Opinion (Kenneth Rogoff, Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics at Harvard University): “There’s little doubt that globalization and technological innovation are the driving forces behind rising inequality, Rogoff said in a panel discussion on income inequality and role of money in politics. So for the stability of the system, ‘government policy should mitigate the effects of this big change that technology and globalization is achieving and not exacerbate them.’”

My Comment: This is possible only by becoming aware of the necessity to rise to the next level of human development. It is possible to reach the awareness of the need either under the influence of great suffering or with strong dissemination of the method of integral education and upbringing, or both of them together.
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In the News (from World Socialist Web Site): “In the European countries, 12.7 percent of all young people are neither employed nor in education or training, a rate 2 percentage points higher than before the crisis. The ILO report notes: ‘The crisis has dramatically diminished the labor market prospects for young people, as many experience long-term unemployment right from the start of their labor market entry, a situation that was never observed during earlier cyclical downturns.’

“’Social protection is both a human right and sound economic policy. Social security enables access to health care, education and nutrition. Well-designed social protection systems support incomes and domestic consumption, build human capital, and increase productivity. Yet over 76 per cent of the world’s population continues to live without adequate health and social protection coverage.’ …

“’As a result, we are faced with a deep social crisis, a crisis too of social justice. Disturbing – and rising levels of inequality – in advanced and developing economies are widely acknowledged as cause for great concern. Today the wealth of the top one per cent of the global population equals that of the poorest 3.5 billion people.’“ Source: International Labour Organization

My Comment: Governments will have no choice but to provide the entire population, employed and unemployed, with essential goods and services. But it will not eliminate the degradation of the population, and maybe then the need for integral education and upbringing will be realized. Otherwise, there will be confrontations, pushing towards civil or international war.
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In the News (from RollingStone): “There’s a lot of talk of Karl Marx in the air these days … But few people actually understand Marx’s trenchant critique of capitalism. Most people are vaguely aware of the radical economist’s prediction that capitalism would inevitably be replaced by communism, but they often misunderstand why he believed this to be true. …

“Here are five facts of life in 2014 that Marx’s analysis of capitalism correctly predicted more than a century ago:

1. The Great Recession (Capitalism’s Chaotic Nature)

The inherently chaotic, crisis-prone nature of capitalism was a key part of Marx’s writings. He argued that the relentless drive for profits would lead companies to mechanize their workplaces, producing more and more goods while squeezing workers’ wages until they could no longer purchase the products they created. Sure enough, modern historical events from the Great Depression to the dot-com bubble can be traced back to what Marx termed ‘fictitious capital’ – financial instruments like stocks and credit-default swaps. We produce and produce until there is simply no one left to purchase our goods, no new markets, no new debts. The cycle is still playing out before our eyes: Broadly speaking, it’s what made the housing market crash in 2008. Decades of deepening inequality reduced incomes, which led more and more Americans to take on debt. When there were no subprime borrows left to scheme, the whole façade fell apart, just as Marx knew it would.

2. The iPhone 5S (Imaginary Appetites). Marx warned that capitalism’s tendency to concentrate high value on essentially arbitrary products would, over time, lead to what he called ‘a contriving and ever-calculating subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites.’ It’s a harsh but accurate way of describing contemporary America, where we enjoy incredible luxury and yet are driven by a constant need for more and more stuff to buy… While Chinese families fall sick with cancer from our e-waste, megacorporations are creating entire advertising campaigns around the idea that we should destroy perfectly good products for no reason.

3. The IMF (The Globalization of Capitalism). Marx’s ideas about overproduction led him to predict what is now called globalization – the spread of capitalism across the planet in search of new markets. ‘The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe,’ he wrote. ‘It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.’ While this may seem like an obvious point now, Marx wrote those words in 1848, when globalization was over a century away. And he wasn’t just right about what ended up happening in the late 20^th century – he was right about why it happened: The relentless search for new markets and cheap labor, as well as the incessant demand for more natural resources, are beasts that demand constant feeding.

4. Walmart (Monopoly). The classical theory of economics assumed that competition was natural and therefore self-sustaining. Marx, however, argued that market power would actually be centralized in large monopoly firms as businesses increasingly preyed upon each other… Politicians give lip service to what minimal small-business lobby remains and prosecute the most violent of antitrust abuses – but for the most part, we know big business is here to stay.

