>Brad Mayer wrote:
>
>>Of course, the analogy was invoked mostly as a corrective to Doug's
>>open-ended skepticism. If capitalism is a historical system, like
>>feudalism, with a beginning and an end, it should follow at at some
>>point, the system "passes its zenith", so to speak. What that
>>point is, though, is certainly open to debate. The (highly
>>abstract) criterion deployed here is that in which capital attains
>>a scale and scope of development to the point where capital itself
>>becomes its own "greatest barrier" to its further development,
>>whereupon there ensues the process of its own "self-abolition".
>>This is not an automatic process - capital surely does not abolish
>>itself willingly! - but on the contrary must strive to disguise
>>this process from itself (meaning us, subsumed with capital as we
>>are) to the point that it opposes this as a process of ultimate
>>triumph (in this sense Fukuyama was right - we are at the 'endtime'
>>of _a_ history).
><snip>
>
>Hmm. Why do I get the feeling that because some guy said that
>capital would become its own final barrier, you're hot to find it in
>the real present? That may be true someday somehow, but why are you
>so sure that that's not decades, maybe centuries, away?
At 9:30 AM -0700 8/17/01, Brad DeLong wrote in a thread titled "A
long way to go still.......":
>The hope was that opening up international capital markets would
>make it easier for poor countries to finance industrialization. But
>as we sit here and look at the United States's $250 billion plus
>annual trade deficit, it seems that something has gone very wrong.
>In the aggregate, capital is not flowing from rich countries to poor
>countries, but from everywhere else to the United States.
>
>There are a number of theories suggesting that the long-run dominant
>tendency is for open capital flows to cascade from rich to poor, and
>that this tendency has been masked over the past two decades by
>temporary factors. But with each year that passes, such theories
>become less and less credible...
For once, Brad Mayer & Brad DeLong sound as if they are on the same wavelength. ;-)
Yoshie