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Category Archives: Social Theory

Why We Can’t Afford the Rich: A Conversation with Dr. Andrew Sayer

22 Tue Dec 2015

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Capitalism, Political Economy, Social Theory

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Against the Grain, class war from above, Dr. David Harvey, Emmanuel Saez, finance, financialisation, Gar Alperovitz, global labour movement, globalisation, Henry George (1839-1897), Interwar Period, KPFA, Marxian economics, Milton Friedman, New Deal, Pacifica Radio Network, Professor Andrew Sayer, rentier capitalism, The Moral Significance of Class, Thomas Piketty, transcript, unearned income, University of Lancaster (UK), Why We Can't Afford the Rich, worker co-ops, worker self-directed enterprises, WWII

We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew SayerLUMPENPROLETARIAT—In an encore broadcast, author and professor, Andrew Sayer [1] has joined free speech radio’s Against the Grain to discuss his 2014 book, Why We Can’t Afford the Rich.  Host Sasha Lilley guides Professor Sayer through a thoughtful discussion including the accumulation of wealth “without contributing to the production of goods and services”, or “unearned income”.  “You can get money simply by virtue of power stemming from control of assets,” emphasised Dr. Sayer, responding to questions about the dreaded rentier class.  Listen (or download) here.

Messina

***

AGAINST THE GRAIN—[22 DEC 2015]  “Today on Against the Grain:  Are the rich wealth creators, as we commonly hear?  Should we be grateful to investors and entrepreneurs, as they like to be called, for generating jobs and greasing the wheels of the economy?  Or is the source of their massive wealth the rest of us?  I’m Sasha Lilley.  In this encore broadcast, I’ll speak with scholar Andrew Sayer about rentiers, capitalists, and why we can no longer afford the rich.  That’s following these news headlines.”

[News Headlines omitted by stenographer]  (c. 6:28)

“From the studios of KPFA in Berkeley, California, this is Against the Grain on Pacifica Radio.  I’m Sasha Lilley.

“The world’s richest 85 people own as much as the poorest half of the world’s population.  That is as much as 3.5 billion people.  46% of the world’s wealth is owned by just one percent of the world’s population.  In the United States, the top 1% owns 35% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 40% owns just 0.2%.

“Yet, as Andrew Sayer asserts, it’s not a mystery how the rich have become so rich.  My guest, today, argues that, despite their self-description as wealth creators, the rich are, in fact, wealth extractors.  In his book called Why We Can’t Afford the Rich (published by the University of Chicago Press), Sayer argues that the richer people are, the more their wealth comes from purely unearned sources, from property and finance, not to mention production.  His other books include The Moral Significance of Class.  And he teaches social theory and political economy at the University of Lancaster.  And he joins me now from the UK.

“Andrew Sayer, let me start by asking you, if you will, to describe the degree of inequality in our respective countries.  That is, in the US and UK.”

DR. ANDREW SAYER:  “Actually, the US and the UK have some similarities here.  And, as Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez and people like that have shown over the last century, there’s been a dramatic series of changes in the degree of inequality, especially as regards the rich and super-rich.

“And one century ago, just after the First World War, the top 1% received about 20%, or nearly 20%, of total income.  That fell in the Inter-War Period.  And in the UK fell down to about 6% of total income.  But since then—and, again, the US is the same—the rich have bounded back with the top 1% taking about 12%, now, of total income.  And more in the US.  So, the rich have made a huge come back.  And it’s, largely, at the expense of the bottom 99%, but, particularly, the bottom 90%.”  (c. 8:58)

SASHA LILLEY:  “So, how do you define the rich?  Now, you just used the term 1%, something, that came out of the Occupy Movement.  But the top 10%?  Would we consider them rich as well?  How do you define the rich?”

DR. ANDREW SAYER:  “Well, as regards the UK, looking at the last hundred years, actually, the top 1% versus the 99% has been a key dividing line because whenever the top 1% have enlarged their share of total income the 99% have lost out.  And it could have been different.  It could have been the top 5% gaining at the expense of the bottom 95% or something much more complicated.  But throughout the last hundred years, at least in the UK, there’s been a kind of hinge point around 99%.