5. Low Wages, Big Profits (The Reserve Army of Industrial Labor). Marx believed that wages would be held down by a ‘reserve army of labor,’ which he explained simply using classical economic techniques: Capitalists wish to pay as little as possible for labor, and this is easiest to do when there are too many workers floating around. Thus, after a recession, using a Marxist analysis, we would predict that high unemployment would keep wages stagnant as profits soared, because workers are too scared of unemployment to quit their terrible, exploitative jobs.

In Conclusion: Marx was wrong about many things. Most of his writing focuses on a critique of capitalism rather than a proposal of what to replace it with. But his work still shapes our world in a positive way as well. When he argued for a progressive income tax in the Communist Manifesto, no country had one. Now, there is scarcely a country without a progressive income tax, and it’s one small way that the U.S. tries to fight income inequality. Marx’s moral critique of capitalism and his keen insights into its inner workings and historical context are still worth paying attention to. As Robert L. Heilbroner writes, ‘We turn to Marx, therefore, not because he is infallible, but because he is inescapable.’”

My Comment: Baal HaSulam’s opinion is that, tracing the mechanism of natural development, Marx noted only the results of the positive and negative forces, i.e., creation and destruction that are produced in society.

Accordingly, he planned his tactics and did not pay attention to the causal factors that lead to such consequences. It’s like a doctor who does not pay attention to the root of the disease and treats the patient based just on its external manifestations (modern medicine operates on the same principle).
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Opinion (F.F. Wiley, Cyniconomics blog): “Wars and political systems are the two most basic determinants of an economy’s long-term path.

“Military spending requires a different evaluation because it succeeds or fails based on whether wars are won or lost…. In any case, military spending isn’t our focus here.

“There are 11 countries in our analysis, chosen according to a rule we’ve used in the past – GDP must be as large as that of the Netherlands. We start in 1816 for four of the 11 (the U.S., U.K., France and Netherlands). Others are added at later dates, depending mostly on data availability.

“Not only has the global, non-defense budget balance dropped to never-before-seen levels, but it’s falling along a trend line that shows no sign of flattening. The trend line spells fiscal disaster. It suggests that we’ve never been in a predicament comparable to today. Essentially, the world’s developed countries are following the same path that’s failed, time and again, in chronically insolvent nations of the developing world.

“In much of the world, the Great Depression triggered a gradual expansion in the role of the state. Public officials failed to establish a sustainable structure for their social safety nets, and got away with this partly by sweeping the true costs of their programs under the carpet.

“Central bankers suppressed normal (and healthy) market mechanisms for forcing responsibility, by slashing interest rates and buying up government debt. Regulators took markets further out of the equation by rewarding private banks for lending to governments, while politicians and central bankers effectively underwrote the private bankers’ risks.

“Monetary policies also encouraged dangerous private credit growth and other financial excesses, resulting in budget-destroying setbacks such as stagflation and banking crises.

“Budget decisions were made without consideration of the inevitability of these setbacks, because economists wielding huge influence over the budgeting process assumed a naïve utopia of endless economic expansion.

“On the bright side, a fiscal disaster should help trigger the needed changes.”

My Comment: Or it can happen by realizing the need for fundamental restructuring of the whole of society—its re-education. And it will lead to the restructuring of the entire life: economic, political, social, family, and so on. In our world, there is no other means of changing our life and avoiding disasters, but transforming the human being himself.
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Opinion (from vz.ru): “Negative selection exists in all capitalist countries because capitalism is based on the principle, ‘man is a wolf to [his fellow] man.’ And in order to survive in the pack of wolves, one has to be a wolf himself.

“Capitalists claim that the market will put everything into place and the invisible hand of competition will regulate everything; most important is not to interfere with markets.

“There is some truth to it: If you are a capitalist, you need to compete, and in order to compete, you need to be effective. That is, you need to get more profit than your competitors since those with higher profits have more competitive opportunities.

“But the more profit a capitalist makes, the worse it is for an ordinary worker. An example: Three capitalists want to produce the exact same product of the same quality under the same conditions and they sell it in the same market. To compete, they have to make production more effective, that is, to lower the production costs, preserving its previous volume. Eventually, they will transfer production to the Third World country, where the labor force is cheaper; start buying low quality raw materials, supplementing them with taste enhancers; lengthen the workday, and manage to pay less tax.

