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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Faith!

A comparison of Avatar and Confucius in the Asia Times sees this:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/LC11Ad02.html
Different takes on coping with change
By Francesco Sisci

In flocking to Avatar, Chinese filmgoers perhaps see more clearly than their government that tempestuous changes are something that cannot be managed but can only be endured. This subtle difference is in a nutshell the one described by economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950) as creative destruction in the capitalism system.

After over a century of capitalism's evolution, Schumpeter, born in what is now the Czech Republic and a devoted student of Marxist literature, argued that modern crises were not crises of the capitalism system, but integral parts of the system. The sudden ups and downs of the capitalist cycles were not a warning of impending total revolution, but the nuts and bolts of the system in which people lived, and from those crises capitalism would be reinforced, not weakened.
In a way, science fiction - almost a literary version of Schumpeter's creative destruction - is part of the present, as Avatar and daily experience in China prove.

The second paragraph is what interests me: an article of economic and political faith, unaccompanied by any proofs or caveats: just baldy stated. The crises may indeed be integral to Capitalism, but there is no proof they are benign, nor that they may always be the beginning of a step forward.

I have no idea what the third paragraph is supposed to mean.

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