Economic Crisis and Globalization

The news isn’t good. The Euro is los­ing val­ue dai­ly. Coun­tries are slip­ping into “sov­er­eign debt crises” – mean­ing they’re going broke. And the mar­kets are swoon­ing once again. We’re watch­ing the prover­bial oth­er shoe drop.

Through­out this cri­sis, many Amer­i­cans have direct­ed their anger at Wall Street (and deserved­ly so). But few have won­dered whether there’s any­thing basi­cal­ly wrong with Amer­i­can-style cap­i­tal­ism. And, if any­thing, the only orga­nized protest move­ment (The Tea Par­ty) has assert­ed that we need more cap­i­tal­ism in our lives, not less.

In some rare quar­ters of acad­eme, cap­i­tal­ism still does­n’t get off so easy. And that brings us to three new online cours­es taught by the econ­o­mist Richard D. Wolff at The New School in NYC. Above, we fea­ture the first lec­ture from Eco­nom­ic Cri­sis and Glob­al­iza­tion, a course that takes a less ortho­dox view of how we’re man­ag­ing the Great Reces­sion. (Find the oth­er sev­en lec­tures here.) His oth­er cours­es, both on Marx­i­an eco­nom­ics, appear in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es under Eco­nom­ics.