Does capitalism need a dose of socialism?
Occasionally, however, capitalism requires a good dose of diluted socialism to keep it kicking, and the capitalist elite may well be hankering for a bit of socialist economics to straighten out the neoliberal disaster engineered by ideologues with fanciful derivatives they can’t understand (and neither can the “rocket scientists’ who engineered them) and an energy crisis that they can’t break out of. Oh, the rocket scientists understood their derivatives well enough, it was the risk they didn’t understand. “The range of markets practically never goes outside two standard deviations.” Yet in the 1987 crash, it was twenty standard deviations. Oopsie. “Our models predict no more than a 2% default rate in subprime mortgages.” Whoops, “How did the default rate go to 4%, our models show that to be impossible.” Darn that pesky reality that refuses to conform to mathematical models. Socialists tend to think that capitalists control the system with a firm hand and glacial calm. Not so. Fina
