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Wednesday, July 16, 2014

OECD predicts collapse of capitalism

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development -- a pro-establishment, rock-ribbed bastion of pro-market thinking -- has released a report predicting a collapse in global economic growth rates, a rise in feudal wealth disparity, collapsing tax revenue and huge, migrating bands of migrant laborers roaming from country to country, seeking crumbs of work. They prescribe "flexible" workforces, austerity, and mass privatization.
The report, Policy Challenges for the Next 50 Years , makes a number of assumptions about the impact of automation on skilled jobs in the workforce, the end the recent growth in the developing world (especially the BRIC nations), and a series of worsening environmental catastrophes.
As Paul Mason points out in The Guardian, the OECD does not countenance the possibility of rupture -- states opting out of market capitalism, say, or non-state actors refusing to accept claims on property. It seems unlikely that the changes the OECD envisions will not be attended by more changes in the way people think about the legitimacy of the economic and political system that produced them.
The OECD has a clear message for the world: for the rich countries, the best of capitalism is over. For the poor ones - now experiencing the glitter and haze of industrialization - it will be over by 2060. If you want higher growth, says the OECD, you must accept higher inequality. And vice versa. Even to achieve a meager average global growth rate of 3% we have to make labor "more flexible", the economy more globalized. Those migrants scrambling over the fences at the Spanish city of Melilla, next to Morocco, we have to welcome, en masse, to the tune of maybe two or three million a year into the developed world, for the next 50 years. And we have to achieve this without the global order fragmenting.

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