Session 7 Blog Post for March 17

In Ha-Joon Chang’s book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism, the author explores the misleading nature of the free market and its underlying regulatory boundaries.  Ha-Joon talks about how we miss these restrictions because of the moral values behind them that we support.  He also discusses the inherent political motivations that primarily influence the movement of the market.  With this reading in mind, how has capitalism become a system independent from the apparent values that developed it and how has this system allowed the unsustainable use of natural capitol?

According to “The Next Industrial Revolution” the author discusses the traditional mind-set of conventional capitalism.  These points have led to the ignorance of the role of natural capital in the economic cycles of society.  These traditional foundations of our society form our system linearly and advocate the misuse of nature towards the goal of maximizing human standard of living.  These points include, economic progress is best achieved through free-market systems of production and distribution where reinvested profits make labor and capital increasingly productive, competitive advantage is gained when bigger plants manufacture more products for expanding markets, growth in total output maximizes human well-being, any resource shortages will elicit the development of substitutes, concerns for a healthy environment are important but must be balanced against the requirements of economic growth, and free enterprise and market forces will allocate people and resources to their highest and best uses.  All of these points that formed the foundations for conventional capitalism are absurdly still the main guidelines for current capitalistic development.  We have reached a certain point in our economic development that requires us to reconsider these values, however.