With similar persistence and willingness to attempt the unknown, let our journey begin!
In The Future of Capitalism, respected MIT Professor of Management and Economics, Lester C. Thurow, warns that capitalism is experiencing an era of “punctuated equilibrium” (326). He uses an extended metaphor of the shifting plates of the earth’s surface to chronicle the major changes that have dramatically changed the world and its economy. While his assessment is apocalyptic at times, it is also filled with optimism because Thurow views the future as one with both enormous challenges and opportunities. He is not suggesting capitalism will implode as communism did, rather, he is saying that capitalism is in danger of stagnating, much as the economies in previous historical eras did when they had no significant competition, “Pharaonic, Roman, medieval, and mandarin economies also had no competitors, and they simply stagnated for centuries before they finally disappeared. Stagnation, not collapse, is the danger” (325).
Thurow writes with authority from an economic and historical perspective, yet he also uses language more creatively and interestingly than most economic writers. He not only uses the shifting plates of the earth’s surface to make a parallel to modern capitalism’s shifting disruptions, but he also applies evolutionary theory to highlight his point that, bottom line, it will be those countries willing to make the changes necessary for future survival who will avoid stagnation, “During the transitions in periods of punctuated equilibrium, no one knows who will be a dinosaur and who will be a mammal. That depends upon who is the best at adjusting to a new world-something that can only be known with certainty looking back” (325).
Before looking at the type of adjustments Thurow feels are necessary to adjust to a new homogenized global capitalism, we need to look at Thurow’s assessment of the dramatic chang...