“So, I would say the 99%, definitely, are the rich.  But the amount of variation within the top 1% is, of course, far greater than anywhere else.  They can be people with multi-billions, like Bill Gates, or people who are just getting in to the top 1% with incomes—well, in the US, just trying, roughly, to convert from pounds to dollars—they’d be getting a household income of about $250,000 to $300,000 dollars a year.

“There’s a matter of degree in it.  The richer you are, the more of the problem it is for various reasons, which we can, no doubt, talk about.”

SASHA LILLEY:  “So, you’ve been giving us a rough sense of how we should think about the rich:  Who are they?  Whether it’s as a percentage of the population  Whether it is by income or wealth.  But I wonder if you could describe for us—who are the rich?—because, of course, the image we tend to get in the mainstream media is of celebrities, high-flying movie stars, and so on.  Are they the rich?  Or is the rich a broader group than that?”  (c. 11:02)

DR. ANDREW SAYER: “It’s not celebrities in the media, like sports stars and television and film stars.  Even someone like Steven Spielberg or Oprah Winfrey, they don’t get anywhere near the top.  They’re certainly super-rich.  But most of the super-rich we, ordinary people, haven’t even heard of.

“Okay, there are a few exceptions like Bill Gates and Donald Trump and so on, and Warren Buffett.  But most of them are known only to a few business insiders.  So, in Britain, most people haven’t heard of the top 10.  And most of them are foreign, Russian, and so on, super-rich people who  control businesses we haven’t heard of in many cases.

“The richer they are, the more their income tends to be associated with finance and real estate and the more of it is what I would call unearned income.  But, no doubt, we can talk about what that is later.”  (c. 12:03)

SASHA LILLEY:  “Sure.  One of the things, that we’ve heard about in this country is very high salaries going to, say, people in the medical profession.  And that is one group of people who are making a substantial amount.  But it sounds like what you’re saying is that, within the spectrum of the rich, those people, people, say, making $400-, $500,000 dollars a year—obviously, a lot of money—would be dwarfed by people who are on the top echelons of the 1%, so to speak, whose income or, more significantly, wealth would be substantially more.”

DR. ANDREW SAYER: “Absolutely.  Certainly, key medical consultants and other people who have very specialist skills, but also power that goes with that, can leverage themselves very high salaries.  There’s no doubt about that.  But they tend to be in the bottom half of the top 1%, if you see what I mean.  But, to get into the top half, you really need other sources of income, like financial securities and the income, which they give you, bonds and shares, derivatives, and so on, and also property, capital gains, and such.

“Any get-rich book will tell you that the best way to get rich is not simply by working hard.  And, in fact, maybe you don’t need to work hard.  It’s by getting access to financial assets, which will yield you lots of unearned income.”

SASHA LILLEY:  “Right.  And we will be talking a lot more about that.  In fact, that’s sort of the centerpiece of your book:  How are the rich rich?  But before we get to that, let me ask you:  How do the rich spend their money?  Because that has a significant role, not just simply as an individual question—how a certain person may spend the money, that they have—but it actually has a societal impact.”

DR. ANDREW SAYER: “Yeah.  Well, if you’re a billionaire, then it’s very difficult to spend all your income.  At least, it is hard to spend it on things you’ll actually get to use in a typical year.  For example, you may have four of five houses in different parts of the world.  And you’re unlikely to be able to stay in any of them for more than a short period.  But the more you get, the less you can use them, the less point in having them.  And maybe a couple of private jets would be useful.  But any more than that is a complete waste.  And, likewise, trying to get a bigger yacht than the next billionaire will take several hundred million, perhaps.  But, if you’re a billionaire, that’s not making much impression on your wealth.  So, what they do with most of their wealth is just reinvest it and seeking further sources of capital gains.  The might invest in property, not in order to live, but just to take advantage of the inflation of its value.

“So, once you get into the multi-millions, it becomes harder and harder to spend on things, which you’ll actually use.  In other words, it’s money beyond purpose, in a way.”

SASHA LILLEY:  “Andrew Sayer is my guest.  He’s the author of Why We Can’t Afford the Rich.  You’re listening to Against the Grain on Pacifica Radio.  And I’m Sasha Lilley.

