The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
In this Big Think interview, economist Thomas Piketty, best-selling author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, delves into several common misconceptions about free market economics. Piketty argues that strong public institutions are necessary for market regulation. So-called "natural forces" of self-regulation commonly associated with the writings of Adam Smith cannot be relied on to maintain a healthy economic climate. An example of this is the heavy trend toward deregulation...
Glenn Ashton -
Naomi Klein’s latest book, “This Changes Everything – Capitalism vs the Climate” explains how the dominant economic system is destroying the life support systems of humans and all other life on earth. Klein proposes that in order to prevent catastrophic climate change we need to fundamentally shift away from the existing materialist based capitalist system.
The 1970’s and ‘80’s were decades where human threats to planetary ecosystems were not only...
French economist Thomas Piketty caused a sensation in early 2014 with his book on a simple, brutal formula explaining economic inequality: r is greater than g (meaning that return on capital is generally higher than economic growth). Here, he talks through the massive data set that led him to conclude: Economic inequality is not new, but it is getting worse, with radical possible impacts. In this TED, which took place in Berlin, Piketty argues that wealth inequality is always a lot higher...
Leonard Gentle -
President Jacob Zuma recently returned from Russia, a strange place to be for many when you’re in the middle of a crisis at home, as many a commentator here in South Africa has observed. Maybe he and Putin were swapping stories of a new series of Survivor. Putin certainly would have a lot to teach Zuma on that score.
But important as those tips may be for our embattled Zuma, Putin has much bigger fish to fry and for those of us more interested in social justice than the competing...
Glenn Ashton -
Two millennia ago the Roman commentator Juvenal wrote of “panem et circensis,” bread and circuses, to demonstrate how the masses had abandoned political responsibility in exchange for full bellies and extreme entertainment. In Juvenal’s times entertainment was of the gladiatorial variety.
Today the violence of gladiators has been replaced by sports heroes and teams where rules constrain the violence, or by cinema and television featuring violence as gratuitous as the...
Saliem Fakir -
The reaction to Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century was to be expected – both great praise and rejection at the same time. Most studies on inequality, certainly, in the case of South Africa have tended to focus on the middle class, the employed worker and the unemployed through household surveys.
What Piketty’s book has done is to argue that economists have been focusing so much on the bottom of the economic pile that we have lost sight of what is...
