{"content":[{"text":"The fragile construction of a human future: \n From post-War policy tradeoffs to political crises","bbox":{"left":0.266503,"top":0.07267,"width":0.47832199999999997,"height":0.041479}},{"text":"Why we need a pluralist and \n interdisciplinary economics","bbox":{"left":0.387141,"top":0.131992,"width":0.2375819999999999,"height":0.035489999999999994}},{"text":"Gary A. Dymski \n Professor of Applied Economics, \n Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds \n g.dymski@leeds.ac.uk","bbox":{"left":0.281993,"top":0.185174,"width":0.44788,"height":0.07109599999999999}},{"text":"ABSTRACT","bbox":{"left":0.45969,"top":0.274113,"width":0.09238799999999997,"height":0.01776300000000003}},{"text":"Some 150 years ago, Marx warned in Das Capital that an economic system rooted in a self- \n expanding logic of exploitation and expropriation, primed to push aside or destroy prior \n bonds of community, would repeatedly generate crises without reliably providing for human \n provisioning. Sustaining this logic would require a counter-logic, wherein either the state or \n community would both support capitalists’ accumulation and compensate for their \n limitations in meeting human need.","bbox":{"left":0.117686,"top":0.309606,"width":0.7737480000000001,"height":0.10654999999999998}},{"text":"This dialectical logic was apparently rendered historically moot in the OECD countries in the \n immediate post-War years. For after two world wars and a Depression, these countries \n established “safety-net” policies which appeared to convert economic policy into a technical \n problem. Samuelson’s text epitomized this approach. However, the turbulence at the end of \n the Bretton Woods period put renewed emphasis on the unstable balance that economic \n policy seeks to establish and maintain. This was most memorably described in James \n O’Connor’s The Fiscal Crisis of the State (St. Martin’s, 1973), which described how “the \n capitalistic state must try to fulfill two contradictory functions – accumulation and \n legitimation. … to maintain or create the conditions in which profitable capital accumulation \n is possible …[and] to maintain or create the conditions for social harmony.”","bbox":{"left":0.117686,"top":0.434,"width":0.7707210000000001,"height":0.17763599999999996}},{"text":"The crises that emerged in the 1970s and deepened in subsequent years gave rise to many \n bold new theories which characterized economic crisis as an endogenous result of capitalist \n processes. These included Magdoff and Sweezy’s revival of stagnation theory, world systems \n theory, Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis, and the French Ecole de Regulation, among \n others. These theories all suggested that the immanent breakdown of economic \n reproduction could be offset by institutional evolution and government support. There then \n ensued some years – known as the “Great Moderation” – in which it again seemed (as in the \n era of Samuelson’s text) that economic policy could be dialed in by the numbers and ever- \n greater (if ever more opaque) financial markets were breaking through previous risk-return \n limits.","bbox":{"left":0.117686,"top":0.629328,"width":0.770877,"height":0.177801}},{"text":"The global crises of 2008 and after, of course, eviscerated such illusions. Wolfgang Streeck’s \n 2014 Buying Time effectively updated O’Connor’s thesis, by pointing out that the steady \n growth of debt in recent years had delayed the realization of a profound crisis.","bbox":{"left":0.117686,"top":0.82482,"width":0.7635790000000001,"height":0.053212999999999955}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}