“So, then the question, which you touched—you mentioned the rich have not always been as rich, as they are now; and if you look at the early part of the 20th century, the rich were quite rich.  That, then, changed in mid-century and, then, has become concentrated again at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century.  So, can you tell us, then, why the rich are as rich as they are now?  What has happened?”  (c. 15:54)

DR. ANDREW SAYER: “In the 1920s, the Interwar Period, labour grew in strength.  And the political franchisement of labour meant that it had more influence.  It was more possible to tax the rich and to reduce their share, their huge share, of the national income and, also, to reduce their wealth.  Particularly with the New Deal and the Second World War, that changed economies and changed attitudes as well.

“So, for people to sacrifice themselves for the country and the war, they expected a better life when they returned from the war.  And the shift in power towards labour, particularly with the reconstruction after the war made a huge difference as well.  And we experienced in the UK, and in the US, in the late 1940s through the 1960s very high rates of marginal taxation, which young people today would scarcely believe—over 80% and over 90%, even in the US.  So, very high earners were very highly taxed.  And, yet, capitalism was very successful in that period from the late ’40s to about the very early 1970s.  That was the most successful period of capitalism, in fact.

“But capitalism also got into trouble in the sense that globalisation meant that industry could run away from well-paid labour in countries like ours to East Asia and so on.  That weakened trade unions and labour organisations.  And, also, rates of profit in rich countries were also falling in productive industries.  And, as David Harvey has argued, capital started looking for other outlets, particularly in property and in financial assets.

“And, with the liberalisation of finance in the 1970s, that gave them free rein to do so.  And, so, you had a shift away from productive capitalism, after the Second World War, and, starting in the 1970s, late 1970s, towards what I would call a rentier capitalism, in which simply controlling assets is the key way to get income, rather than investing considerably in productive investments.”  (c. 18:30)

“[transcript pending]”  (c.52:47)

SASHA LILLEY:  “Well, let’s talk about—since you’re saying these things are all tied together—the political implications of thinking about how to reduce the power of the rich.  You write that certain concrete steps a ways toward reining that power in.  What would those steps look like?”

DR. ANDREW SAYER: “Well, with rent, I would have kind of land value taxes, which have been advocated, not only by the Left, but actually by some figures on the right, like Henry George, of course.  And even Milton Friedman said a land value tax is the least bad tax.

“So, you tax away those free lunches, if you like, and return them to the public, who, effectively, paid for them.  And, where interest is concerned, that’s tied to credit, I think credit needs to be brought under democratic control, not totally, but to a significant extent, so that it is used for funding necessary productive investment, particularly in the foreseeable future with a huge emphasis upon sustainable energy—sustainable ways of living.

“As regards other forms of unearned income, I think ensuring that employees and users of products and services should be the key stakeholders, not absentee shareholders.  I mean it’s absurd that shareholders are almost the only stakeholders.  I can buy some shares in Monsanto or whatever; and the money that I pay doesn’t go to Monsanto.  It goes to the previous owner of those shares.  I’m not invested in the company at all.  But I, then, get a bit of power over what happens to Monsanto if I buy a lot.  And I get this unearned income in the form of capital gains and trading shares and dividends and so on.

“I should not be a stakeholder.  It should the employees and key users or representatives of users, as a question of justice.  But it’s also functional for the economy.  That way you’re more likely to get an economy, that’s serving the public, rather than providing a kind of disservice.”  (c. 55:13)

“And I think it’s very important that, with that, people like Gar Alperovitz have argued we need much more cooperatively organised economic organisations.  So, there, the workers really are the primary stakeholders.  And one of the attractive things about them, in a no-growth future, is that they can survive without  constantly expanding.  And they can stay at one level.

“And that will, actually, probably, mean that there’d be less competition.  And I think we need less mobility of capital.  Competition can be a good thing.  It can raise standards.  And, then, should be retained in many sectors.  But there can be competition between competing cooperatives. And, internationally, competition is a very mixed bag, in terms of its benefits.

“So, we don’t really need to re-think economies, rather than just assuming that business as usual is the only possibility.”

SASHA LILLEY:  “Well, I’m afraid we’re entirely out of time.  Andrew Sayer, thank you so much for your time.”

DR. ANDREW SAYER: “Thank you.  I’ve enjoyed it.”

