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What is an economic policy?

An economic policy is the response to the following three questions:

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What are the needs of the various members of our community that we wish to address?

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What must we extract at a minimum from the environment, in terms of renewable and non-renewable resources, and what must we import?

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How will we transform the basic elements (listed in the second question) into the various products and services (listed in the first question)?

Remarks

The approach we have presented is vaguely reminiscent of economic planning. However, economic planning is usually associated with a socialist model of government (generally authoritarian), or a hybrid model in which it attempts to compensate for the shortcomings of the market economy.
The model of government presented in the book 'From Capital to Reason' differs entirely from these two models. The economic policy we present here is a more academic and sociological, rather than governmental, approach; it seeks primarily to highlight shortcomings (unmet needs) and archaic practices (excessive extraction relative to the outcome obtained, non-optimal transformation methods). It thus refers to Chapter 10 of this book 'The Journal of Strategic Reflections' and more particularly to its last paragraph 'External effects on the ecosystem'.

The imports listed in the second question presuppose that more is produced or extracted than is necessary for the population considered, in order to enable exchange with the outside world.

The problem of wealth distribution

The inextricable problem of wealth distribution in our modern societies stems from the fact that goods and services are produced without knowing in advance their destination. More precisely, their purpose is 'to be sold' rather than 'to satisfy a specific need of a specific group'.
In other words, there is a market postulate that: if a product is sold, it is useful and therefore it was right to produce it; and if it is not useful, it will not be sold and thus will no longer be manufactured. However, this postulate is simplistic because it makes the absolutely false assumption in an abundance society that what we buy corresponds to the response to reasonable needs.
To simplify, a market economy produces on one side the poor who cannot decently satisfy their actual needs, and on the other side the irresponsible who waste resources.

As soon as the economy is viewed as a system of wealth production, whose objective is growth and not the satisfaction of identified needs, we artificially create the problem of distribution and the intense social conflicts associated with it, such as, for example, the issue of financing pensions in France in 2023. Yet, this problem—which generates a high level of violence, conflict, and dissatisfaction, and ultimately threatens national cohesion—does not exist in the real world: it is merely a byproduct of a mistaken, dogmatic, and unrealistic vision of the notion of economic policy.

To deepen

Read the second part of the book From Capital to Reason which outlines the proposed production organization.
Also see Chapter 17 'The Financing System' for the financing section.

Aside from the book From Capital to Reason whose method has not yet been implemented on a large scale, Lean production, as described in the book 'The Machine that Changed the World', is the closest production method to have been successfully implemented on a significant scale. Its particularities include an emphasis on problem management, the revaluation of directly productive people and their training to enable them to become more versatile and sources of improvement, reduced inventory, pull production based on orders, demand stabilization through a different marketing approach. This stability in turn enables lifetime employment.
Attention: concerning Lean production, read the book 'The Machine that Changed the World' and nothing else, because the term has been corrupted by the myriad of consultants who claim it, up to the point where the Wikipedia article is one of the very worst articles on this remarkable platform.

 

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