The Great Recession & Its Aftermath
Recorded March 19, 2011 at the Left Forum at Pace University in lower Manhattan. Featuring Alan Freeman on “Waking from the Dream: Europe in the Great Recession,” Andrew Kliman on “The Great Recession and the Persistent Frailty of Capitalist Production,” David McNally on “Global Slump, Age of Austerity, and the Growing Resistance,” and Fred Moseley on “A Lost Decade for Jobs in the U.S., Unless…”
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I would have liked some kind of ‘gender balance’ in the panel/s, or is it ‘irrelevant’?
When you take a look at the world and what works and what does not as far as economics and well being, is it not clear that the countries with a free, or rather, freER financial market has more well being for all their citizens?
Europe has been an experiment of the socialist system and it is failing!! You can not have countries continuing to bail out other countries who are not contributing to the solution, only demanding more of what is causing the problem.
Europe is a macrocosm of what has been the microcosm. Super!! Now it gets more eyes. It is more apparent that the socialist model does not work.
In response to Ann:
What you mean by “socialism” isn’t what I mean or MHI means. NOT AT ALL.
You mean a kind of managed capitalism. Yes, that’s failing, but so is free-market (or more-free-market) capitalism. Take the U.S.–please! It, of course, is the epicenter of the recent financial crisis, Great Recession, and their aftermath. The asset-price bubble here, and its collapse, and the recession here are a BIG part of the reason why some Eurozone countries are in trouble.
Consider the “well being for all their citizens” we have here: There are 6 million fewer people employed in the U.S. than prior to the recession, and that figure is 10 million fewer if we count the fact that 4 million employed people who have full-time work before the recession are now working part-time although they want full-time jobs. And there’s a total deficit of around 16-17 million, since an extra 6-7 million jobs would be needed to keep up with population growth over the last 4 years. Some success story!
I don’t think it’s clear that “the countries with a free, or rather, freER financial market has more well being for all their citizens.” Below are the top 13 countries in terms of what the UN calls “human development” and, in parenthesis, their “economic freedom” rankings according to the (conservative) Heritage Foundation. There’s almost no relationship between the two sets of rankings.
1. Norway (30)
2. Australia (3)
3. Netherlands (15)
4. United States (9)
5. New Zealand (4)
6. Canada (6)
7. Ireland (7)
8. Liechtenstein (N/A)
9. Germany (23)
10. Sweden (22)
11. Switzerland (5)
12. Japan (20)
13. Hong Kong, China (1)
The correlation coefficient excluding Lichtenstein is -0.11. This means that less “economic freedom” is associated with more “human development,” but the relationship is *extremely* weak and not statistically significant at normal levels of testing.