And quite frankly most of those persons who drive our economic system care only about money. They care only about profit. So I’m not certain that we can create a system that doesn’t conflict at all with human, animal, or planet rights, but we certainly can have people who run the system who care more about these other areas of concern and fight harder and are more aggressive about trying to find a balance amongst our economic systems and our ecological systems. But again it begins; it has to begin with people who care about human, animal, or planet rights. Quite frankly, and not to cast aspersions on everyone in the economic system, there are too many people who don’t care, don’t value those concerns in the way that they should. We need to change that.

by Tavis Smiley

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Tegla Loroupe: Answertext will be available soon.

by Tegla Loroupe

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Thenmozhi Soundararajan: I think one of the things that’s very interesting about the time that we live in is that I think we are moving past having leaders who actually define the economic agenda for mass parts of the world. I don’t think we need to be caught between a Western dichotomy or a Communist dichotomy by leaders that are from mostly the North. I think the question around just economic systems whether it’s just relationships of labor, just relationships with the environment and just relationships with each other in general, is really something that’s going to be decided at a local level. I think the more that we can really look at distributive models of leadership, distributive models of power where people are actually able to create what that means for themselves on the ground in their local community, I think we’ll see the local become global as opposed to what we have seen in the past where what’s happened globally has to be forced locally. I think there is a dissonance with people’s local traditions, with their local values, and the way that they can truly internalize what that means. I feel like what I’ve seen around the way people have incorporated human rights and maybe what we need to look at is connecting human rights with a body of work that looks at the rights as a planet and the rights of animals; is that when we look at what we care about in terms of [sentiency], I think that if we can hold those things to be true in whatever systems we create in our society, I think that’s one way to look at creating that system. But my number one thing that I would actually say to begin with is that I don’t think we actually want to start with saying this is meta solution for all peoples in all times in all spaces, but really allow people to decide that locally, regionally and based on their own cultural traditions and values.

by Thenmozhi Soundararajan

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Tu Weiming: The whole question about the so-called humanization of economics is very complex, and this new understanding that economy ought to be a form of human flourishing, for example, the father of economics, Adam Smith, in fact consider himself very much a moral philosopher thinking about human relationships in terms of mutual human flourishing. In the Chinese case, economics sometimes is considered as managing the world. If you try to manage the world, you have to understand the human species is an integral part of a larger nature, and bio-diversity is an important part of human existence. Economics is not simply a mechanism of handling the economic situation, it has broad political implications, it has extremely important feature not only in economy but in society and culture in this particular sense that the new kind of humanized economy is something that may have far reaching implications for all people in the world. And it is in this sense that economics should be liberated from simply the mechanism of the distribution of power and wealth. It should be understood as a mechanism of human flourishing in the broadest and comprehensive manner. It is in this particular sense that economics ought to be developed not simply for the sake of the human species but for the idea of rights that would enhance the importance of the biodiversity for the eventual development of the human species as a whole. Economics, in this particular sense, is not simply a science of the distribution of wealth but as Adam Smith pointed out earlier, that economics has moral sciences ought to take into consideration all aspects of the human experience as a way of dealing with the whole situation.

by Tu Weiming

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Udi Aloni: I really believe that if we concentrate on the true rights and needs of humans the rest will follow. If we really understand the true needs of humankind we also understand that animal and planets are part of it. So I don't have to divide it to three different issues. I would say let’s concentrate on what’s good to human but what's really good to human, not in the short term, in the long term. And the rest will just fall into this concept. Because they are not in contradict to each other. They are complementary to each other.

by Udi Aloni

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Valentina Melnikova: First of all it is possible to reduce war expenditures. The mankind spends enormous human and economical resources, spends its intellect to develop weapons of destruction and to prepare people for war. Is it possible to deflect these resources for for paeceful purposes? Yes, it is possible if every community would say “We want to live on the clean planet. We want to save the world of animals and plants. We don’t want to have wars.”

by Valentina Melnikova

Sep 9, 2006 10:20:00 AM cite

Vesna Pesic: Answertext will be available soon.

by Vesna Pesic