From Volume 85, Number 3 (March 2012)
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Even its more stalwart defenders are concerned that capitalism is in crisis. Alan Greenspan conceded a “flaw” in his free-market beliefs. The Financial Times, in 2012, invited Arundhati Roy and Occupy Wall Street to share a dialogue with high-level officials and leading economists over the crisis in capitalism.
The crisis in capitalism might have come as a shock to some, but not to many middle- and lower-income households. Well before 2008, middle-class Americans saw little gains in income, despite gains in productivity. When mass unemployment came, the middle class shrank further. America’s social net, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders described in his historic speech, is threadbare. America’s infrastructure is crumbling. Primary and secondary education for many families is inadequate. Incarcerations, home foreclosures, underwater mortgages, the number of people in poverty, and the public’s dissatisfaction with Congress are at record highs. With America’s debt in the trillions of dollars, a larger fiscal crisis looms. Many Americans in 2012 were dissatisfied with the United States’ moral and ethical climate (68 percent surveyed), the federal government’s size and power (69 percent), and the state of America’s economy (83 percent). Given the dissatisfaction, it is a wonder why more people are not protesting.
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