We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, October 23, 2017

Laughter is the best medicine

Click here to access article by David Ruccio from Real-World Economics Review Blog.
The basic question of the conference was: does contemporary macroeconomics, in the wake of the Second Great Depression, require a few reforms or does it need a wholesale revolution? Blanchard lined up in the reform camp, with Summers calling for a revolution—with the added spice of Adam Posen referring to himself as Trotsky to Summers’s Lenin.
Although from the description it would suggest that the economics conference would have take a debating form. But such was not the case. The headline for this piece is economist Ruccio's way of reacting to a conference which ended up avoiding the serious issues of growing inequality in current capitalism. As such I think the conference is another illustration of upper-middle class academics who are much more concerned about following the capitalist party line and securing their careers than in solving serious issues with contemporary capitalism. I also suspect this is partly because the problems are insolvable within capitalism.
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