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How the Crash Will Reshape America
Richard Florida, Atlantic
The crash of 2008 continues to reverberate loudly nationwide—destroying jobs, bankrupting businesses, and displacing homeowners. But already, it has damaged some places much more severely than others. On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will the suburbs be ineffably changed? Which cities and regions can come back strong? And which will never come back at all?
(March 2009 issue)
Long article.
Job Losses Pose a Threat to Stability Worldwide
Nelson D. Schwartz, New York Times
PARIS — From lawyers in Paris to factory workers in China and bodyguards in Colombia, the ranks of the jobless are swelling rapidly across the globe.
Worldwide job losses from the recession that started in the United States in December 2007 could hit a staggering 50 million by the end of 2009, according to the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency. The slowdown has already claimed 3.6 million American jobs.
High unemployment rates, especially among young workers, have led to protests in countries as varied as Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to strikes in Britain and France.
(14 February 2009)
A survey of reports from multiple countries. -BA
Economic Lessons From Lenin’s Seer
Kyle Crichton, New York Times
NIKOLAI KONDRATIEFF was not exactly a faceless bureaucrat in post-revolutionary Russia. He had held an important economic post in the last, short-lived government of Alexander Kerensky before the Bolsheviks took charge; then he founded an influential research organization, the Institute of Conjecture, and became an important theorist of the New Economic Policy under Lenin.
But he would long ago have been consigned to the dustbin of history had it not been for his quirky academic passion, which he pursued in a series of books and papers through the 1920s. Reviewing economic history since the late 18th century, Kondratieff came to a startling, doomsday conclusion: that capitalist economies were fated to go through regular and predictable cycles of around 50 years, inevitably culminating in a depression.
Despite having become a committed Communist and the author of a theory of inevitable if periodic capitalist collapses, Kondratieff was executed in 1938, a victim of the Stalinist purges.
… whenever it seems Kondratieff is about to be forgotten, the economy nosedives. And once again, perhaps the most dismal of the dismal science’s practitioners is back in the news, which his disciples try to fit into the cycles, or “Kondratieff waves,” that he described.
Kondratieff and his disciples — among whom was Joseph Schumpeter, who wrote about capitalism’s “creative destruction” — identified four stages in each cycle, corresponding to the seasons.
(14 February 2009)
We’ll be hearing more about Kondatieff. -BA
It couldn’t happen here – could it?
Ted Rall, blog
PARIS–Most Americans don’t care what happens in France. But the oldest country in “Old Europe” remains the Western world’s intellectual capital and one of its primary originators of political trends. (Google “May+1968+Sorbonne.”)
The French are reacting to a situation almost identical to ours–economic collapse, government impotence, corporate corruption–by turning hard left. National strikes and massive demonstrations are occurring every few weeks. How far left? This far: the late president François Mitterand’s Socialist Party, the rough equivalent of America’s Greens, is considered too conservative to solve the economic crisis.
A new poll by the Parisian daily Libération finds 53 percent of French voters (68 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds) favoring “radical social change.” Fifty-seven percent want France to insulate itself from the global economic system. Does this mean revolution? It’s certainly possible. Or maybe counter-revolution: Jean-Marie Le Pen’s nativist (some would say neofascist) National Front is also picking up points.
One thing is certain: French politics are even more volatile than the financial markets these days.
(12 February 2009)
Ted Rall is a satirical U.S. cartoonist. He also writes serious columns like this one. -BA
