Capitalism Is Not the "Market System” With the Democratic Socialists of America now counting 48,000 people within its membership and socialist candidates such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushing for free universities and Medicare for All, Americans are once again discussing capitalism versus socialism.
Fortunately, they are not doing so in the old Cold War manner of uncritically celebrating one while demonizing the other. Rather, it’s a debate over the choice Americans must make now between keeping capitalism or changing the system to some form of socialism. As debates often do, this debate awakens us to problems and differences in how we understand its basic terms.
For clarity and to make progress in this important debate, we need to stop conflating “capitalism” with the market. This is done far too often and on all sides of the debate. Markets are a means of distributing resources and products, goods and services. Who Created the Economy? Excerpted from The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley.
With permission of the publisher, HarperCollins Publishers The Evolution of the Economy Depending on whose estimate you choose, and how you correct for inflation, the average person alive in the world today earns in a year between ten and twenty times as much money, in real terms, as the average person earned in 1800. Or rather, he or she can afford ten or twenty times as many goods or services. Today's Capitalism Is a Far Cry From What It Was Intended to Be. Theconversation. Today’s youth are increasingly unhappy with the way their elders are running the world.
Their ire was most recently expressed when thousands of teenagers and others across the country marched on March 24 demanding more gun control, a little over a month after more than a dozen of their peers were shot and killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida. But there’s growing evidence that today’s young adults, ranging in age from 18 to 29 or so, are strongly dissatisfied with other fundamental aspects of our political and economic system. Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today. On or about February 24, 1848, a twenty-three-page pamphlet was published in London.
Modern industry, it proclaimed, had revolutionized the world. Simple Rules of Capitalism — Collaborative Fund. You can’t accurately describe how complicated the global economy is.
There are more than 200,000,000 businesses in the world. Three-hundred trillion dollars of financial assets. Eighty trillion dollars of GDP. Almost 200 countries, thousands of cultures and norms. When Systems Crumble: Looking Beyond Global Capitalism. Is the employee-employer relationship of capitalism crumbling, just like feudalism did before?
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout) As global capitalism staggers painfully, unevenly and dangerously in the wake of its 2008 collapse, its critics divide into two broad camps. One commits to fixing or reforming a capitalism that has somehow lost its way. How economists rode maths to become our era’s astrologers. Since the 2008 financial crisis, colleges and universities have faced increased pressure to identify essential disciplines, and cut the rest. In 2009, Washington State University announced it would eliminate the department of theatre and dance, the department of community and rural sociology, and the German major – the same year that the University of Louisiana at Lafayette ended its philosophy major. In 2012, Emory University in Atlanta did away with the visual arts department and its journalism programme.
How the Invisible Hand Was Corrupted by Laissez-Faire Economics - Evonomics. By Jeff Madrick As I learned my economics and further explored the influence of the Invisible Hand, the power of ideas became clearer to me.
Economic ideas have had enormous influence on economic conditions—and vice versa. Over the past thirty-five years, the ideas at the center of orthodox economics, did damage and laid the groundwork for the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. The Invisible Hand, though alluring, is highly ambiguous—it does good and harm.
A beautiful idea can be described as one that explains a lot with a little. Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems. Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism.
The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Bernie Sanders Is a Social Democrat, Not a Democratic Socialist. Theconversation. It is now not uncommon for 11-year-olds to be diabetic.
I see one reason for it every time I check out at my local Safeway in Washington. The candy is right there at the cash register, waiting to be eaten. But this does not mean that the manager of the store is mean or even irresponsible. If she has qualms about this practice, she would face a real dilemma: she needs to show a profit. The margins at supermarkets are tiny. Curiously, while economists understand each and every such instance where people are tempted to buy things that are not good for them, they fail to appreciate that this occurs because of a general principle of economics. Markets will deceive. The JP Morgan Jamie Dimon/Matt Taibbi Edition of why SEC Chair Mary Jo White needs to recuse herself from Hartzman v Wells Fargo. I believe Mrs.
White has a stake in the outcome of Wells Fargo Advisors LLC / Hartzman / 4-3750-13-010 If I provided Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi among others information concerning Mrs. White's former JP Morgan client Jamie Dimon about insider trading, and my OSHA/DOL filing, which the SEC can be involved in, and may already be involved in, includes information concerning JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon, which is material and relative to the veracity of my case, I believe Mrs. White should recuse herself from any involvement. . .From: Matthew Taibbi To: george hartzman. DC Douglas' "Why #OccupyWallStreet? 4 Reasons." Four Horsemen Feature Documentary. Global Power Project, Part 1: Exposing the Transnational Capitalist Class. A giant mansion right below the Chapel of the Rocks in Sedona, Arizona. (Photo: Adam Gessaman / Flickr)The Global Power Project, an investigative series produced by Occupy.com, aims to identify and connect the worldwide institutions and individuals who comprise today's global power oligarchy.