SASHA LILLEY:  “I’ve been speaking with Andrew Sayer.  He’s the author of Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, published by the University of Chicago Press.  You can find a link to that book on our website, AgainstTheGrain.org.  He teaches social theory and political economy at Lancaster University in the UK.  I’m Sasha Lilley.  You’ve been listening to Against the Grain.  Thanks for listening.  And, please, tune in again next time.”

Learn more at AGAINST THE GRAIN.

[Transcript by Messina]

***

Also see AgainstTheGrain.org.

***

[1]  Andrew Sayer is professor of social theory and political economy at Lancaster University, UK.  His books include Radical Political Economy: A Critique, The Moral Significance of Class, and Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life.

***

[Last modified  10:50 PDT  25 DEC 2015]

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Creating Freedom, Episode One: The Lottery of Birth (2012)

15 Tue Dec 2015

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Fascism, Critical Theory, Microeconomic Analysis, Organised Religion, Philosophy, Social Theory

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Bertrand Russell, Born Free, Creating Freedom, David Rockefeller (b. 1915), Education, Howard Zinn, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, John Rawls, Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), Joshua Van Praag, Jr., M.I.A., Martin Luther King, Naomi Klein, Raoul Martinez, The Crisis of Democracy, The Lottery of Birth, Thomas Hobbes, Trilateral Commission

Lottery of Birth (2012)LUMPENPROLETARIAT—One might agree with the sentiment evoked by M.I.A.‘s brilliant anthem entitled “Born Free“.  It seems to make sense.  One is born free, until confronted by the state and its justified or unjustified tyrannies.  Or, so it seems.  However, a documentary film, of which some of us have caught excerpts over the years on free speech radio, is gradually persuading us by the logic of its argument, encapsulated in the film’s tagline:  To take freedom for granted is to extinguish the possibility of attaining it.

The documentary film is entitled The Lottery of Birth.  Its initial release was September 27, 2012.  And its full title is Creating Freedom, Episode One:  The Lottery of Birth.  The film was nominated for Best Documentary at the Raindance Film Festival (2012) and is the winner of the Spirit Award at the Artivist Film Festival (2012).  The film’s website, Creating Freedom, describes the film as part of a larger project:  “‘Creating Freedom’ is a project comprising a series of films, paintings and a book on the subjects of power, control and freedom.”  However, as of yet, the film seems to be its primary component, apparently due to funding constraints

The film holds a respectable 85% rating at the film review website, Rotten Tomatoes, albeit from unpublished viewers, as the critics have either ignored, or remained ignorant of, the film.

The Lottery of Birth (official trailer)

From birth onwards, our minds are a battleground of familial, educational, cultural and professional forces that determine who we are.

According to the people’s encyclopedia:

“The lottery of birth is a philosophical argument which states that since no one chooses the circumstances into which they are born, they should not be held responsible for them, e.g., being rich, being poor, etcetera.

“The lottery of birth argument has been used by philosophers such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  More modern day uses have been prompted by political theorists such as John Rawls, who explored the subject in depth in his book A Theory of Justice.”

This is a must-see film for all who are interested in the concept, theoretical or otherwise, of freedom.

Messina

“Born Free” by M.I.A.

***

[An excerpt of The Lottery of Birth transcribed from a free speech radio broadcast] [1]

NICHOLAS WOODESON (narrator):  (c. 43:20) “How many American students are taught that between 1945 and 2005 the United States attempted to overthrow fifty governments around the world, many of them democracies?”

Unidentified British Male:  “If you talk about atrocities committed in the colonial period by the British Empire most people would just stare at you blankly.  They have no idea what you’re talking about.  If you talk about Stalin‘s atrocities, they’re fully apprised of those.  But Lord Lytton, in India, probably killed as many people as Stalin did, by very similar methods, exporting grain in the midst of a famine, huge, huge quantities of grain, often from places where there was a surplus of production, a very successful harvest, and engineered a famine in which tens of millions of people died.  But we hear nothing of this.  We know nothing of this.”

NICHOLAS WOODESON (narrator):  “How many British students learn about the work of the historian Mark Curtis?  Drawing on formerly secret UK government files, he estimates that Britain is complicit in the deaths of over ten million people from countries around the world since 1945.”

