The Destiny of Civilization

Autorentext

Michael Hudson is a Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), and Professor of Economics at Peking University in China. He gives speeches, lectures and presentations all over the world for official and unofficial groups reflecting diverse academic, economic and political constituencies. Before moving into research and consulting, Prof. Hudson spent several years applying flow-of-funds and balance-of-payments statistics to forecast interest rates, capital and real estate markets for Chase Manhattan Bank and The Hudson Institute (no relation). His academic focus has been on financial history and, since 1980, on writing a history of debt, land tenure and related economic institutions from the Sumerian period, antiquity, and feudal Europe to the present. Since 1996 as president of the Institute for the Study of Long Term Economic Trends (ISLET), he has written reports and given presentations on balance of payments, financial bubbles, land policy and financial reforms for U.S. and international clients and governments. He organized the International Scholars Conference on Ancient Near Eastern Economies (ISCANEE) in 1993, and to-date has co-edited the preceedings of six academic conferences on the evolution of property, credit, labor and accounting since the Bronze Age. His website and blog can be found at michael-hudson.com. He has been interviewed on Democracy Now, Marketplace, and Naked Capitalism. Many of his interviews and public appearances can be seen on YouTube.

Klappentext

This book is based on the lecture series on finance capitalism Michael Hudson presented for the Global University for Sustainability. The book explains why the U.S. and other Western economies have lost their former momentum: A narrow rentier class has gained control and become the new central planner, using its power to drain income from increasingly indebted and high-cost labor and industry. The American disease of de-industrialization has resulted from the costs of industrial production being inflated by the economic rents extracted by this class under the system of financialized monopoly capitalism that now prevails throughout the West. The book explains why the U.S.-China conflict cannot simply be regarded as market competition between two industrial rivals. It is a broader conflict between different political economic systems - not only between capitalism and socialism as such, but between the logic of an industrial economy and that of a financialized rentier economy increasingly dependent on foreign subsidy and exploitation as its own domestic economy shrivels. Professor Hudson endeavors to revive classical political economy in order to reverse the neoclassical counter-revolution.