Few people explain capitalist economic concepts and analyses better than Dolack. In this piece he deconstructs a document entitled “Policy Challenges for the Next 50 Years,” issued by a major capitalist organization called the OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).
It appears that key capitalist policy makers insist that they must continue with the same neoliberal austerity policies with plenty of assurances that everything will be fine, but admit that their beloved system must now accept slow growth for the foreseeable future. Of course, what they are really facing is stagnation as their system which demands high rates of growth comes up against the resource limits of a finite planet, especially cheaply available energy from fossil fuels.
The implications of that stagnation are a sputtering economy, more unemployment and more inequality because capitalism is a system that requires growth. A system based on endless growth can’t function without it — slow growth (all the more so no growth) means misery for working people as the recent years of “recovery” from the 2008 economic collapse has demonstrated.However, as Dolack correctly concludes:
An economic system designed to meet human needs, rather than private profit, would have no need to grow. But as capitalism is designed for private profit, and requires continual growth to maintain itself, harsher austerity (and the force that will be necessary to implement it) is what is on offer by the world’s elites.
