‘A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest‘    (Paul Simon)

We’re a few days into Davos, and a couple of weeks into the Athens debt negotiations. While Greeks sleep in the street and refuse to pay their electricity bills – existing on an estimated average family salary of 14,000 euros – a dozen or so Hedge Funds and a bunch of corrupt Eurocrats are arguing the toss about whether the carpetbaggers from the US will make $6.2bn or $7.4bn on the deal, or if France will lose one stupid bank or none at all. And the IMF which a year ago was all for this State suicide is now confusing everyone involved with ideas that are too brittle too late.

In this context, I suppose we should be encouraged by the admission of all those billionaires up there in the daily-cleaned snow that ‘inequities of wealth’ are a real problem. Except I can’t be, because other than a bit of readjustment here and there, the Dreamers of Davos have nothing to say about a radical approach to the problem.

Economists – especially academic economists – are good crack if there’s nothing on the telly, and you haven’t had much to smile about during the day. What adds to the amusement however is that 95% of the time, the humour most of them emit is almost unconscious. At times it borders on autonomic.

Anatole Kaletsky writes quite a bit for The Times. His piece earlier this week on the global economic ‘problem’ was headlined ‘Enough tinkering. Only a Revolution will do’. So given Anatole’s track record of Big State mixed metaphors, I shouldn’t have been surprised when, once he got going, his idea of what a revolution might be was revolutionary in a very narrow sense. He was in fact headlining a revolution as in old-fashioned vinyl going round and round….until the needle lifts itself off, and goes back to where it started. This made me smile at the end of a long and tedious session on the gym bike. And it takes a lot to make me smile after one of those.

In 2010, Kaletsky suggested the emergence of a new form of capitalism, which he called Capitalism 4.0. His epic was primarily influenced by the subprime mortgage crises of 2007-2009, and the fallibility of capitalism. This too was a revolver in the sense of a disc rather than a gun. (Don’t misinterpret that parallel: I don’t hold with the idea of blowing capitalism away either. I just don’t want to go back to the tedium of Socialism churning grey things out at 45 rpm)

Hitting the dulled ‘markets are always right’ nail firmly on its small head, Kaletsky’s Times piece blames free-market Friedmanism for all our ills. The answer, unfortunately, is…..macroeconomic management. Oh dear.

What is it about qualitative step-change that terrifies the human race in 2012? I am a conservative person myself (and if I’m honest, I always have been) but I am also a great believer in the Sherlock Holmes principle when it comes to data: ‘When there is only one interpretation left that fits all the facts, then that must – however bizarre – be the right one’.

In Davos Week, I think it is right to be raising the need for this sort of thinking. Not woolly, Leftie, Nick Clegg ‘let’s-raise-the-tax-relief’ bollocks, but solid socio-economic philosophy. OMG, there’s the p word again: isn’t philosophy dead? Well, when the application of eclectic and hard-headed experience to society’s problems is dead, then so is civilisation. Ask Aristotle: he was pretty clear about that 3,000 years ago, and he’s still right several Saviours later.

What makes Anatole Kaletsky’s piece risible in the end is the following list of things he doesn’t even deem worthy of mention, let alone deconstruction:

1. Globalist mercantilism.

2. The bourse model of financing capitalism.

3. The assumption that Big is here to stay. (Not even Rupert Murdoch believes that any more)

4. The transfer of wealth from sovereign States to private lenders.

5. The destruction during the period 1985-2000 of the mutual sector of the economy.

6. The growing rejection of supra-nationalism in favour of community capitalism.

7. The fact that 57% of major corporate acquisitions destroy shareholder value.

There is a movement for change out there, and I for one find it uplifting. Some of it is misguided, and much of it yet another attempt by the dying Left to hijack something to take the place of its beloved but busted Socialism. As the slump overwhelms the decent middle, rejection of neocon devil-take-the-hindmost-trickle-down bollocks will advance; and then we will see real change. But in the interim, I do fear that denialism among the upper crust of capitalism’s half-baked cake will evoke a mob reaction that nobody can then control.

My prediction of a world in which self-sufficiency, balanced agro-manufacturing economics and efficient trade replace the contemporary nonsense has nothing to do with hugging a tree. I want the best use of entrepreneurial capitalism to make sovereign States more secure. I want to abolish nutcase zero-sum bank-driven paper with the sum of something better for the Benthamite majority. I want to stop idiots yelling the word protectionism as if it was infectious leprosy, and help them to think of self-sufficiency instead as diplomacy minus the destructive neurosis. And above all, I want that Benthamite majority to be driven by educated social values, not visceral appetites.

Clearly, I am a fully paid-up member of the lunatic fringe.