by I was looking for more global examples to put in the After Capitalism manuscript, so I went through my library of 700+ scanning hits on the topic and pulled out the global ones. In this case by global, I mean outside the US, since a key focus of my After Capitalism research has been on the US as the most prominent champion of capitalism in the world today.
I pulled 96 global examples out of the scanning library. In some cases I clustered problems and solutions, such as with inequality and UBI. Since there were almost 100 items, the raw numbers are roughly the percentages as well (off by about 1% == 18 hits = 19%). Here is the rough order with a few observations:
- Environmental/climate/resources 20 — no surprise that this is the most “popular” global issue
- Inequality/Universal Basic Income (UBI) 18 — a pretty even split between the problem, and UBI is most common proposed solution
- Decline of capitalism 16 – grab-bag that also included explicitly mentioned alternatives
- Workers and automation 14 — mostly about oppression of works and mostly sees automation as a replacement (not an opportunity)
- Democracy/authoritarianism (govt) 13 — mostly about democracy in peril, but a few counter-examples, mostly local-level novel democracy experiments
- Culture wars/left vs right 6 — surprising low, suggesting it might be more heavily a US phenomenon
- Miscellaneous: Finance/crypto (4), global vs national (3), and corruption (2)
This is just from horizon scanning, not from the other sources of information, such as the book concepts, which tended to be more global/non-US on the whole. — Andy Hines
One thing I find disturbing in the image is nothing related to “individual liberty” or “freedom”.
How can one be “free” if they cannot accumulate wealth? What better way to accumulate wealth than with capitalism.
It seems very few American’s recognize the importance capitalism and free market economics to individual liberty.
q smith why should freedom be solely limited to wealth accumulation? Perhaps you’ve entangled the idea of freedom from western thought alone? Capitalism since its origins is predicated on the wealth of few at the expense of the “freedom”-hood of the many—the ones doing the actual accumulating and organizing of this so-called wealth
Andy Hines is there an avenue for accessing or subscribing to these 700+ scan hits you’ve pulled around Post-Capitalism?