Retaining Balance: The Eternal Way

Contents: Foreword. Preface. 1. Strange Alliance, Stranger Bed Fellows. 2. Mummy, What is a Daddy? 3. To Destroy Family, Marx goes to Market. 4. Culture-Emerging Frontiers of Economics. 5. A Case for the Missing Middle. 6. In Search of Utopia. 7. Taxes are a price we pay for our Civilisation. Is it? 8. Needed: Economic Reforms or Reforms in Economics? 9. The Power of Restraint. 10. Ram Rajya is Less of Lord Rama, More of Rajya. Retaining Balance is a fascinating approach to deal with the challenges faced by the discipline of economics. This work critically analyses the prevalent conundrum of policy framers who place too much reliance on the individual, in the process ignoring traditional institutions of family, society and community. Rampant individualism, in turn, results in excesses leading to the proliferation of either a corrosive state, or an extortionist market. Retaining Balance traces this conundrum to the Christian theology of original sin and broken self, necessitating salvation through an external agent viz., the state or markets, in the first place. This arrangement has spawned a series of excesses resulting in extant macroeconomic imbalances. Retaining Balance argues that the institution of family, rooted to civilisational restraints, alone can deal with such individual excesses. Importantly, it seeks to introduce the grand idea of individual duties along with the fundamental rights to balance the skew in our constitutional arrangements. A must read for people in power.…