Why Are Most Miracles About Healing? (Resent) – WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT CAN BE

Let’s start with some big questions. How do we sustain welfare financing in a non-growing economy? How do we manage the rising relative costs of welfare? Do we overcome structural and behavioral growth dependencies within the welfare system? Do we transform the welfare state for the better?

Now for the thought experiment. What if we were to “answer” these questions with an observation that at first seems far-fetched and completely off-the-charts? Namely: Unfree labor flows and flows of illicit funds, goods, and services are a stable part of the global economy, not an aberration:

Two areas of scholarship, human trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced labor in supply chains, rarely intersect.” “By demonstrating that unfree labor is a stable aspect of the contemporary global economy, scholars of supply chain labor challenge the idea that forced labor is an ‘aberration’ (Phillips and Mieres, 2014: 245) from the normal functioning of labor markets and that of unfree labor as the opposite of free wage labor.

That is to say, deregulation, liberalization and privatization not only lead to failed regimes – which are by definition less stable – where they did not exist before (for example, because government institutions can now go bankrupt, undermining the welfare state), but also create more stable markets for all kinds of unofficial and illegal goods.

“Welfare,” “state,” and the “welfare state” have indeed been transformed. The official non-growth economy is no longer the only economy that matters.

It always has been, although it may not be as globally marketed as it is now. So what?

The observation would be banal if it were not for its important policy implications. If we were to ask, What makes for better forward planning?, we would have to answer, Why ask at all if we cannot learn to plan and respond better for now and the next steps? Or, to put it the other way: It is not unimportant that most miracles are ultimately about healing.

Sources.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800921001245

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13505068211020791

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/puar.13388