Talentism to clientelism

THE EDITOR: Talentism by itself is not an economic model and left on its own, in the hands of governments with crummy economic ideas and will-power, it will devolve to the system of clientelism. The fact that it is an expression of old ideas in a new package or at a later time, makes no difference.

Economics is not just about the allocation of resources and value judgments about that; nor is it singularly about facilitating talent. Without a basic level of volume or turnover in the macroeconomy, everything will remain at a subsistence scale. The same is true for the microeconomy.

There would be the constant threat of stalling in one or the other and, sometimes, together at once. Let's be realistic. For the sake of argument, let us admit that national debt is 80 per cent of GDP. It could be as much as 95 per cent and it might be it will very quickly exceed 100 per cent.

It could be 95 per cent in the domestic economy and 70 per cent in the non-domestic. On top of that, the lion's share of resource exploitation has been given up from our control. So, now, do you suppose that talentism is going to reverse that? Do you think that (shadowy) index-pricing in the (shadowy) energy sector is an advantage in that, or even just a correct balance to the debt level?

Do you expect that assigning to the multinationals the sole discretion and decision on our rates of return, is talented? -or economic? And if you throw in names like Solow and Schwab, does it help?

ELIAS GALY

Via e-mail