The Grouch Reads

The Grouch Reads......The Endless Crisis; How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China, by John Bellamy Foster and Roert W. McChesney

Last night I was reading TEC. I was surprised to learn that there are a significant numer of economists who clearly recognized the tendency toward an increasingly small number of companies running things.

It's not exactly monopoly, but it's enough of an "uncompetitive" market to matter.

Two or three large companies can, in effect, set the prices.  The larger company sets the trend by high pricing.  The other companies won't  offer their goods at lower prices because companies have learned that such warfare is bad for profits.  (There are interesting details which I will omit for now.)

But the students I meet seem to believe in some sort of perfect competition, andol the idea of monopolies or oligopoly is nowhere in sight.  (Incidentally, economists who use those terms should send a check to Greece to cover the intellectual property right rental fee.)

So as BF and M tell the story, economics has, consequently moved further and further from the real world.

As, I said, I'm leaving things out---like an interesting quote from Buffett saying that the ability to control prices is more important than any sort of managerial talent.

Here, in Central Europe, the Unreality Principle reigns supreme.  I've heard countless times that the Crisis is not serious locally.  And students have never heard the word "austerity"

Yeah, right.

That's  why the public services are so very generous!---Buses and trains are never, never crowded.  The toilets in the trains are always clean and........You get the idea.

And the local government did not axe fifty or so government agencies, and they did not gloat about it when they did so. Nor did the local financial newspaper nod its head, sharing in the gloating....

None of that ever happened.