The stock markets and profits for large banks and corporations have recovered, more or less. That explains the good fortune of the top 1%. Their incomes depend heavily on the health of those parts of the economy (especially interest, dividends, and capital gains). But the 99% depend mostly on wages and salaries. High unemployment keeps their income hobbled, as does the persistent shift from jobs with high pay and good benefits to jobs with neither.
Hyping a recovery helps politicians to boost their popularity (or at least, slow its decline. Academic economists, with careers built celebrating capitalism's efficiency, growth, and optimality for everyone, need urgently to hype recovery just as they have long hyped capitalism.Hyping recovery pleases those seeking reassurance about the state of capitalism. They want to hear that it is – or will shortly be – the secure, near-perfect economic system they always thought and said it was. They want to see the system's flaws, imperfections, and ongoing crisis – stressed by capitalism's critics – as merely minor and passing irritations. Calming references to recovery – used often and said as authoritatively as possible – nicely suggest that capitalism is either healing itself or being healed by a benevolent government.
But more importantly it also serves to give masses of people with growing economic difficulties the impression that "other people" are experiencing a recovery. So they blame themselves (their age, skill set, education and so on) for missing out. The recovery hype thereby functions as a massive "blame-the-victim" program, in which a dysfunctional capitalism escapes criticism, while its victims instead turn criticism inward upon themselves. Hyping recovery provides "delaying cover" as businesses executives relocate their facilities abroad, their homes and offices inside "gated communities", and their workplaces into "heavily secured enterprise zones".The recovery hype performs the same service of mass distraction in this crisis as the accumulation of consumer debt provided since the 1970s. From the 1970s to the economic collapse in 2008, household debt accumulation distracted American workers from the stagnation of their real wages.
Richard Wolff's full article can be read here
Hyping a recovery helps politicians to boost their popularity (or at least, slow its decline. Academic economists, with careers built celebrating capitalism's efficiency, growth, and optimality for everyone, need urgently to hype recovery just as they have long hyped capitalism.Hyping recovery pleases those seeking reassurance about the state of capitalism. They want to hear that it is – or will shortly be – the secure, near-perfect economic system they always thought and said it was. They want to see the system's flaws, imperfections, and ongoing crisis – stressed by capitalism's critics – as merely minor and passing irritations. Calming references to recovery – used often and said as authoritatively as possible – nicely suggest that capitalism is either healing itself or being healed by a benevolent government.
But more importantly it also serves to give masses of people with growing economic difficulties the impression that "other people" are experiencing a recovery. So they blame themselves (their age, skill set, education and so on) for missing out. The recovery hype thereby functions as a massive "blame-the-victim" program, in which a dysfunctional capitalism escapes criticism, while its victims instead turn criticism inward upon themselves. Hyping recovery provides "delaying cover" as businesses executives relocate their facilities abroad, their homes and offices inside "gated communities", and their workplaces into "heavily secured enterprise zones".The recovery hype performs the same service of mass distraction in this crisis as the accumulation of consumer debt provided since the 1970s. From the 1970s to the economic collapse in 2008, household debt accumulation distracted American workers from the stagnation of their real wages.
Richard Wolff's full article can be read here
The recovery hype thereby functions as a massive "blame-the-victim" program, in which a dysfunctional capitalism escapes criticism, while its victims instead turn criticism inward upon themselves. Sober Companion
ReplyDelete