Just looked up my notes from a lecture by Joseph Stiglitz which I attended in July 2016. Some key points:- Sustained economic development requires a learning society
- Western economies started the transition into a learning society in the 1800’s. However, this has flattened out towards the end of the 20th century
- Schumpeter (and others after him) have shown that technological change has substantively more impact on economic growth than the accumulation of capital
- The move from an underdeveloped to developed economy is described as a gap in resources, but it is much more of a gap in knowledge
- Free markets are praised as being efficient. However, markets are not efficient in promoting innovation and learning. For example, in the field of drug discovery, markets direct more effort and resources into fighting hair loss than into combating malaria.
- Adam Smith’s invisible hand argues that the pursuit of private interests leads to the well being of society. However, although Smith recognised it, insufficient attention is given to the fact that free markets underproduce public goods.
- Unfortunately most governments follow the Washington Consensus which believes that development can be best promoted by improving the static efficiency of resource allocation and the accumulation of capital. This policy has gained public traction just when economists have proven it to be wrong.
- These policies are counterproductive for creating a learning society.
- Knowledge is a non-rivalrous public good. Its equitable distribution should be a major factor of public policy, since this will not be ensured by the market.
- Education can no longer focus on the transfer of specific skills and knowledge, and should be aimed at “learning to learn”.
To this, I feel one has to factor in recent developments in digitalisation of the economy which has had the following impacts: - Exponentially scaled up the high-capital speculative section of the economy, which means that for most people the cost of survival is determined by other factors and has nothing to do with the value they provide.
- Empowered the aggregation of individualised services by corporate capital, which pushes more and more people into a gig economy that offers neither economic stability nor social benefits like health insurance
- Used big data to move the political economy from public negotiations of causation to opaque value extraction through correlation, and overturned the equation between the private and public realm. The value of what one does is realised by others.
On 2018-01-09 22:25, Joseph Rabie wrote: Their is a blind belief that capitalism and the market are one and the
same, but this is not so. Markets have existed for as long as there
has been specialization of labour. Capitalism is a modern mechanism,
invented to enable certain forms of development, frequently of a
predatory and corrosive nature. The time has come to uninvent
capitalism, to return the market to its cooperative vocation.
Why does this 'self-evident truth' need to be repeated over again while it is being forgotten over and again? Puzzling. Ciaoui, p+7D! # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
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