More on what the financial crisis means for capitalism

A previous post of mine tried to get at how capitalism fails under its own standards. Joseph Stiglitz, my favorite living economist, has a new article that makes a similar, though better written, argument.

And Pranab Bardhan of Berkeley has a nice article on how capitalism is not a “one size fits all” program.

I am skeptical that the US system actually fits us all that well. I especially like his comments though on how efficiency is not necessarily the end goal of all societies. I think this is still today a new idea for most economists.

I think the failure of US capitalism may lead more countries to look at other models. Wei-Wei Zhang has some interesting comments on the Chinese development program for Africa here, though I am not entirely sold on the “Chinese model”.

On a similar topic, my favorite discussion on the role of the Chinese in Africa is an older article from Foreign Policy magazine. As with all new relationships, its actually more rocky than anyone looking from the outside might guess.