Saturday, August 31, 2019

Production and then distribution, or distribution and production together — Branko Milanovic


Must-read! Branko Milanovic sums up the fundamental issue affecting political economy as economics in relation to society.

Neoclassical economic is like doing engineering with a total focus on efficiency and ignoring resilience. This approach views redundancy as inefficient. This is like eliminating the emergency brake on vehicles.

An economy is the material life-support system for a society and its culture. It is the welfare and progress of the society that set the priorities.

Neoliberalism is based on the view that society does not exist. Go figure.

As Branko Milanovic points out, following the classical economists and Marx, it's the endowments, stupid. This results in market asymmetries that determine who wins and who loses, not the assumed spontaneous natural order that arises spontaneously as a result of the operation of a free market that leads to equilibrium characterized by optimality

Global Inequality
Production and then distribution, or distribution and production together
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

1 comment:

Matt Franko said...

"Neoclassical economic is like doing engineering with a total focus on efficiency and ignoring resilience."

We throw away half of our food.... thats not efficient... the analogy doesnt hold...

What we are ignoring is the methodology that the people who we put in positions of high level material systems administration are trained under....

If we could somehow disappear all the current trained Platonists/Liberal Art people who are trained to never make a discriminatory decision/judgement ... all of these material system production/distributional problems would very quickly be corrected and go away...