Calendrier du 11 septembre 2019
Economic History Seminar
Du 11/09/2019 de 12:30 à 14:00
Salle R1.13, Campus Jourdan 48 Bd Jourdan 75014 Paris
MITCH David (University of Maryland Baltimore County)
Fear and Envy as Motives for the Pursuit of Economic Growth: Do Ideological Frameworks Matter?
The pursuit of economic growth has come to be taken for granted as a policy goal with the motive commonly presumed to be improvement of human welfare. However,a historical perspective points to ulterior motives such as military upheaval threats as motives for governments to pursue economic expansion. .In societies as diverse as Qin and Han dynasty China, early modern Europe, Meiji era Japan, the Soviet Union in the early Stalinist years, and post-war U.S. and OEEC Europe, the desire to provide resources to support military activity was a central motive in setting economic expansion as an important policy goal. Nevertheless, it can hardly be claimed that militarization has always been the dominant motive for the pursuit of economic expansion. In the cases both post-independence India and post-war South Korea, the pursuit of industrial self-sufficiency for security purposes was balanced by populist motives of poverty alleviation. The cases of India and South Korea as well as that of early modern Europe illustrate Jacob Viner’s claim of a long-run harmony between the pursuit of wealth and power as ultimate ends of national policy.While civil wars and domestic violence were endemic in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa during the twentieth century, the combination of a lack of interstate competition and of weak state legitimacy implied no attempt to pursue growth as a means of military mobilization. Instead growth as a policy goal was pursued in both regions from a perspective of backwardness and catch-up.
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EPCI (Economie politique du changement institutionnel) Seminar
Du 11/09/2019 de 10:30 à 12:00
MSE, salle du 6éme, 106-112 Bd de l'Hôpital 75013 Paris
MILANOVIC Branko (Stone Center, CUNY)
Capitalism, Alone. The Future of the System That Rules the World.
écrit avec *
We are all capitalists now. For the first time in human history, the globe is
dominated by one economic system. In Capitalism, Alone, leading economist
Branko Milanovic explains the reasons for this decisive historical shift since the days
of feudalism and, later, communism. Surveying the varieties of capitalism, he asks:
What are the prospects for a fairer world now that capitalism is the only game in
town? His conclusions are sobering, but not fatalistic. Capitalism gets much wrong,
but also much right—and it is not going anywhere. Our task is to improve it.
Milanovic argues that capitalism has triumphed because it works. It delivers
prosperity and gratifies human desires for autonomy. But it comes with a moral
price, pushing us to treat material success as the ultimate goal. And it offers no
guarantee of stability. In the West, liberal capitalism creaks under the strains of
inequality and capitalist excess. That model now fights for hearts and minds with
political capitalism, exemplified by China, which many claim is more efficient, but
which is more vulnerable to corruption and, when growth is slow, social unrest. As
for the economic problems of the Global South, Milanovic offers a creative, if
controversial, plan for large-scale migration. Looking to the future, he dismisses
prophets who proclaim some single outcome to be inevitable, whether worldwide
prosperity or robot-driven mass unemployment. Capitalism is a risky system. But it
is a human system. Our choices, and how clearly we see them, will determine how
it serves us.