Unidentified North American Male Voice:  “Schooling can’t be politically neutral because it’s preparing people to play a role in society.  And roles in society are not politically neutral because they affect the distribution of power.  It’s either preparing you to empower those who already have power, or increasing their authority, or the distribution of their ideas, or by increasing their wealth.  Now, if you’re trained to serve them, then you’ve been trained to play a political role.  If you’re trained to pursue your own vision, to develop your own vision first and then pursue it, then that’s a political role also.”

Unidentified North American Male Voice #2:  “In the 1960s, in the United States, there was, of course, like most places in the world, an upheaval, a gigantic social upheaval of resistance and opposition to the past, to the structures of capital and power, that existed in society.  The government, of course, the elites confronted a problem.  They didn’t want this to recur.”

NICHOLAS WOODESON (narrator):  “In 1973, at the behest of billionaire David Rockefeller, an organisation known as the Trilateral Commission was founded.  Its early members were drawn from the United States, western Europe, and Japan.  Among them were the heads of major corporations, banks, law firms, and government. Concerned about their resistance since the early ’60s, the Commission set out to investigate its root causes.  Their report was entitled The Crisis of Democracy.” [2]

Unidentified North American Male Voice:  “And this Commission did an investigation focusing on education and on school systems because, of course, so much of the activity occurred on campuses.  And they actually came up with a conclusion.  It wasn’t the totality of the reasons for the ’60s, but it’s quite revealing.  And it was one of the reasons.

“What they said was the population was being over-educated.  That’s an incredible kind of idea.  And, yet, it’s accurate.  They were saying—and they were very clear on this—that we were educating people enough, so that they actually expected to have a life, so that they expected to have a degree of control when they got finished with their educations.  And what they were encountering was their ability to control their own lives was marginal.  And people resisted.

“And what they [the Commission] decided was that they had to make a change in the educational system.  They had to cut back on the high quality education that they had until then—under the pressure of Sputnik and the rest—been spreading through society and, instead, increasing the more regimented education.”  (c. 47:55)

NICHOLAS WOODESON (narrator):  “The report regarded the education system as the most important value-producing system in society and argued that a programme is necessary to lower the job expectation of those that received a college education.

“Within two years of the report’s publication, all of the top positions in the U.S. government—the office of president, vice president, secretary of state, defence, and treasury—were held by members of the Trilateral Commission.  And the national security advisor was its director.”

[Transcript by Messina for Lumpenproletariat.org]

***

“Passive acceptance of the teacher’s wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought […] Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.”  —Bertrand Russell (quoted by CreatingFreedom.info)

***

“As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich, even if I have a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people in this world cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight or thirty years, I can never be totally healthy even if I just got a good checkup at Mayo Clinic. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.”  —Martin Luther King, Jr. (quoted by CreatingFreedom.info)

***

“A term like capitalism is incredibly slippery, because there’s such a range of different kinds of market economies. Essentially, what we’ve been debating over—certainly since the Great Depression—is what percentage of a society should be left in the hands of a deregulated market system. And absolutely there are people that are at the far other end of the spectrum that want to communalize all property and abolish private property, but in general the debate is not between capitalism and not capitalism, it’s between what parts of the economy are not suitable to being decided by the profit motive.”  —Naomi Klein (quoted by CreatingFreedom.info)

***

[1]  Listener-sponsored free speech radio, KPFA (Berkeley, CA), Pacifica Radio Network:

  • Programme:  UpFront
  • Broadcast date: 17 DEC 2015, 07:00 PDT
  • Host:  Brian Edwards-Tiekert

[2]  The report observed the political state of the United States, Europe, and Japan and says that in the USA the problems of governance “stem from an excess of democracy” and, thus, advocates “to restore the prestige and authority of central government institutions”.  The report serves as an important point of reference for studies focusing on the so-called contemporary crisis of democracies.

