But now there is some phase change going on in modern capitalism. The scale of credit developments is giving rise to new qualitative relations. The new phase is not going to look pretty - one surely looking thing is growing imbalance of economic (and eventually social) power. It is like everyone is playing the "Monopoly" game, and now we are in the phase that people are starting to drop out. One difference is that unilateral win does not make sense, so people in play will start make arrangements (rather cooperative) to "settle" the game. Other difference is the risk that "loosers" won't leave quietly.
The new phase of capitalism does not mean "the end of the world" - some will adopt very nicely even without trying, so to speak. But there might be a great hangover even for "winners" - they will probably get less than they ever thought.
The worst of mortgage crisis is still to come - I will check the sky in April :-]
It is like everyone is playing the "Monopoly" game, and now we are in the phase that people are starting to drop out.
I have been thinking along these lines in the past couple of days. And I don't like the look of it.
What happens when control of corporations is concentrated in relatively few hands? When the controllers are permitted to pass control to their heirs? When the corporations in question have revenue streams comparable with the GDP of sovereign countries?
We don't know. Yet. But methinks it won't be pretty. Equality under the law is gonna go, at the very least.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
What happens when stuff runs out, and cities flood?
Petere Hamilton has written about a possible future for the UK where a Mao-ist government collectivises everything and everyone after the flooding - which I think is more likely than a corporate dystopia, because corporations can only survive when energy is readily available and travel and transport are simple and relatively cheap.
Without easy international trade, corporations are meaningless. They're also a lot more brittle than they appear.
When the corporations in question have revenue streams comparable with the GDP of sovereign countries
Jake, they already do, and have done for a very long time, right back to the Dutch East India Company , which was quite durable, and the South Sea Company and Mississippi Company, which were spectacular bubbles, and blew the English and French economies respectively out of the water.
My case is that big transnational "Joint Stock Limited Liability Companies" aka Corporations are obsolete complex and hierarchical dinosaurs, which will either collapse and die, or more likely, the cannier ones (eg IBM) will evolve into something else more networked and collaborative.
It's in this field of collaborative legal protocols and "enterprise models" or "legal and financial structures" that I've been working on Open Capital this past few years, since I realised that the UK government had inadvertently - and for entirely the wrong reasons - made Victorian-vintage "closed" corporations obsolete.
They did this in 2000/2001 by creating what I call an "Open" Corporation, in the shape of the UK Limited Liability Partnership ("LLP"), (which is not a partnership, despite the name)and the US LLC is a close enough cousin to use in the US for the same purpose.
I believe that those enterprises (by which I mean both "private" businesses, and "public" institutions) which do not use the risk and revenue sharing structures I observe emerging - eg "Capital Partnerships" and "Guarantee Societies"- will be at a disadvantage to those that do.
Classic "emergence"
The driver of all this is direct "peer to peer" connection. The models I am describing enable "dis-intermediated" and indeed cross-border consensual legal protocols I characterise as "legal XML".
We are quite close to the position where new tools based upon such "Semantic Web" protocols begin to spread "virally". "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
What happens when control of corporations is concentrated in relatively few hands? When the controllers are permitted to pass control to their heirs?
I have been mulling what the optimal level of wage/income equality/inequality is. Any ideas? Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
"The middle class" should be a reasonable if controversial answer.
I mean, you need both fairness, social mobility and rewards for entrepeneurs and people who want to study and work hard.
Without losing sight of the veil of whatever Rawls called it.
A hugely complex issue, permeating everything we discuss here. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
isn't social mobility one of those growth myths though? if everyone is upwardly mobile, then who picks the fruit, who sweeps the streets, who washes the floors?
the technotopian answer to that is "robots of course", whicm merely means substituting energy slaves for human slaves. and energy is now an increasingly scarce resource, alont with enojgh other resources that we know "social mobility" cannot continue to mean "aspiring to live like ozzie and harriet" let alone paris hilton.
why should rewards only go to inventors and entrepreneurs and similar [mho] growth fantasists? why should not rewards go to good stewards of land, producers of good food and high quality durable goods? or even to people who keep the streets clean or fix bike tyres or cook a magnificent blintz?
for people who like to study, isn't studying a reward in itself? do they also need to be bribed with positional goodies galore? surely the reward of studiousness is to be let loose in a library: the maintenance of a library being a net-positive benefit to everyone instead of a privatised position good to reward only the elite few deemed worthy.
and so on. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