“But competition is perpetual and in order to survive, each one will have to do everything that they each did before.

“This is the system of negative selection. The fittest survive or, more precisely, the most cunning and mean ones, who are ready to disregard any moral values only to profit more. Life is a war, and at war, everything is fair.

“A capitalist couldn’t care less about the life of a worker, his family and children. Through exploitation, he acquired new equipment and now he can fire half of the staff to lower labor costs. If you don’t devour someone, they will devour you. Such system leads to monopoly in the industry, market, authority, truth, and the world. Hence, the most ruthless person gets monopoly. Then, something worse comes instead—fascism, and those who disagree are sent away to camps.”

My Comment: The law of nature doesn’t consider our desires, but rather changes them. Capitalism is replaced by its crisis. The crisis is external, in all spheres of our life, and also internal, manifesting as the change of purposefulness of man. A soft transition is possible provided the integral upbringing of the masses is successful, which is possible by disseminating the method of integral education. If not, the transition towards integral society will indeed happen through fascism, as Baal HaSulam wrote nearly a hundred years ago.
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Opinion (Anatoly Wasserman, writer, political consultant, scholar): “The concept of liberalism considers only dualistic relationships between individuals, not taking into account that further interactions affect each other.

“The desire to be limited by dualistic interactions is connected to the fact that the liberalistic concept is commercial. Production and trade are considered parts of a single process, but they constantly compete. You cannot sell what is not yet made, and it makes no sense to produce something that obviously will not be sold – from this point of view, the process is really unified.

“But in every confrontation, the position of sellers is stronger than manufacturers’ positions: $1- to the inventor, $10 – to the maker, $100 – to the seller. When the market is on the rise, the confrontation is small because there is something to share. But in bad times, sellers stifle manufactures to secure a greater prosperity for themselves.”

My Comment: It is necessary to eliminate the process of trade and to develop industry on a scale that allows equal distribution of essential products and services.
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Opinion (Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics and professor at Columbia University): “Soon after the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, I warned that unless the right policies were adopted, Japanese-style malaise – slow growth and near-stagnant incomes for years to come – could set in. While leaders on both sides of the Atlantic claimed that they had learned the lessons of Japan, they promptly proceeded to repeat some of the same mistakes. …

“Policymakers’ response to the crisis failed to address these issues; worse, it exacerbated some of them and created new ones – and not just in the US. The result has been increased indebtedness in many countries, as the collapse of GDP undermined government revenues. Moreover, underinvestment in both the public and private sector has created a generation of young people who have spent years idle and increasingly alienated at a point in their lives when they should have been honing their skills and increasing their productivity.

“Instead, our current difficulties are the result of flawed policies. There are alternatives. But we will not find them in the self-satisfied complacency of the elites, whose incomes and stock portfolios are once again soaring. Only some people, it seems, must adjust to a permanently lower standard of living. Unfortunately, those people happen to be most people.”

My Comment: Our nature, egoism, is above our mind, and we are in its power. It forces us to act irrationally, even under the threat of our own death. As it is said: The angel of death brings a sword to a man and the sword has a drop of poison at the tip, and he is forced to open his mouth and swallow it, to fulfill his egoism, a sense of life, although this drop kills him. The elite cannot limit itself in exploiting society, even under the threat of unrest, wars, and self-destruction.
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Opinion (Nouriel Roubini, professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and Chairman of Roubini Global Economics): “At the same time, the Fed’s tapering of its long-term asset purchases has begun in earnest, with interest rates set to rise. As a result, the capital that flowed to emerging markets in the years of high liquidity and low yields in advanced economies is now fleeing many countries where easy money caused fiscal, monetary, and credit policies to become too lax. …

“But the short-run policy tradeoffs that many of these countries face – damned if they tighten monetary and fiscal policy fast enough, and damned if they do not – remain ugly. The external risks and internal macroeconomic and structural vulnerabilities that they face will continue to cloud their immediate outlook. The next year or two will be a bumpy ride for many emerging markets, before more stable and market-oriented governments implement sounder policies.”

My Comment: New government will bring nothing new; there is a need for a new society, brought up on the basis of integral education. Governments should be advised of this, even before they might be replaced. The key to their salvation is in the transformation of society!
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Opinion (Jag Bhalla, entrepreneur and writer): “’Competition creates efficiency,’ is preached as if it were a law of nature. But nature itself teaches a different lesson. Biological competition can create foolish costs, and collective doom. ‘Darwin’s Wedge’ shows why and reminds us of the point of being human. Our competitions, and the myopic logic of free markets, needn’t be dumb as trees.

