Category World

Despite appearances, this goes well beyond Marxism vs. Capitalism (thinking in such one-dimensional terms would be degrading to anyone doing so). The issues that have surfaced through the world economic crisis of the late 2000s could not have been part of a 'socioeconomic' theory from the 19th century, the 1930s or the 1950s or even a modern one. The debate should not be about whether Hayek/Friedman were right (they never were), whether Keynes was, or whether Marx's arguments hold any water nowadays (some still do, but a lot of them clearly don't). Economic theories usually seem to fail exactly because they try to explain human activity in simplistic terms while struggling to prove a central thesis. That's not how the world works however. Deregulation has meant that the global finance sector has really gone wild in the past thirty years or so, and --- in the end --- markets and the financial deregulation can and have failed with detrimental results to families, businesses and societies as a whole. We don't need to explain everything or prove a meaningless thesis regarding markets, statism or innovation; we don't need to explain human frailty, culture or institutions. If anything, the central argument here is that a viable capitalism is one that exists under a fair, well-defined set of rules, one that fosters innovation and competition and one that respects the dignity of the vast majority of the population, the environment and those extra-economic aspects of human civilisation, like the arts, philosophy and history. We're nowhere close to having that at the moment. Is it possible? [via talos]