Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible? What about sustainable city-regions?
This is a good place to register your comments about these admitedly big questions? Do you think such questions are too big (i.e., an academic waste of time). Or do you think such questions are worth pondering? Why? Why not?
2 Comments:
Hi everyone:
Regarding the week 7 readings on strategies for capitalizing on region-specific assets in production, I thought people might be interested in this book about alternative regional development and governance in places that have succeeded in attracting high-tech workers. One take on sustainable development... Best, Caroline
New Money, Nice Town:
How Capital Works in the New Urban Economy
Leonard Nevarez
2003, 224 Pages
The economic restructuring that has gone on since the 1980s has produced a new economic space in which service and high tech firms are at the forefront of innovation. One of the features of the new economy is what pop geographer Joel Kotkin calls "nerdistans," or smaller cities with a substantial high tech sector, limits on growth, environmentally friendly policies and a generally well-educated population. In New Money, Nice Town, Leonard Nevarez takes a close look at how "new economy" firms in "quality of life" cities interact with local political structures, finding that they are both more liberal and more detached than their traditional counterparts. This new global economy has created communities whose politics are more democratic, but also more tenuous and unstable.
By Caroline L. (TA), at 12:21 PM
It seems to me that the issue is not the sustainability of capitalism, per se, but rather, the sustainability (or not) of ANY economic arrangement which is funded with fractional-reserve debt. The underlying problem is that - contrary to all extant economic theory - the aggregate real wage is invariant. More precisely, the aggregate real wage is a dimensionless invariant which, despite all human effort to the contrary, tends always and everywhere to the value 1.0000. In plain English, wages are merely recycled prices. Thus an economy cannot 'grow' itself out of debt because any increases in wages must immediately be 'recaptured' via higher prices. As I see it, the issue of 'sustainability' has nothing to do with whether or not the system happens to be a 'capitalist' system.
Richard E. Planck, MSME
Director, The Simmel Group
ex-doctoral student (econ/CUNY)
ex-doctoral student (econ/UT-K)
author: "Unified Demand Theory in Euclidean 3-space" (72nd Annual Meeting, SEA; New Orleans, 2002)
e-mail: rplanck@tds.net
e-mail: Simmel_Group@Planet-Save.com
Note: I would be pleased to correspond with others regarding the issues I have raised herein.
By Richard E. Planck, at 4:19 PM
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