***

[19 DEC 2015]

[Last modified 23:51 PDT  22 DEC 2015]

 

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Dr. Harriet Fraad on Family Life Under the Capitalist Mode of Production

27 Fri Nov 2015

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Capitalism, Feminism, Microeconomic Analysis, Mindfulness, Social Theory, Sociology

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Angry White Men, Dr. Harriet Fraad, Economic Update, feminism, KPFA, Marxism, Michael Kimmel, Nation Books, Pacifica Radio, The Indypendent, transcript

Economic UpdateLUMPENPROLETARIAT—Dr. Richard Wolff has interviewed Dr. Harriet Fraad, a recurring guest on Economic Update, in the wake of a new study by two noted economists.  As broader socioeconomic changes restructure gender politics within the capitalist mode of production, many men, particularly middle-aged white males, are facing depression and worsening mortality rates, as they struggle to adapt to demoted positions in society and in the home. [1]

Dr. Fraad, as a mental health counsellor, asks the dominant culture to reconceptualise male gender roles, so that men may learn to take pride in home-making and contributing to the domestic work load, which has often been degraded by our hitherto patriarchal society.  Dr. Fraad and Dr. Wolff also help us understand the structural or societal aspects of many socioeconomic challenges, which millions of individuals often internalise as personal failure.  This is a timely and important discussion.  This type of informed discussion helps individuals, families, and communities find common ground across gender, ethnicity, and other socioeconomic markers toward healthier outcomes for all.  Please listen (or download) here. [2]

Messina

***

ECONOMIC UPDATE—Welcome back to the second half of Economic Update for this Thanksgiving Day Weekend 2015.  I’m very proud to have with me, again, and, partly, by the way, because so many of you have written in asking me to bring back Dr. Harriet Fraad, who is a mental health counsellor and a hypnotherapist with a private practice in New York City.  And she also writes prolifically in a variety of places on politics and economics and how they intersect and interact with personal life.  And that’s, indeed, why I wanted her to join with us today because, as she will explain, there’s been some recent research, that has really touched precisely on the interaction of economics and personal life.  And, so, this is a perfect opportunity to explore that.  Thank you very much, Dr. Fraad, for joining us.”

DR. HARRIET FRAAD:  “I’m glad to be here.”

DR. RICHARD WOLFF:  “So, tell us, if you will, in a few words, what is this new research, who performed it, and what, basically, does it tell us.”

DR. HARRIET FRAAD:  “Well, it’s a very recent study by […]”  [expanded transcript pending]

Learn more at ECONOMIC UPDATE.

***

[The following is an excerpt of a book review originally published by Dr. Harriet Fraad on 25 FEB 2014 at THE INDYPENDENT.  The book reviewed is Angry White Men written by Michael Kimmel and published in 2013 by Nation Books.]

DR. HARRIET FRAAD—It’s been a tough 40 years for working and middle-class white men in America. Accustomed to an exalted place in the social hierarchy, they have seen their wages stagnate and decline since the early 1970s. At the same time, women have gained unprecedented new freedoms and our society became more racially and culturally diverse.

Rather than adapt and change, many of these men cling to male dominance. Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology and gender studies at Stony Brook University in New York, journeys deep into the worlds of his white male aggrieved subjects.

Kimmel has produced a masterful account of white men’s rage. He focuses on the sons of successful skilled craftsmen, small businessmen and small farmers disenfranchised by the corporatizing of America, mass production, outsourced work, mega-stores like Walmart and Home Depot and restaurant chains like McDonalds and Applebees.

Learn more at DR. HARRIET FRAAD.

***

[1]  The term capitalist mode of production is used by many within the discipline of economics, primarily within the subset known as heterodox economics, to denote capitalism.  In my training, and having graduated with honours with a degree in Economics from the heterodox economics department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, I have come to view the term as the most appropriate way to denote capitalism.  (One of my economics professors, Dr. Erik Olsen, actually had Dr. Richard Wolff as one of his professors and dissertation advisers.)  To simply refer to our current economic system as capitalism runs the risk of perpetuating the myth that our current mode of production and social organisation is somehow natural, necessary, or inevitable.  This, of course, is not true.  In the past, other forms of social organisation have existed and endured for long periods of recorded human history, such as feudalism, slavery, and other tribal forms of organisation not based on the extraction and accumulation of capital.  I know the term is a mouthful, as many of my non-economist friends have complained.  But it’s an important distinction we may overlook only at our own peril.

[2]  Dr. Richard Wolff’s interview with Dr. Harriet Fraad begins at minute 29:00 of the Economic Update broadcast.

***

[3 DEC 2015]

[Last modified  3 DEC 2015  10:38 PDT]

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