The politics of public debt

4 Feb, 2015 at 14:25 | Posted in Economics | Comments Off on The politics of public debt

What if a resumption of growth, as implied by older traditions of political economy, requires more public investment rather than less, and perhaps also a reversal of the apparently inexorable trend toward ever more inequality (Stiglitz 2012)? In this case, the declining capacity of politics to contain the plundering of the public sphere and the apparently unending self-enrichment of the already unendingly rich may pose a problem not just for democracy, but also for the economy – look at the superrich among the Greeks who are abandoning Greece in droves, availing themselves of free international capital markets to take their money to the safe havens of Wall Street or the City of London; or the Russian and Ukrainian “oligarchs” who, having expropriated their fellowcitizens in post-communist primitive accumulation, are now abandoning them to their domestic misery. What we are seeing here may be the beginning of the fate of economic elites finally becoming divorced from the economies-cum-societies from where they derived their riches, decoupling the fortunes of the rich and their families from the prosperity, or the lack of it, of normal people.

Wolfgang Streeck

[For those of you who want to read more Streeck, his Adorno lectures (Frankfurt 2012) are available in Gekaufte Zeit. Die vertagte Krise des demokratischen Kapitalismus (Suhrkamp 2013). Also available in an eminent Swedish edition as Köpt tid. Den demokratiska kapitalismens uppskjutna kris(Daidalos 2013)]