{"id":27111,"date":"2017-10-22T12:36:05","date_gmt":"2017-10-22T17:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=27111"},"modified":"2017-10-22T12:36:05","modified_gmt":"2017-10-22T17:36:05","slug":"is-capitalism-dead-or-merely-dying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=27111","title":{"rendered":"Is Capitalism Dead or Merely Dying?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Is Capitalism Dead or Merely Dying?<\/a><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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\nAlfred Wertheimer Elvis <\/b>1956<\/center> <\/p>\n

New Zealand\u2019s new prime minister Jacinda Ardern calls capitalism a blatant failure. Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis says capitalism is \u2018merely\u2019 coming to an end because it is making itself obsolete. Mathematics professor Bruce Boghosian claims that without redistribution of wealth, our market economy would not be stable, because wealth always tends to concentrate. The people at Artemis Capital Management write that the stock market has begun self-cannibalizing like a snake eating its tail, and the only reason we\u2019re not in a recession already is \u2018financial alchemy\u2019.<\/p>\n

At the very least we can say that the system is under pressure. But what system is that? It would be nice to have a clearcut definition of capitalism, but alas, there are many, about as many as there are different forms of it. That doesn\u2019t make this any easier. Americans call many European economies \u2018socialist\u2019, which seems to mean they are not capitalist. But Scandinavian countries don\u2019t function like the Soviet Union either.<\/p>\n

And if you see how much money is involved in transfer payments to citizens in the US, the supposed bastion of free market capitalism, it\u2019s tempting to conclude the system has already failed. But even with transfer payments, inequality is at record levels. That would seem to confirm Boghosian\u2019s statement that \u201ceven if a society does redistribute wealth, if it\u2019s too small an amount, \u201ca partial oligarchy will result..\u201d<\/i> So what then?<\/p>\n

<\/center>Varoufakis and others want a \u201cuniversal basic dividend\u201d, or \u201cuniversal basic income\u201d. Would that be the end of capitalism as we know it? Or is it just a -perhaps more extreme- form of \u2018state capitalism\u2019? Varoufakis deems it inevitable because technology will eradicate so many jobs from societies that people won\u2019t be able to make money from work. Personally, I\u2019ve long thought that the pending large-scale demise of pensions systems will lead to some form of UBI.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is Capitalism Dead or Merely Dying?\u00a0 Alfred Wertheimer Elvis 1956  New Zealand\u2019s new prime minister Jacinda Ardern calls capitalism a blatant failure. Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis says capitalism is \u2018merely\u2019 coming to an end because it is making itself obsolete. Mathematics professor Bruce Boghosian claims that without redistribution of wealth, our market economy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13681,16620,16621,111,378,5007,13924,5731,16622,16623,5177,16624,16625],"class_list":["post-27111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-ai","tag-ardern","tag-artemis","tag-capitalism","tag-google","tag-mathematics","tag-raul-ilargi-meijer","tag-redistribution","tag-snake","tag-tail","tag-the-automatic-earth","tag-ubi","tag-varoufakism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27112,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27111\/revisions\/27112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}