My thanks for posting the link to Oligopoly Watch. This is an excellent site both for the writing and for the literacy in economics that makes the author's points valid. Does anyone know anything about Steve Hannaford?

Thanks to Caterina for the link which many of her readers have used. Thanks for the compliment, John. As far as my background is concerned, I am journalist who writes about technology and busienss issues, My day job now is evaluating new office hardware like printers and scanners. Oligopoly Watch grew out of my fascination with reading the business pages and is an attempt to see what's really behind them.

http://eh.net/lists/archives/hes/jan-1999/0008.php
Once we appreciate Heilbroner's understanding of the underlying structure of capitalism, Carroll then asks what Heilbroner's view to the future would be: uncovering the central contradictions of capitalism allows some tentative conclusions about its further development. Can the system sustain the drive to accumulate? Probably not, but capitalism has proven remarkably resilient; it has the capacity to transform itself even though changes may also create constraints for the system. The system's real enemies, therefore, are the disruptions which reveal its endemic self-contradictions: structural unemployment, for example, which emerges from the drive to accumulate and the market's organizing features, yet undermines future productivity, aggregate demand, and people's hopes for their future. Or globalization, which by extending the market's organization around the world in the absence of a global institutional base, jeopardizes the system's separation of the public and private worlds in the drive to "accumulate, accumulate, accumulate." In these, and other disruptions, Heilbroner sees the evolution of capitalism continuing. The role of an economist like Heilbroner, Carroll argues, is not to sketch out the particular features of the future, but to trace "future visions": potential outcomes of the evolution of the relations among capitalism's central elements.

http://www.edgenews.com/issues/2002/11/lietaer.html
How does our currency system relate to greed and scarcity?
Lietaer: Two key features of our conventional money system systematically encourage these two collective emotions. Bank-debt money, to keep its value, needs to be kept scarce that is a key role of the Central Banks such as the Federal Reserve in the U.S. The second feature is interest, which is built into our money. It automatically concentrates wealth. It also amounts to a systematic incentive to indefinitely accumulate more and more money. There is also a deeper collective psychological mechanism that explains why these two emotions are now so generalized, and why we accept them as normal features in our money system. This is a process best understood through Jungian archetypes. Greed and the fear of scarcity turn out to be the shadows of an ancient archetype that relates directly to fertility and money: the Great Mother archetype. As this archetype has been repressed for several millennia in Western society, we have ended up building its shadows into our money system itself. To fully develop this topic would go beyond the scope of this interview.

http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html
to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/publications/wpabstract/200101003
far from representing holdovers from a premodern era, the small-scale local interactions that characterize communities are likely to increase in importance as the economic problems that community governance handles relatively well become more important.

http://economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1974139
Lord Layard's analysis suggests an alternative view: it is not that Europeans are working too little, but that Americans work too long, driven to choose more income instead of leisure by an urge to keep up with the Joneses. Higher taxes in Europe encourage workers to choose more leisure rather than work, and so keep this urge in check. America's economic performance is superior if judged by GDP alone. But GDP is a flawed measure of economic well-being. Happiness demands leisure as well as material consumption. Americans may be richer than Europeans, but are they any happier?

http://www.idlex.freeserve.co.uk/idle/evolution/human/economic/value.html
The term "value", in Idle Theory, corresponds largely to what is usually termed "use-value" - the value-in-use of some good. Historically, the term "value" has more usually meant "exchange-value", or what is termed "price" in Idle Theory. It is unfortunate the same word has two quite separate meanings.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0132331985/
"We live in a period in which much of the conventional wisdom of the past has been tried and found wanting. Economics is in a state of self-scrutiny, dissatisfied with its established premises, not yet ready to formulate new ones. Indeed, perhaps the search for a new vision of economics, a vision that will highlight new elements of reality and suggest new modes of analysis, is the most pressing economic task of our time..."

"Remember that we are talking about the kind of behavior that we find in a market society. Perhaps in a different society of the future, another hypothesis about behavior would have to serve as our starting point. People might then be driven by the desire to better the condition of others rather than of themselves.

"A story about heaven and hell is to the point. Hell has been described as a place where people sit at tables laden with sumptuous food, unable to eat because they have three-foot long forks and spoons strapped to their hands. Heaven is described as the very same place. There, people feed one another."

http://www.dankohn.com/happiness.html#DeLong
Keynes' conclusion was that "a point may soon be reached... when these [absolute] needs are satisfied, in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes." In that case:

"the day is not far off when the Economic Problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and that the arena of the heart and head will be occupied... by our real problems---the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion."

More important, Keynes's predictions have not come to pass. He expected society to undergo a profound change as attention shifted from working hard to keep the wolf from the door to living a good life. But we today do not feel that material acquisition is about to go out of style, we do not appear to be on the threshold of converting en masse from full-time to half-time or quarter-time work, and we have not begun to rank and applaud people by how they spend their leisure as opposed to what they do at work.

Schumpeter's thesis is seen repeated many times in debates between academics.

Capitalism has inherent contradictions and inherent losers, yet it is the belief in its central logic that allows the system to continue. Moreso, despite its problems, most would agree that the system is better than any alternative yet offered.

It is, in short, a system that works precisely because it can maintain its own illusion. A number of authors have written about twentieth century revolutions, especially those with marginal historical impact, as the creation of temporary autonomous zones: the poor or disadvantaged of a society reaching out to replace the existing system. Unlike most systems which tend to gradually encourage an accumulation of sentiment against them, it is capitalism's skill at continually turning the heap and encouraging revolution (Schumpeter's 'creative destruction') that tends to allow it to continue.

Paired with the modern welfare-state, the system becomes even more entrenched. With notions of complete equality and the great leveler of public education, there are increasing conservative movements to argue that the system itself is self-correcting. The bum on the street is just lazy, they argue. The poor can make it ahead through hard work. Etc. In countries with successful histories with class integration (America of course one of them) the stable political system helps vent the feelings of both sides, and the system continues.

The threat, of course, is that this illusion based on our personal experience is nothing more than another example of the Law of Leaky Abstractions. We assume capitalism to work on its own because we see it doing so. Yet in reality, even the most free-market economists (the best example being Milton Freidman, the relavent interview with I cannot seem to find a good link to) recognize the significant social barriers to allowing capitalism's normal function. It is, as Fukayama argues trust and a history of social interaction that allows for such free exchange.

Capitalisms most likely demise, then, will lay in the eventual realization that globalization is ultimately compatible with increased production, but incompatible with stability. Large corporations have much to gain from the process, as do average citizens--on a purely economic level. Yet if the system expands too far beyond the borders where it is widely accepted, and if it rots from the inside as a result of the sloth of an increasingly-detached upper class and an entertained and unsacrificing public -- well, then perhaps capitalism is just waiting for its own Vandals.

Most of the accepted tenets of Western civilization are similarly leaky abstractions, Democracy only works where enlightened self interest and social stability have preceded it--and even then succeeds only at maintaining the status quo level of stability. Human rights ultimately depend on our willingness to use extreme intelligence and military operations to defend them.

The ultimate downfall of Western civilization lies in the fact that its incrasing success masks the great sacrifices required to maintain it.

Are you aware of the book, by Harvard Bis School prof. Shoshana Zuboff, titled "The Support Economy - Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism".

She co-wrote the book with her husband, who is an ex-CEO of several good-sized companies. According to him, while chasing her skirts, he saw the light (my interpretation ;-)

They suggest that "managerial capitalism is dead", and that capitalism may be flexible enough to undergo episodic fundamental revisioning and restructuring.

See www.thesupporteconomy.com

There is also an interesting, and growing, Yahoo group.

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