Henwood's piece is a conversation starter but his recommendations (dreams?) to fix things by "Raising the incomes of the bottom 90 percent of the population through higher wages and public spending initiatives" he has often ridiculed on Pen-l as unobtainable. His essay, nevertheless, is the best of the odd assortment.
Brad DeLong says, of the future, "The optimistic view is that our collective ingenuity will create so many things for people to do that are so attractive to the rich that they will pay through the nose for them and so recreate a middle-class society." Thus, once again Say's Law is the way to save ourselves. Invent some attractive product, the rich will buy it, we'll all go back to work. That can be found as well in the latest book by Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age. In that book they also plump for the latest fad on the right, a guaranteed income/negative income tax. Capitalists will give people a meager existence (what DeLong hopes would be a RISING meager existence) if they will leave capitalists alone to exploit nature, including humans. Michael Strain puts all his bets on the social safety net for the "truly needy" to correct the excesses of the free enterprise system. (Note the means test.) I guess that's cheaper than DeLong's version but more or less the same. I'd send this one back without a grade. Tyler Cowan: How much time were these students given for the essay? Cowan has recycled some stuff already published repeatedly and so can't be given a grade. Shouldn't an effort of originality be required? Cowan would break the teachers' unions and tell people not to be NIMBYs and that would address "... many of today’s economic problems ... ." Really, he wrote that! Yves Smith said very little but I have to give her an A- for her conclusion: "But as long as there is a sufficiently large remnant of the American middle class, still socialized to identify with the established order, no matter how beleaguered they are, it's hard to see how any organized, large scale uprising could occur." Echos of echos of Carrol Cox. The grades (on a curve) turned out to be: Henwood = A. Smith A-. Strain & Cowan each get dropped from the class. DeLong = D-. On Mar 30, 2014, at 5:36 PM, Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote: > http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/03/30/was-marx-right/a-return-to-a-world-marx-would-have-known > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
