Contemporary Macroeconomic Outcomes: A Tragedy in Three Acts (original) (raw)
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Critical Public Health, 2014
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2016
There are now a significant number of good articles and books describing the Great Recession and the related subsequent lethargic recovery. The number of these articles is constantly increasing as the weak recovery continues, written by both liberal critics1 of neoliberalism, and radical critics2 of both neoliberalism and capitalism. The intent of this chapter therefore is not to discuss the recent United States (US) crisis and anemic recovery themselves. Rather, the intent of this chapter is to address two underdiscussed prequel questions: why US capitalists abandoned the previous form of capitalism that had served them so well in the first two decades after World War II (WWII), and (related to that, we will see) why they adopted the specific practices and structure of neoliberal capitalism that existed in the US in 2007. A second intent of this chapter is to go beyond only analyzing the origins of today’s deeply troubled economy, to contribute to building a humancentered alternati...
BRIQ, 2020
The pandemic crisis produced by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the disease COVID-19, has rapidly exposed the limits of growth in neoliberal globalization, where financialization, far from bolstering global productive and commercial activities, has proved to be merely an efficient means of redistributing wealth towards society’s wealthiest members. The paralysis of global productive chains and trade is exacerbated by the deterioration of financial-market assets and loss of liquidity, high levels of corporate and private debt in industrialized countries, and the prominence of the informal economy in developing countries. Taken together, these phenomena will make it impossible for the global economy to return to the way it functioned before the COVID-19 crisis. With the hyper-crisis of modern-day neoliberalism exacerbated by the pandemic, difficulties in the supply chains essential to global trade have increased the risks of default on sovereign and corporate debt markets. For both sectors – government and business – a temporary restoration of liquidity is mediated by issuing higher volumes of debt. In a context of uncertain recovery, falling investment, failing businesses, mass unemployment, and declining family income, this will shift insolvency from the real to the financial sector. The potential way out of this hyper-crisis of neoliberal capitalism should be a new development strategy based on domestic markets, which globalization has relegated to niches of industrial specialization dictated by the need for supplies in highly profitable productive chains in developed countries. The current crisis, with its attendant high unemployment and increase in poverty, will define workers’ global struggle for better living conditions, thereby defining the structure of income distribution between capital and labor for the rest of the 21st century.
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SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
These books, different in style and content but united in purpose and major conclusions, analyse events from 2007 to 2010 to ascertain why the economic disaster happened and what must be done to put the United States economy (on which both books focus) on a more secure footing, and prevent any recurrence of the extended crisis of those years. Both target the increasing influence of market liberalism over the last 30 years, and the institutions of capitalist economies which they have encouraged.
2014
AbstractThe major contributor to Radical Economics was Karl Marx. This article makes the case that Marx should be appreciated for his contribution and the values he brought to today's macroeconomic debate.IntroductionKarl Marx is the central figure in the history of socialism. It is less easy to establish a consensus as to why he is pre-eminent and it is notoriously impossible to obtain agreement about the significance of his form of social analysis. But his methods, nonetheless, endure today and have the potential to provide insights that could arguably help provide a blueprint to remedy the dysfunctions of the present day economy. Marx's philosophical system as a fusion of three intellectual traditions: German Idealism, the French Enlightenment, and British classical economics (liberalism). He blended these three traditions into a coherent theoretical structure, which provided the emerging socialist movement with an intellectual basis for analysis. This social construct pr...
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