7. The story so far

(Editor’s note: There are now six posts in the November 21th Century Forum. They have been numbered 1 through 6 with 1 being the first post and 6 being the latest. At this point I thought it would be appropriate to provide a brief summary of each of the posts.)

1. Sustainable capitalism - this is a very polished and well thought out piece advocating the move from short-term to long term capitalism. In essence, this involves moving away from the quarterly performance obsession to a more long-term perspective. It calls for abandoning the practice of providing Wall Street analysts with quarterly forward guidance, basing executive compensation on long-term performance and reconsidering GDP as the best measure of corporate performance, expanding it to something that includes costs (pollution, deforestation, etc.).

2. The case for inclusive capitalism - in addition to advocating for long-term capitalism as defined above, this piece introduces the idea that the capitalism of the future must include a broader and more equitable sharing of its fruits. How this is to be achieved is not specified. I would think they are referring to a redistribution of wealth from the 1% to the rest of society.

3. Capitalism may be destroying itself - based on an interview by the Wall Street Journal with Nouriel Roubini, who argues that capitalism is inexorably shifting income from labor to capital, from workers to owners, in such a way that leaves workers or consumers without sufficient disposable income to keep the economic machinery going. Roubini adds that companies appear to be unwilling to address this problem and if anything are making it worse.

4. Technology will destroy capitalism - the argument here is that technology will continue to eliminate jobs and that that in turn was will cause a slump in sales due to lack of disposable income among the consumer public which if nothing changes will destroy capitalism. The answer to this problem is a proposal to provide every citizen with a basic guaranteed income regardless of whether that person has to job or not.

5. Capitalism is based on economic growth, but is there such a thing as uneconomic growth - the main argument here is that capitalism must move away from constantly pursuing growth and the obsession with GDP. In a planet with finite, non-renewable resources, one cannot live with an economy based on perpetual growth. This is an example of what is known as steady state economics in which the system is designed to experience very small variations in expansion and contraction, the emphasis being not on bigger but on better, on quality rather than quantity.

6. Naomi Klein rips into modern day Capitalism – a NYT review if the latest Naomi Klein book.  In the words of the reviewer: “her latest, form an antiglobalization trilogy. Her strategy is to take a scourge — brand-­driven hyperconsumption, corporate exploitation of disaster-struck communities, or “the fiction of perpetual growth on a finite planet” — trace its origins, then chart a course of liberation.”  The course of liberation actions are unclear to this editor.