Social Evolution and the Future of World Society

Christopher Chase-Dunn

Cycles and Trends In The Historical Evolution of World Orders

This article is about the idea of world society and the possible futures of the world-system in long-term evolutionary perspective. Th ough I share a social constructionist and institutional approach similar to that of the Zurich and the world polity schools, my structural approach to world capitalism and the notion of world society emphasizes the importance of markets, money and geopolitics in the modern system, while seeking to take account of the ideological projects of both the contenders for predominance and those who have resisted domination and exploitation...¹

Credit Warnings...!

Signs of The Times

Credit Derivatives...

Of course, the Austrian School of Economics has had the best grasp of credit markets and the following is an essay entitled "Dearth of Credit" by Ludwig von Mises:

"An increase in the quantity of money or fiduciary media is an indispensable condition of the emergence of a boom. The recurrence of boom periods, followed by periods of depression, is the unavoidable outcome of repeated attempts to lower the gross market rate of interest by means of credit expansion. There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

The breakdown appears as soon as the banks become frightened by the accelerated pace of the boom and begin to abstain from further credit expansion. The change in the banks' conduct does not create the crisis. It merely makes visible the havoc spread by the faults which business has committed in the boom period.

The dearth of credit which marks the crisis is caused not by contraction but by the abstention from further credit expansion. It hurts all enterprises – not only those which are doomed at any rate, but no less those whose business is sound and could flourish if appropriate credit were available. As the outstanding debts are not paid back, the banks lack the means to grant credits even to the most solid firms. The crisis becomes general and forces all branches of business and all firms to restrict their activities. But there is no means of avoiding these consequences of the preceding boom.

Prices of the factors of production – both material and human – have reached an excessive height in the boom period. They must come down before business can become profitable again. The recovery and return to "normalcy" can only begin when prices and wage rates are so low that a sufficient number of people assume that they will not drop still more."