Rob: OK, Noam, do you have a response to Paul?
NC: Well, I mean there...he brought up a great many points. I think a lot of them merit much closer scrutiny and discussion. We don't have time for it now, but I think there's some...I would just like to say that what he's describing, you know, we can disagree about this and that part, but the major picture that he's describing does reflect a certain logic of the state capitalist institutional structure as it now exists. So let's say take offshoring, the CEO of a corporation has actually a legal obligation to maximize profit and market share. Beyond that legal obligation, if the CEO doesn't do it, and, let's say, decides to do something that will, say, benefit the population and not increase profit, he or she is not going to be CEO much longer -- they'll be replaced by somebody who does do it.
Also, the government has stepped in -- partly I think because of the enormously increasing power of financial institutions and decision making in the last generation -- it has stepped in to provide mechanisms by which this institutional obligation of CEOs is magnified. For a particular CEO, actually Hacker and Pearson had a good discussion of this years ago, it used to be the case, say, 50 years ago 60 years ago, that the CEO of a corporation had a stake in the survival and growth of that corporation. That's much less true today because of the way compensations are determined. For today's CEO, because of the mechanisms that allow them to essentially set their own salaries, bonus systems and so on, the incentive is to guarantee profit in the short term-- the next quarter-- no matter what happens to the institution. That way they'll become the multibillionaires who are forming the fraction of 1% who are designing policy. Those are very perverse incentives. And they are now part of the basic logic of an institutional system that is driving towards serious disaster. Now I hope we don't have to wait for a catastrophe for the population of the country to act in ways to reverse this. If we do, it'll be I think too late. But clearly these are tasks that have to be undertaken. And there are others.
For example, we were marching -- well, there was a big global march, a march on global warming a couple days ago, drew a couple hundred thousand people to New York, that happened to take place on the same day that an international commission that monitors global emissions reported that global emissions had increased to a record level last year by over 2%, and in the United States by even higher than the global average. Another report predicted that in another...it reported that August was the hottest month yet and that in another maybe 30 years the number of over 90 degree days in New York would probably triple with much more dire effects in warmer climates -- all of these things are happening and we're reaching a point of literal no return. If they pass a certain not very distant level we can be quite confident that the basis for the decent survival will have been seriously eroded. And we can't wait for a catastrophe to bring a change in policy -- that has to be done very quickly.
Rob: Now, my next question, well, is going to be about climate change. What role will climate change play in the future of economics and world power balances? Why don't you keep going Noam.
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