RSA ANIMATE: Crises of Capitalism

What people said

pero · 2011-03 · Strong recommendation

Disasters like this are, in theory, actually beneficial to economies--especially stagnant ones like Japan's. The capacity for immediate bonafide economic growth has been diminished but that doesn't mean that economic production will decline. There is now ample room to deploy all that surplus capital (humans, machinery, money) that was previously unproductive. The upper echelones of the financial sector will make a killing shorting and re-buying. Advanced reading on a parallel concept: [LINK] The quoted and cited David Harvey piece (2007, albeit the condensed article veresion and not the full-length book) would have been a better reference however is apparently no longer online. This, though, is amazing: [VIDEO] I believe Naomi Klein made a good buck on dumbing down and re-orienting the above hypothesis.

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EGreg · 2015-12 · Recommendation

The main explanation is not considered here: Automation and Outsourcing. Both reduce the demand for local human labor, and thus depress wages. They cause wealth redistribution upwards by providing a power imbalance between the capitalist and the worker. David Harvey did a nice talk about this: [VIDEO]

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smacktoward · 2014-01 · Recommendation

In this particular case it may also have something to do with the LTOV's association with Marxist economics. The only thing Americans are expected to know about anything even vaguely associated with Marxism is that it's bad (mmmkay?), so U.S. educational institutions tend to avoid teaching things in that category to students who aren't specializing in economics. Which leads to Americans coming up with their own labels and descriptions for things that Marx observed and labeled long ago. All of which is too bad, because Marx had a lot of interesting and valuable things to say about the problems of industrial economies (see [VIDEO] for a good introduction), even if the solutions that were tried in his name didn't work out. It just wastes people's time and energy having them spin their wheels re-discovering things he discovered 150 years ago.

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