Interestingly, the dominant ideology pretends that we have a market economy without capital or capitalists (the late JK Galbraith observed in his final years that the term capitalism itself had fallen into disuse among the serious people). The whole point of Neo Classical Economics has been to obscure the role of capital, to the point that standard economic theory doesn't have a workable model of capital development, credit creation, the intertemporal effects of debt...
So, my plan for capitalism would begin with recognising it for what it is. Then we can figure out what to do about it. En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
my plan for capitalism would begin with recognising it for what it is
Sounds like a plan.
Migeru:
standard economic theory doesn't have a workable model of capital development, credit creation, the intertemporal effects of debt...
The absence of such (a) model(s) in a highly modelised theoretical environment may have had (no, some, a great deal of) effect on recently observable financial instability?
That's what Minsky's Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (1986) is about. Except that it's not "recently observable" - the book also contains a relatively detailed economic history of the US 1960-80 and he interprets each recession as an example of financial instability.
The one we're having now is like a cat-5 hurricane, but meteorologists don't pretend that cat-3 hurricanes are not hurricanes. En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
Interestingly, the dominant ideology pretends that we have a market economy without capital or capitalists...
In "Neo-classical Economics as a Stratagem Against Henry George," Mason Gaffney has clearly shown how this came about, Steve Keen, in Debunking Economics, has shown rather simply how little the theory corresponds to reality and Nitzan and Bichler have provided a coherent theory of capital as power in their book by that name, Capital as Power, a Study of Order and Creorder "creorder" being a concatenation with abreviation of "creation of order." What is needed is a simplification of these works into a form that is suitable for popular consumption combined with an adequate effort to convey this to a population that, if not now, should soon be receptive to a comprehensible explanation of how we have gotten to the situation in which we find ourselves.
To the question "Is capitalism compatible with a stable sustainable society that serves the interests of the entire population?" the answer must be: "Not without a population that has a clear understanding of how the system works. We have developed a system that is amazingly effective in confounding any popular understanding of how the system works and that reliably serves to recruit the great majority of its citizens to be the tools of their own oppression.
In order for us to survive as viable societies the evil spell cast by Neo-Classical Economics over the minds of the people must be broken. Only then will it be possible to test the possibility of constructing a better society. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
