Authors:

  • Bruce Scott

Excerpt

Capitalism as a System of Governance (Course), Bruce Scott, Fall 2015, Syllabus. "Capitalism seems to have been coined around 1850 as a pejorative term by socialists. If thought of as a system of governance for economic relationships, then it seems to have originated in Venice around 1300. Still, the term was not much used in academic or policy analysis until 1950 and never has had a standard definition. Then in 1990 it became a standard term because the USSR, the leading socialist model, had collapsed. Today many economists treat capitalism as a self-regulating system of markets. In sum, the situation is that there is no accepted definition but, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, 'there is no alternative.'..."  Link