A 3 part discussion series with accompanying articles including video commentary asking Why did no one see it coming? Can we fix it? And did the boom years corrode our moral character? Guardian writers and contributors ask where we go from here and what we can learn from the crunch and the downturn.
This article first appeared in a “symposium in print” in the National Catholic Register in November 2008: God brought Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin together to form the Catholic Worker movement at a time when the world was facing an economic crash similar to today’s. They critiqued robber barons, banks, the financial system, and the free market ideology known in their time as laissez-faire capitalism. They did not look to socialism as a solution, but were able to develop an alternative based on the Gospel, Catholic social teaching, and the lives of the saints…
Goudzwaard is Professor Emeritus of Economics and Social Philosophy, at the Free University in Amsterdam and former member of the Dutch parliament. co-author of Hope in Troubled Times: A New Vision for Confronting Global Crises
But the most astounding fact [of the current financial collapse] is how familiar its physiognomy and physiology look compared to past financial crashes… No one can read the chronicles of those earlier crashes without sensing with a chill that history is repeating itself… More»