Marx's pragmatism is also very appealing to me. Emotive appeals not only do not make much sense to me, they also do not tend to affect great policy change or sway societies. Marx argues for the same things that many of the humanist philosophers of the Enlightenment argues for, but he determines that this is the correct course not due to emotive arguments, but the cool, rational logic of

52). Furthermore, Marx felt that money had "deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man's work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it..." (Strathern, 2001, p. 52). From Marx's point-of-view, owners or holders of capital were in a position to exploit workers because of their "systematically privileged position within the market" (Pierson,

Strong welfare states protect workers against economic vulnerability through generous unemployment benefits and training programs" (Beckfield, 2006). The expansion of markets to the regional level from the national level-should increase income inequality as workers are exposed to the wage competition of a larger labor pool, but this effect may be dampened or even reversed at very high levels of regional economic integration, because those economies are stabilized by strong

Capitalism and the Global Environment A framework has been formed by capitalism according to which the world is not responding to the environmental changes. Capitalism produces (or is formed by) a number of environmental changes and lays down the foundation for the social relations and for all the political institutions. This thus demonstrates our potential to respond to the changing environment very efficiently. But still the learners of global environmental change

Marx cries out that in Capitalism, "That culture... is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine." It is this exploitation which persists today and which is far worse than the mere depression of living standards. Capitalism is intrinsically linked with consumerism, and both replace a sacred connection to one's vocation and one's art with a profane connection to one's paycheck and the throw-away products

Economic Crisis The recession of 2008-2009 and the subsequent government responses provides a good test for economic theories. There are no controlled experiments in economics, so we can only work with case studies in order to understand how economies work. A good starting point is to consider the issue through multiple different lenses, so that we can understand how the crisis occurred and what prescriptions might be best suited for response