Capitalism in Question’ at Annual Meeting of Management Profs

[eridani]

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-06/capitalism-in-question-at-annual-meeting-of-management-profs

Readers are left to draw their own conclusions about whether the questioning of capitalism is a sign that management professors have been infected by the liberalism of their colleagues from the philosophy and sociology departments, or whether capitalism has performed so poorly lately that even the people who teach it for a living are asking hard questions.

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“The recent economic and financial crises, austerity, and unemployment, and the emergence of many economic, social, and environmental protest movements around the world have put back on the agenda some big questions about this vision: What kind of economic system would this better world be built on? Would it be a capitalist one? If so, what kind of capitalism? If not, what are the alternatives?”

Gar Alperovitz, a left-leaning professor of political economy at the University of Maryland, was invited to give a keynote address. In a blog post he said he was “a bit taken aback” but pleased by the invitation. He wrote that the conference’s request for submissions “outlines the kind of sophisticated research agenda we’ll need if we’re serious about building something over time beyond the traditional systemic capitalist model.”

“Amazing how strong is the critique of capitalism they have produced for this event,” Alperovitz wrote in an e-mail.