Tom Bramble
For three decades after the end of World War II, the world economy boomed like never before, with most economies more than tripling in size. Living standards rose and the dole queues of the Great Depression became a distant memory as jobs became plentiful. This was a period often described as “the golden age of capitalism”. Defenders of the capitalist system argued that it demonstrated that capitalism had overcome its crisis tendencies and that good government policy could keep the good times going. But by 1975 the boom had come to an end and within a few years mass unemployment and government attacks on the working class had become the norm, the beginning of what we now know as neoliberalism. Far from overcoming crisis, capitalism was still a system that put profit before human need. This talk will explain where the long boom came from and why it ended.