There is a battle for the future of local economic policy. It has been captured by an over exuberant set of economic orthodoxies and its failing wisdom around competition and growth. Low wages, poverty and hardship are on the rise, and local economic policy seems increasingly incapable, if not obsolete, in tackling it.
Systems evolve. As the palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has described it, each time the evolution of planet Earth reaches a plateau a new creative direction emerges, and that in turn leads to a plateau, and so on. Thomas Kuhn describes the evolution of science similarly.