Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism's Imminent Demise (vice.com)
Capitalism as we know it is over, an anonymous reader writes. So suggests a new report commissioned by a group of scientists appointed by the UN Secretary-General. From a report: The main reason? We're transitioning rapidly to a radically different global economy, due to our increasingly unsustainable exploitation of the planet's environmental resources. Climate change and species extinctions are accelerating even as societies are experiencing rising inequality, unemployment, slow economic growth, rising debt levels, and impotent governments. Contrary to the way policymakers usually think about these problems, the new report says that these are not really separate crises at all. Rather, these crises are part of the same fundamental transition to a new era characterized by inefficient fossil fuel production and the escalating costs of climate change. Conventional capitalist economic thinking can no longer explain, predict, or solve the workings of the global economy in this new age, the paper says [PDF].
Too bad every place that capitalism has been tried has ended up badly as well and has needed tight government control to keep it from falling apart.
People aren't leaving California and New York over socialist policies but because costs of living are going up and there's a much larger divide between the wealthy and the poor in those places, all driven by excesses of corporatism.
You're trying to turn this all into a binary option, anything that's not a pure free market must be socialism is what you seem to imply. Never mind that Maoism is not the same as Communism, which is not the same as Socialism, and none of these have much resemblance to what's in Venezuela. Economics and politics are much more complicated than this comic book version.