You all are being distracted ---

[FarCenter]

4. Haven't finished the book yet, but I think that is the conclusion that Wolfgang Streeck will reach.

He has observed that capitalism has survived multiple crises in the past 200 years by mutating and adapting to changed social, political and technical conditions. However, the fact that it has survived the last several crises is no guarantee that it will survive the next.

He is pessimistic about what would follow if capitalism does not survive, since there is no political economic system that appears ready to take its place. The implication is that if capitalism falls, social and political chaos follow.

In another book I recently finished the theory is that once a society disintegrates, as in the USSR, the sequence is that you go back to third-world chaos and near anarchy until a second-world authoritarian government asserts itself. Those two phases would correspond to Yeltsin and Putin. Then the transition to a first-world system with effective laws and constitutional order may or may not follow depending on a variety of factors.