A New Economy? Looks Suspiciously Like The Old One

Is a 'new', more sustainable economic model in prospect as the world attempts to pull itself out of recession? That's the question we posed at the latest of our regular 'salon' discussion evenings last night. We had distinguished speakers from Philips (Josephine Green), the BBC (Andrew Walker) and Sally Jeanrenaud of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and a diverse audience drawn from across the corporate and NGO world.

The discussion was certainly fizzing with ideas, but on the whole, the consensus was pretty downbeat - no, a new economic model was not around the corner. Many seemed to feel that the impressive rhetoric of government leaders about committing large sums of money to a low-carbon and sustainable economy is very far from being realised. And as far as reforming the wild excesses of global capitalism was - one panellist commented that he fully expected to see the economic high-rollers back at the gambling tables of the world's financial markets within a couple of years - even if perhaps with not quite as many chips as they had before the crash.

A number of hypotheses were floated - was a testosterone-driven, 'fight or flight' mentality in the upper echelons of business, finance and government to blame for the crisis? Are we suffering from the dominance of an orthodoxy that believes that a boom will always follow a bust, no matter how severe? Or is the main problem a lack of effective structures for international policymaking, and a political short-termism that's hard-wired into most of our modern democracies? There was no shortage of diagnoses, but optimism that a cure could be found was lacking.

But if it is indeed to be back to business as usual - for now - it's in the teeth of mounting unhappiness from the global public. Our latest data shows that support for both globalisation and the free market economy continues to erode. But in the absence of a clearly articulated alternative model for organising the world, what chance is there of real reform taking place?

Those looking for a silver lining have to search hard. We did find that the proportions believing that their children and grandchildren will have a better quality of life has increased, just a little. But before things get better, our salon felt they might be about to get a whole lot worse...