By studying the relationships and varying levels of leadership that govern our planet's most influential institutions — from banks, corporations and financial institutions to think tanks, foundations and universities — this project seeks to expose the complex, highly integrated network of influence wielded by relatively few individuals on a national and transnational basis. This is not a study of wealth, but a study of power. Amazon's Letter To Shareholders Should Inspire Every Company In America.
Whole Foods' John Mackey: What 'Conscious Capitalism' Means. Lewis Schiff interviews the co-founder of Whole Foods about 'conscious capitalism' and how businesses can serve all their shareholders: customers, employees, suppliers, investors, communities and the environment. John Mackey talks about the decline of economic freedom in the U.S. -- and why business people are more important than ever. John Mackey explains why you shouldn't 'manage your brand' -- you should take care of your customers and create authentic value. John Mackey talks about empowering Whole Foods employees to take initiative and the successful (and failed) experiments that have resulted.
John Mackey explains how a transparent compensation program can create solidarity, increase justice and help direct people's career choices. What I Didn't Learn in Introductory Economics - Room for Debate. Time to resurrect an old idea: Economic Rent. Have you ever heard of the term “economic rent”? No? That’s probably because of the greatest political coup in the history of our republic. A Capitalist’s Dilemma, Whoever Wins the Election. Victo Ngai Clayton Christensen, author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” says the winner of the presidential election must face “the capitalist’s dilemma. " In many ways, the answer won’t depend on who wins on Tuesday. Anyone who says otherwise is overstating the power of the American president.
Financial Totalitarianism: The Economic, Political, Social and Cultural Rule of Speculative Capital. Full Interview: Taming Capitalism Run Wild on Moyers & Company. Capitalism Hits the Fan - Richard Wolff. "Pure" Capitalism Is Pure Fantasy. RSA Animate - Crises of Capitalism. Capitalism is a “dirty word”: America’s new socialist councilmember talks to Salon.
On November 5, Seattle voters made Occupy activist and economics professor Kshama Sawant the first avowed socialist city council member in their city’s history – and the country’s first big city socialist council member in decades. In an interview Thursday – one day before her vote count lead spurred her opponent to concede the race – Sawant slammed Obama economics, suggested she could live to see the end of U.S. capitalism, and offered a socialist vision for transforming Boeing. Is American Capitalism in Profound Trouble? David Harvey: The Crisis Today: Marxism 2009. Robert Brenner: A Marxist explanation for the current capitalist economic crisis.
From crisis to crisis: can capitalism survive? Part I: Can Capitalism Survive? Part II: Details Proliferate, Structure Abides. Testimony of Marriner Eccles to the Committee on the Investigation of Economic Problems in 1933. Laissez-faire’s Piketty Problem. Noah Smith remarks that Tyler Cowan’s portion of the Marginal Revolution blog, since the release of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, seems to have become “your one-stop-shop for anti-Piketty links and analysis.”
Smith goes on to say: This is interesting, because Cowen himself recently wrote a book called Average is Over, which makes predictions somewhat similar to those made by Piketty. Harold Meyerson - Building a Better Capitalism. The International Monetary Fund Says Trickle-Down Economics Don't Work. Economists have long argued about the economic effects of inequality.
One school says big income differences spur poorer people to work harder. Another says inequality is bad for economies because it reduces economic spending from people of lower and middle incomes. Now the International Monetary Fund is saying where it stands on the issue. Will Capitalism Destroy Civilization? The Good, Bad and Ugly of Capitalism. LIVE from the NYPL & The Aspen Institute Present: Capitalism and the Future. Forget “Going for growth” neither Hayek nor Keynes can save Capitalism. Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt. Mike Konczal: '13 Bankers,' Financialization and the Real Economy. Top Derivatives Expert Estimates Size of the Global Derivatives Market at $1,200 Trillion Dollars … 20 Times Larger than the Global Economy. Derivatives - The Unregulated Global Casino for Banks. Quants: The Alchemists of Wall Street (Marije Meerman, VPRO Backlight 2010) Money & Speed: Inside the Black Box (Marije Meerman, VPRO)
Michael Lewis, Flash Boys, and 60 Minutes. Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market. Hedonometer. Twitter and its impact IRL. Google Trends Could Predict Stock Market Moves, Study Shows. Financialization Era – how banking welfare captured our economy and ravaged the wealth of the working and middle class. Building profits through financial debt leverage. How Banks Got Too Big to Fail. Publicly traded investment banks = big mistake. There Is No Invisible Hand - Jonathan Schlefer.