Tag Archives: capitalism

Bernie appears to have had an impact. To obtain this information, the research and data firm YouGov surveyed 23,000 people aged 16 and over. Two of the survey’s findings included that 59 percent of total Americans would rather live in a capitalist country, with 34 percent preferring a socialist nation.When focusing on millennials, the survey revealed 44 percent of those surveyed would rather live in a socialist nation, compared to 42 percent who would prefer a capitalist country. The...

Earlier this year, a Stigler Center paper by Luigi Zingales [Faculty Director of the Stigler Center and one of the editors of this blog] argued that market concentration can lead to a vicious circle, in which companies use market power to gain political power that in turn allows them to gain more market power, and vice versa. Zingales called this the “Medici vicious circle”: “Money is used to gain political power and political power is then used to make more money.”A new UN report shows...

US capitalism is again careening down blind alleys. Earlier it had crashed into the Great Depression from 1929 to 1933 before lurching into the New Deal. After 1945 it concentrated on rolling back the New Deal until it turned sharply to neoliberalism and “globalism” in the 1970s. That provided the comforting illusion of a few decades of “prosperous normalcy.” When the second major crash in 75 years hit in 2008, it exposed the debt-dependent reality of those decades. It also sent capitalism...

And American imperialism is scared. U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has described the plan as an “attack” on “American genius.” In an excellent new book, The US vs China: Asia’s new cold war?, Jude Woodward, a regular visitor and lecturer in China, shows the desperate measures that the US is taking to try to isolate China, block its economic progress and surround it militarily. But she also shows this policy is failing. China is not accepting control by foreign multi-nationals; it is...

First, we have to understand, the U.S. trade deficit has risen and U.S. manufacturing output has fallen not because of the “blind forces” of international trade. For decades now, U.S. corporations have decided to increase their profits by a combination of shifting production to other countries and automating many of the production processes that remain in the United States. And they’ve left the American working-class behind. Second, there’s no guarantee that increasing manufacturing output...

Maldistribution. Symptom or cause? A market ideology that causes widespread misery has no future. The Automatic EarthIs Capitalism Dead or Merely Dying? Raúl Ilargi Meijer The transition from the age of hunting-gathering to the agricultural age wrought a drastic social, political l and economic transformation, as did the transition from the agricultural age to the industrial age. So it can be safely assumed that the transition from the industrial age to the information age will also...

Socialism a century ago seemed to be the wave of the future. There were various schools of socialism, but the common ideal was to guarantee support for basic needs, and for state ownership to free society from landlords, predatory banking and monopolies. In the West these hopes are now much further away than they seemed in 1917. Land and natural resources, basic infrastructure monopolies, health care and pensions have been increasingly privatized and financialized. Instead of Germany and...

What Ed Harrison call "crony capitalism" is a feature of neoliberalism as government capture that favors special interests. "Crony capitalism" is an egregious example of the underlying assumption that capital formation should be favored over other factors in the interest of growth, based on the further assumption of trickle down. This results in upward distribution and growing inequality of income and wealth, which eventually leads to social dysfunctionality.Credit Writedowns Crony...

So what are the problems according to Blanchard and Summers? In their view, “the events of the last ten years have put into question the presumption that economies are self stabilizing, have raised again the issue of whether temporary shocks can have permanent effects, and have shown the importance of non linearities.” Only mainstream macroeconomists could possibly have thought that capitalism is self stabilizing. The rest of us—who have read Marx and Keynes as well as the work of Robert...

This neoliberal era has a habit of getting ahead of itself and exposing its internal contradictions. In fact, the Capitalist system, as Marx, Keynes and others have demonstrated, it inherently inconsistent. The imposition of neoliberalism has only heightened those inconsistencies and made it more likely that we will move beyond this period in the foreseeable future (fingers crosssed). Last week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest Retail Sales data for August 2017. The...