Dominant Revenue Economics

For most of us, our eyes glaze over when The Minister of Finance, Bank executives or economic spokespersons begin to speak about interest rates, inflation, the GDP; and so on. We wonder: 'What are they talking about?'

To better understand economics, it is necessary to clarify that it is not some mysterious set of perfect mathematical equations over which we have no control. Today, the Marketplace is often alluded to in almost Godlike terms, as if it were some all-pervasive, self-correcting, immutable Presence. To criticize operations of 'the Marketplace' smacks of blasphemy. But, believe it or not, economic spokespersons do not carry about with them some secretive, inner knowledge of the way in which the world works!

A fundamental concept which aids us in bringing economics down-to-earth is the very important notion of dominant revenue economics: from it, we see that dominant interests devise an 'economics' which serves their exclusive monetary and economic interests, rather than the interests of all, or of the Earth.

Francois Perroux (1903-1987), a leading figure of the French school of economics during the sixties held that in every historic period the revenue of a particular group is taken to be the 'dominant revenue'. With each successive dominant revenue there was associated a very distinct economic theory:

• The ascendancy of the landowners gave us the doctrine of the Physiocrats who held agriculture to be the only productive occupation.
  
• The era of merchant capitalism had as its doctrine mercantilism, which hardly looked beyond the balance of trade and the net flow of the precious metals.
• Laissez-faire mirrored the interests of a pioneering industrial capitalism.
• Marginal utility answered more closely the requirements of industrial capitalism at a more advanced stage.
• Today, profit gleaned through global fiscal speculation- essentially gambling-is justified by the economic theory of monetarism.

The crisis of modern-day economics springs from a quixotic attempt to understand a mixed economy (explained later on in our tutorial) in which profit is no longer the dominant revenue- in terms of a theory based on the assumption that it is.