How Plutonomy Thrive

Abstract

There is an effective dialectics emerging between the economy of stakeholder versus economy of shareholder in the period of industry-3.0, upsetting the values and conflicts that sustained capitalism. The capitalist system came under severe competition in production—industry-2.0—period, roughly starting from 1960 to 1980s. This is the reason for starting the era of globalization aiming at creating a unified global market. With the commencement of the third industrial revolution, in the era of globalization since 1980 onwards, there started a new production and marketing method that had set to dominate all the world systems. During industry-3.0, technologization and digitalization of systems began to flourish creating new “work” opportunities. During this period, a few developed Western countries identified financing and investment as an industry, that the kind of profit financing could bring from China by financing all production activities there, and marketing the cheaply produced goods globally at a very competitive price is huge and astronomical. Financial industry benefited substantially from this kind of unusual production and marketing activities. When financialization happened, the lesser-developed countries became the manufacturing centers and they craved for investor’s money in order to develop their economies, where they competed with each other, producing products cheaply and giving tax rebates to the investors—manufactures. The financial industry put a huge financial net around the world, for financializing the entire global economic system. With the easy availability of investable money, production in many countries thrived, and as a fall out, there generated a sizable market with an increasing size of middle-class population as active consumers especially in China, India, etc. At the same time, the middle class in the western countries began to disseminate, as domestic industries moved out of the respective countries to the so-called low-cost manufacturing centers making a sizable population to live in precarity and the major work force as the precariats—part-time workers, or people who can exist only on charity and handouts. As easily tradable financial products kept the financial market healthy and vibrant for the investors, even when the real economy is in recession. .