Friday, September 21, 2012

Joe Weisenthal — What Ray Dalio Said About The Rise Of Hitler Is His Most Worrisome Observation Yet

But his [Dalio's] most worrisome observation was on something that few people really want to discuss, which is the connection between economic weakness and social unrest, and what happens historically when depressions drag.
Business Insider
What Ray Dalio Said About The Rise Of Hitler Is His Most Worrisome Observation Yet
Joe Weisenthal

1 comment:

Magpie said...

I've been worrying for a while with this issue of the rise of right wing movements and more generally the tendency in Western democracies to adopt more authoritarian positions in the political life. Thus, I tend to share Dalio's opinion.

I, however, disagree with some of his views. If more acute and alarming in the case of neo-Nazi movements in South and Western/Central Europe, the problem is not limited to that, neither geographically, nor politically. And if the problem was aggravated by the effects of the current financial/economic crisis, it was already manifesting itself long before the crisis, because it's not a matter of opposed factions (understood as minorities).

I'll recommend this article by Wolfgang Streeck (The Crises of Democratic Capitalism, New Left Review, 71, September-October 2011). The article, which was very well received last year by people from right-of-center to left (including Rajan, although in my opinion not fully understood by him) traces the problem to a fundamental conflict of interests between the business community and the wider community. For a time the State was able to manage this conflict, but eventually, for economic reasons, lost its ability to moderate the two fields.

I would not go into details, because I don't want to frame anybody's opinion. In its economics, the paper will probably be criticized by MMTers, and rightly so. The criticism, however, does not invalidate its main thesis, I believe.