The defining economic challenge of our time is secular stagnation. It is the risk of inadequate growth, leading to inadequate potential, leading to inadequate growth.
— Lawrence H. Summers, former U. S. Treasury secretary, now teaching at Harvard
We are biological creatures, part of an ecosphere, living in communities. Like any other organism, our genetic code sets parameters within which we live. The ecosphere is governed by laws of physics and chemistry that set the parameters within which all organisms exist. And we encounter the world not as isolated, independent individuals but through social systems that affect how we understand ourselves and the possibilities for our lives.
Imagine owning warehouses full of second rate bootleg hooch at the very moment Prohibition is repealed.
Imagine still owning a buggy whip factory.
Imagine possessing billions of gallons of oil, just as renewable energy sources begin chopping major chunks out of your market share. Watching as the worth of your reserves decreases day after day after day.
With every advance by alternative energy industries, the potential price of the world’s oil reserves decreases.
The simple fact that China has grown by at least eight percent per capita annually, and for the last few decades, irks many pro-Washington, pro-European Union financial lackeys. Notwithstanding the prevailing wisdom espoused by many pro-establishment economics experts, China’s growth has largely made it the most successful economy in the world since 1978. Even renown Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs admits as much. Despite many fringe complaints, China’s growth has not ceased.
Thomas Piketty’s, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is a sensation–an economics textbook, translated from the French, that has been on the New York Times best-seller list. It is an important work. If you ignore more than one hundred pages of notes, it is still a long but easy read.
Modern marketing changes language and machinery but not its material foundation, which existed long before the industrial age. An allegedly “new” economy of information technology (IT) is just an update with different jargon and tools but the profit and loss substance remain exactly what they’ve always been: great for some, nice for many, and terrible for the earth and most of its people.
The unipolar model of the world order has failed.
– Vladimir Putin, St Petersburg, May 22
War is America‘s main export. Without it, the USA is nothing. It’s economy depends on it.
Let’s take a look at the tip of a very deep iceberg.
TRNN Producer Lynn Fries hosts an extended interview with Thomas Piketty about his widely acclaimed Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
“Any government with both the power and the will to remedy the major defects of the capitalist system would have the power and the will to abolish it altogether” said economist Joan Robinson analyzing the situation a generation ago. But her words are a call to create such a government now. Our global problem is not only a perpetually war making empire but also the economic basis of its imperial system. The evidence seemed clear to only some scholars in the past, but it is becoming more obvious to anyone who notes the signs of breakdown in the present.
