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Introduction: Creating Prosperity
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19997 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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8 / 1992 |
844 Words |
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Cash in the bank, shelves stocked with baked goods and electronic goods, a home that's warm and dry, medicines and surgeons a phone call away, an abundance of good schools, sound roads and rail lines--these are the fruits of prosperity that the world yearns for.
Yet despite the huge economic gains of the two centuries since the Industrial Revolution, most of the globe still groans under a crushing weight of poverty and associated ills: malnutrition, poor health care, illiteracy, sometimes rampant disease, and occasional starvation.
The challenge facing the world today is how to extend prosperity to embrace the globe and, in those nations already prosperous, how to maintain economic health.
Because of the downturn in the U.S. economy, which is only now beginning to ebb, macroeconomic policy is enjoying more attention than it has received since the election year of 1980, when a soon to be dire recession was lapping around the hem of the economy. In 1992, the presidential candidates--as well as congressmen, governors, and state legislators--are debating tax policy, budget policy, regulatory policy, and monetary policy with a new seriousness. And, spurred by the costly and deadly riots in the wake of the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles, they are studying the social roots of poverty and prosperity with perhaps more urgency than every before.
It seems that it is only in evil economic times that policymakers are forced by the distress of their constituents to wrench themselves from partisan politics to search for real solutions to the economic cataclysms that have recurred throughout modern history. But this year the search in Washington is urgent, and so it is that this month's Currents in Modern Thought symposium considers the nature of prosperity and what it takes to create, maintain, and extend it.
The first two articles in the symposium focus on the social seeds of economic well-being. The next piece moves on to examine how business practices can be reformed to stimulate the economy, and the two concluding articles consider regulatory, fiscal, and monetary policies.
Brigitte Berger, in "The Cultural Sources of Prosperity," identifies the close-knit nuclear family, operating under the inspiration of religious principles, as the fundamental unit for capital formation and prosperity
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