Re: Output Falling in Oil-Rich Mexico, and Politics Get the Blame
On Mar 12, 2007, at 4:58 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
If the early oil and auto businesses were not characterized by big investment, that is probably in large part because there was still a lot of competition and oligopolistic consolidation had yet to take place.
You’ve been hanging around MR too long! Competition is not dead.
Firms are still born, and others die; technologies are introduced,
and some succeed, and some fail.
Moreover, we need to face up to the fact that the question of oil vs. environmentally sounder energy sources is not a technological question but a political one.
Well yeah, but you never know what the Wozniak & Jobs of energy could
come up with.
It struck me recently that Tom Frank’s critique of the business
appropriation of language like “revolutionary” and “extreme” misses
the point that many of the new generation of capitalists that came on
the scene in the 1980s were out to shake up the old, Galbrathian New
Industrial State, that regime of comfortable mediocrity run by geeks
and suits. Every word that Marx wrote in the Manifesto about the
revolutionary potential of capitalism is still true. For the sake of
humanity and our natural home, I’d prefer a rationally planned regime
of public R&D and investment, but it would be very wrong to
underestimate the innovative power of capitalism.
Oh, and the Chinese are pretty committed to new forms of energy. Who
knows what might come out of that?
Doug