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Steve Keen considers the following as important:
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Topics:
Steve Keen considers the following as important:
This could be interesting, too:
John Quiggin writes The war to end war, still going on
New Economics Foundation writes Reclaiming our regions
New Economics Foundation writes New Economics Podcast: Why is the benefits system failing disabled people
Michael Hudson writes Jill Stein: Splitting the Pro-Imperial Vote
Steve, you are better than this clip.
Capitalism worked well when we were just trying to survive and improve our miserable lives. And when we did not dominate the planet and it’s resources.
True capitalism is also based on savings and sacrifice. What we have today is Debtism and it is based on gluttony and selfishness. It’s about taking and not making.
Capitalism has been perverted to the point where we almost feudal, again.
Either way, it’s no longer survival of the fittest. The unfit survive and consume at ever increasing rates because that is what our DEBT BASED MONETARY SYSTEM REQUIRES.
And I hate to say it, but you support our debt based monetary system which requires increasing consumption
INET has an interesting (for me) interview with Crotty who talks at length about Keynes and his embrace of oligopolies as beneficial (economies of scale etc which have ended scarcities of many kinds) but with the need to oversee them and prevent exploitation. neoliberalism has provided all the monopoly, exploitation and no market benefits and the perverse “efficiency” of arrogance and stupidity in wealth. yet the rich try to ply neoliberalism into the EU (see Macron and see Sweden).
@ProfSteveKeen that is the rub, right? any engineer could be considered a natural ambivalent.
@ProfSteveKeen Efficient supply chains are also fragile; that follows a principle of engineering tight tolerance systems are almost always brittle ones. See also All eggs in one basket. See Fukushima.
Efficiency is also a false prophet for other reasons: Damascus steel is supple because of its impurities (amongst other things).
Nature (I'll say God again because He's the mathematician ;D ) tends to build domains of self sufficiency. And also opts for that hugely inefficient thing Nature invented: sex.
"Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable." – Stanhope
One could say that's a glorious inefficiency or damnation, but it's sure proven durable.
Outside of this I am reminded of viewing an Ocean Sun fish, those flat meter diameter pelagic creatures where their bodies contain dimples so their fins are flush when pressed against their body. In water, that efficiency is life or death.
@ProfSteveKeen Goodness I am tempted to ask your opinion on Soros reflexivity. My retention of it is likely fading but I think I could say he had a better sense of emergent properties than 99% of businessmen.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell He did. A bit like Ray Dalio, he has a stylized model of economic cycles driven by both credit and time lags in market responses that is like a layman's version of emergence.
@ProfSteveKeen Thank you. On the topic of the pre-occupations of standard economics one other point dribbled back into consciousness. The field of biology used to exclusively obsess about competition and it was the emergence of women in the field who pointed out cooperation and symbiosis was equally intrinsic.
On the topic of monopoly and efficiency , many hyper libertarians (Peter Thiel) are actually anti-competition and pro monopoly. This on the premise that competition thwarts technical advancement; but the motivations for such beliefs are more pathological than reasoned.
We live in interesting times. Thank you for the interesting exchange!