“Robert Frank coined ‘Darwin’s Wedge’ to describe situations where individual incentives diverge from collective goals (sometimes even risking collective doom). Darwin’s Wedge applies to an entire class of problems wherein supposedly locally rational decisions aggregate badly (see the market fallacy of composition). These include the tragedy of the commons, Prisoner’s Dilemma games, and Nash equilibria. In them using myopic self-maximizing logic ends badly for each and all. But tackled as coordinated action problems, with monitoring and enforcement, outcomes can be guided to everybody’s benefit. Free markets aren’t suited to such simultaneous complex cross-agent coordinated change.

“Competition’s benefits arise from the constraints it creates. Intelligent constraints, and creative responses to them, can work better than what emerges from mindless ‘natural’ competition. The human trick isn’t self-organizing, it’s other-organizing. We’ve coordinated team survival for 10,000 generations. Our choices now are either to let the power of markets be dumb as trees, or to guide their competitions for better outcomes.”

My Comment: The world is becoming integrally interconnected. It is impossible to develop a plan according to our discrete abilities. It is impossible to plan all communication services, society, industry, etc., calculating everything, and managing everything as a single organism. This was an unreachable goal for Communists because they related to society as to a single system, they created by their singularly enforced methods.

Now the human community is becoming integral, not through our choice or enforced unification as in a socialist camp, but as a result of our natural development. The solution to the problem of the interconnected society could be only in bringing it to a predetermined integral form.

First, we must realize that we are not free: we are in the system of the upper management of nature. In its development, humanity advances along the path of unconscious development, like a child. This phase ends in our time. The phase of conscious human development ended in our time. Since the end of the 20^th century has come the stage where we have to study the law of nature and follow it. Nature is manifested as a global integral system and requires us, humankind, to match it.

We can fulfill this condition only if we re-educate people, through changing our egoistic relations to altruistic.
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In the News (from News.com.au): “A recent study by researchers at the University of California Berkeley Campus has found a clear connection between wealth and a disregard for a fellow person’s feelings. The Berkeley research team is lead by Paul Piff, a psychologist with an avid interest in the power of money over human interaction.

“In one test Piff’s research team set up games of Monopoly between more than 100 pairs of strangers. A coin was flipped and randomly determined which person out of the pair would be the ‘rich’ player in the game. The game was clearly rigged in favour of the ‘rich’ player, with fascinating results.

“The rich player was given twice as much money as their poorer competitor, and when they passed ‘GO’ they collected twice the salary they were entitled to. They also got to roll two dice on their turn instead of one, and thus moved around the board quicker.

“The videos showed that the language and comments of the richer players became more confident as the game progressed. They began to move their piece around the board much louder, at times smacking it down.

“We were more likely to see signs of dominance and non-verbal signs, displays of power and celebration among the rich players,” said Piff. …

“’The rich players actually started to become ruder toward the other person, less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor … players,’ said Piff. They became ‘more and more demonstrative of their material success, more likely to showcase how well they were doing.’

“Numerous surveys and studies made over seven years found that wealthier individuals are more likely to moralise greed as being good, and the pursuit of self-interest as being acceptable. …

“Individuals who made between $15,000 and $25,000 a year gave on average 44 per cent more of their money to the stranger than the individuals who earned between $150,000 and $200,000 a year.”

“They even tested hundreds of vehicles and found that drivers of expensive cars were more inclined to break the law, failing to stop at a pedestrian crossing when there was someone waiting to cross.

“Nearly 50 per cent of drivers of expensive range cars cut off pedestrians, while none of the drivers of the least expensive cars did. As the price of the car increased, the driver’s tendencies to break the law increased too.

“Other studies have tested whether richer individuals are more likely to lie in negotiations, to endorse unethical behavior at work like stealing cash from the cash register, taking bribes or lying to customers.

“What these studies have found is that, “the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to pursue a vision of personal success, of achievement and accomplishment, to the detriment of others around you.”

My Comment: How can we get back on the right track? Only by implementing re-education that will lead to the leveling of wealth in a voluntary way. Otherwise, we are faced with civil war.
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