Re: The Prize by Any Other Name

[Harry L Cook <hlc710@xxxxxxxx>]

I guess it depends on what we are trying to explain.  I think that it is
useful and it makes sense to me for practical policy purposes to see
capitalism as a "natural" culmination of a very long period of
evolutionary development.  If you begin after the
fall of Rome and with nothing much more that the desire for economic
betterment for both buyers and sellers and population growth you can, to
my satisfaction, analytically trace the development and evolution of
money, markets and the development of trade, financial institutions,
technology, competition, saving and investment and so on, to the end of
the Middle Ages, through the Mercantile period in England and then the
Industrial Revolution.  I think that this interpretation  gives some
insight into capitalism as a system, both its strengths and weaknesses.
The only issue for me is whether or not this is a useful interpretation.
					Harry L. Cook
>
> At 09:00 27/11/01 -0800, Harry L Cook wrote:
> >My point was that modern capitalism is a system made up of
> >several independent institutions - money, banks, markets -
> >and long driven by the incentive for economic improvement,
> >that developed and evolved quite naturally throughout most
> >of the Middle Ages.  They all began to come together as
> >the Middle Ages gave way to the modern era and climaxed
> >with the Industrial Revolution in England.
>
> My point was that this story ignores the fact that most
> of the commercial institutions evolved outside of the
> economic backwater of Europe and was brought in ... but
> of course that just changes the range of economic
> histories that you have to look at to understand the
> process, it is still an evolving process.
>
> Polyani's point was that the inviability of the system
> came about from the extension of commercial logic to
> the determination of the major portion of the communities
> labour and the major portion of the communities use of
> natural resources.  Pointing out that the commercial
> practices developed prior to taking over the major
> role with respect to those two "fictitious commodities",
> and that the adoption of commercial practices for
> those fictitious commodities was itself an ongoing process
> rather than a single event, doesn't really address
> Polyani's argument about why the nineteenth century system
> was inviable.  And *of course* there were outpost of
> more developed economic systems in Europe, just as there
> are outposts of more developed economic systems in almost
> any less developed economy today.
>
> Virtually,
>
> Bruce McFarling, Shortland, NSW
> ecbm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx