HUMAN WRONGS WATCH

Human Wrongs Watch

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram*

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Mar 10 2020 (IPS)* – The US is currently still in a stock market bubble which, if history is any guide, is likely to end, perhaps soon due to Covid19. President Trump would, of course, like to sustain it to strengthen his November re-election prospects.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Meanwhile, US business investment has declined for many years. As shares of GDP, corporate profits or even market capitalization, such investment has been in decline for at least four decades. Clearly, ‘neo-liberal’ economic policies have failed to decades-long trend.

Financialization ‘unreal’
Although focused on the US, William Lazonick’s seminal 2014 Harvard Business Review article, Profits without Prosperity, and Lazonick and Shin’s new book, Predatory Value Extraction: How the Looting of the Business Corporation Became the US Norm and How Sustainable Prosperity Can Be Restored offer invaluable insights into investment trends with implications for much of the world.

Human Wrongs Watch

By John Scales Avery – TRANSCEND Media Service*

Contrasting Rates of Change

John Scales Avery

Cultural evolution depends on the non-genetic storage, transmission, diffusion and utilization of information.

The development of human speech, the invention of writing, the development of paper and printing, and finally, in modern times, computers and the Internet: all these have been crucial steps in society’s explosive accumulation of information and knowledge.

Human cultural evolution proceeds at a constantly-accelerating speed, so great in fact that it threatens to shake society to pieces.

The strong contrast between the slow rate of genetic change and the lightning-like, constantly accelerating rate of cultural change means that we face the serious problems of today with an emotional nature that has changed little since our ancestors lived in small tribes, competing for territory on the grasslands of Africa.