Zcom_simple

Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

Copy_of_big_logo

Zed Books's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/zed books
Bio: Zed is celebrating 30 years as one of the most distinctive voices in independent, progressive publishing. Over the last three decades we have published more than 1,000 titles. Each of these book... (More)

All Books Blogs

Economics is simply too important to be left to economists

By Zed Books at Nov 02, 2011


Change Text Size a- | A+
Progress Online recently posted an article about the financial crisis and how nobody saw it coming. One of the few economists who did predict the crisis is Australian academic and Zed author Steve Keen, who has just launched a revised second edition of his 2001 book Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned?

It was the Queen who asked the big question in the aftermath of the financial crisis – why did nobody see it coming? Many of the world’s most distinguished economists took upthe challenge, with varying degrees of success. The basic answer was that they couldn’t possibly have known. There was nothing in their experience or theories to prepare them for a freak event like the fall of Lehman Brothers.

Nothing short of a crystal ball would have enabled them to see the crisis coming. Nye Bevan’s words spring to mind: ‘why try to look into the crystal ball when you can read the book.’ The point is that these economists should have seen the crisis coming, since the data and the lessons of history were clear for anyone who cared to look. The fact that they didn’t reflects the sorry state of mainstream economics.

The article goes on to discuss the content of Keen's book, explaining in detail how the very foundations of neoclassical economics are based on faulty logic and barely any consideration of what actually goes on in the real world. Even what is taught as Keynesian economics is really a sanitised version, bereft of Keynes’ most salient insights.

Though the book may not be plain sailing if you don’t have a basic grounding in economics, it is a ‘must read’ for anyone with a serious interest in the ongoing debate on building a fresh alternative to an intellectually bankrupt neoliberal consensus. As Steve Keen would tell us ‘economics is simply too important to be left to economists.’
 

Debunking Economics - Revised and Expanded Edition is out now.

Loading_border