UNE Center for Global Humanities presents 'The Future of Capitalism'

The increasing gap between the top one percent and middle classes in many Western nations has created the basis for many of the world’s recent political developments. As China’s emergence has reshuffled economies around the world, we have witnessed glimpses, in real time, of how rising inequality may destabilize our world for years to come.

An online lecture presented by the University of New England Center for Global Humanities will investigate how liberal capitalism and globalization have combined to unleash these forces when scholar Branko Milanovic presents “The Future of Capitalism” on Monday, Jan. 25 at 6 p.m. The lecture will be streamed live to the Center’s Maine, national, and global communities.

The lecture will examine how the last quarter century has brought about the largest reshuffling of global incomes since the Industrial Revolution, with the emergence of China serving as the driver of this change. He will then explain how this development has created three political challenges: how to manage the rising expectations of meaningful political participation in emerging countries like China, how to “placate” the rich countries’ globalization losers so they don’t turn away from globalization and embrace populist anti-immigrant policies, and how to constrain the rising economic and political power of the top one percent.

Branko Milanovic is a visiting professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and a professor at the London School of Economics. His main area of work is income inequality, in individual countries and globally, including in pre-industrial societies. His most recent book Capitalism, Alone, published in 2019, details capitalism’s rise to global dominance. Previously, his book The Haves and the Have-nots was selected by The Globalist as its 2011 Book of the Year, and his book Global Inequality was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize as the best political book of 2016. He has also contributed articles The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Economic Journal, VOX, The Journal of Economic Literature and other publications.

This will be the first lecture of the Spring 2021 semester at the Center for Global Humanities. For more information and to watch the event, please visit: https://www.une.edu/events/2021/future-capitalism