O leitor conhece a Sociologia à moda de Pedro Arroja ? Pois bem. O que trago hoje não tem nada a ver.
John Bellamy Foster (sociológo de um país protestante) explica a crise actual com fundamentação científica e pouco enviesamento ideológico. Sobretudo porque identifica padrões de longo prazo na história económica dos últimos 200 anos. O início da entrevista é mesmo arrbatador:
John Bellamy Foster (sociológo de um país protestante) explica a crise actual com fundamentação científica e pouco enviesamento ideológico. Sobretudo porque identifica padrões de longo prazo na história económica dos últimos 200 anos. O início da entrevista é mesmo arrbatador:
«I think it is true, as you say, that the American people have been misled by analyses of the crisis into focusing on mere symptoms, or on the straws that broke the camel's back, such as subprime loans. There is still a great deal of toxic financial waste out there in the financial superstructure of the economy, but the real problems go much deeper. One reason for this failure to account realistically for the crisis is that those at the top of the system have very little clue themselves, given the near bankruptcy of orthodox economics. A second reason is that the dominant ideology is designed to naturalize/externalize economic disaster, pretending it has nothing to do with the inner contradictions of the system but is simply the result of human psychology, mistakes of federal regulators, deregulation, corruption of a few individuals, etc. Under these circumstances, what you get from the elites and the media is mostly nonsense, though there are individuals in the financial community, in particular, that are now analyzing the problem at a deeper, more realistic level.
The first thing to recognize is that this is a very serious crisis, of an order of magnitude comparable to the Great Depression. It is not a regular business cycle downturn or credit crunch. This should suggest that there are long-term forces at work. These include, over the last third of a century, stagnation, or the slowing down of the economy, and the financialization, the shift in the center of gravity of the economy from production to finance. Financialization refers not to just one or two financial bubbles (such as the New Economy bubble and the housing bubble) but to the growing reliance on financial speculation, which can be treated as a whole series of bubbles one after the other, each new one bigger than the last. This has been the dominant economic development since the 1970s, and especially since the 1980s. This financialization was occurring on top of a "real economy" or productive economy that was more and more stagnant. Given the rot below, financial speculation thus became the only game in town, serving to lift the economy. More and more economic activity was geared not to production but to the pursuit of paper claims to wealth. The last bubble-bursting episode, associated with the housing or subprime bubble, was so severe that it brought financialization to an end, generating what we call in the title of our new book The Great Financial Crisis.»
The first thing to recognize is that this is a very serious crisis, of an order of magnitude comparable to the Great Depression. It is not a regular business cycle downturn or credit crunch. This should suggest that there are long-term forces at work. These include, over the last third of a century, stagnation, or the slowing down of the economy, and the financialization, the shift in the center of gravity of the economy from production to finance. Financialization refers not to just one or two financial bubbles (such as the New Economy bubble and the housing bubble) but to the growing reliance on financial speculation, which can be treated as a whole series of bubbles one after the other, each new one bigger than the last. This has been the dominant economic development since the 1970s, and especially since the 1980s. This financialization was occurring on top of a "real economy" or productive economy that was more and more stagnant. Given the rot below, financial speculation thus became the only game in town, serving to lift the economy. More and more economic activity was geared not to production but to the pursuit of paper claims to wealth. The last bubble-bursting episode, associated with the housing or subprime bubble, was so severe that it brought financialization to an end, generating what we call in the title of our new book The Great Financial Crisis.»
Da leitura deste e outros artigos, vislumbro uma solução: Assim com a financiarização da economia foi uma tentativa de responder à estagnação económica das economias industrializadas, poderão surgir futuramente outros caminhos: Incluir na economia formal actividades que actualmente não contam para o PIB: protituição, tráfico de droga e até trabalho informal de serviços pessoais (limpeza doméstica, acompanhamento de crianças e idosos, etc). Preparem-se para alterações drásticas na sociedade. Como se referia na entrevista: «Very often between one historical period and another, ten years suddenly might be enough to reveal the contradictions of a whole century».
Quanto mais se perceber esta crise, melhor. Quer seja a nível pessoal, profissional, regional ou nacional.
Quanto mais se perceber esta crise, melhor. Quer seja a nível pessoal, profissional, regional ou nacional.
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