\nThat brings us to the other main point of our book: prosperity is not a scarce resource. Societies do not succeed at the expense of others. Because everyone is connected through trade and finance, more production and more consumption are ultimately better for everyone. China\u2019s revival after the end of Maoism did not require the dispossession of the American middle class, just as the liberation and reintegration of Central and Eastern Europe into the West did not force workers in France, Germany, or Italy to endure lower wages, higher joblessness, and higher debt. Rather, those were consequences of choices made across the world by the rich, by the companies they control, and by the political leaders they influence. The perverse result of those choices is that we as a species have been living below our means for decades\u2014shrinking the world\u2019s economic pie\u2014even as more and more people have become convinced that they must personally suffer to remain competitive in global markets.
preaching the technocratic centrist gospel!
Ah yes, I\u2019m sure the fall of two large communist alliances that constituted the main threat to western capitalism for the latter half of the 20th century had nothing to do with a decline in worker power, the destruction of labor unions, and a quickened pace of widening the gap between rich and poor
I agree, it had nothing to do with it. Neoliberalism began its program of austerity and union-busting long before 1991.
I mean it’s often traced to the policies of Chile under Pinochet, which puts it both as “the kind of things you do to render an economy self-reinforcingly anticommunist” and “the kind of things you can do once you’ve achieved sufficient hegemony to totally exclude communists”
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