Soundings

Editorial 

The financial elite and economists in the academic and commercial sectors have for many years been colluding in ignoring the inevitability of the impending crash. This of course now has the useful additional effect ofeveryone being able to say that nobody could have foreseen what has happened. When this dominant narrative has been disturbed by critical economists, they have been dismissed as doom-mongers (before the crash) or gloaters (afterwards). Some have described dominant economics as autistic, and this does in some ways capture the sealed world of the financial elite and their collaborators in the academy. However, dominant economic practitioners, unlike those suffering from autism, have for a long time been able to remake the world to correspond to their theories, because their world view is linked to power. In this issue a range of contributors put forward a different analysis of recent economic history. Other articles discuss adults and responsibility, life in debt, Iraq, food sovereignty, and images of the undeserving poor; the final two articles discuss the efforts of the government to dismantle the public service ethos of general practice, as plans continue apace to hand over service delivery to the very same business interests who have shown themselves to be so self-interested and incompetent in their operations elsewhere.

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Contents

Editorial

Private equity and the credit crunch
Adam Leaver

The housing disaster
Toby Lloyd

Financial bubbles and economic crises
Carlota Perez talks to Jonathan Rutherford

Adult responsibility in insecure times
Kate Crawford

Life on credit
Zygmunt Bauman

Tax justice and secrecy jurisdictions
Richard Murphy

City pay
Julie Froud

Iraq's new ruling elite
Toby Dodge

Food sovereignty: time to choose sides
Anthony Jackson and Eve Mitchell

The undeserving poor
Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi

Reviews
Tony Blackshaw, Pat Devine, Richard Johnson

Poems
Alvin Pang, Andrea Brady, Siddhartha Bose

Only the lonely: older people and public service reform
Hilary Cottam

End of the line for general practice?
Stephen Amiel

The problem with being private
John Launer

Notes on Contributors

ISBN 9781905007950 paperback Spring 2009