Robert Brenner

Robert Paul Brenner ( born November 28, 1943 in New York City ) is an American historian.

Life

Brenner studied 1964-1968 at Princeton University and a PhD in 1970 on the subject of Political Conflict and Commercial Development: The Merchant Community in Civil War in London. In 1968 he was Assistant Professor, in 1972 Associate Professor and since 1983 Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

With its text Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre- Industrial Europe, first presented in 1974 and as an article published in 1976, burner sparked an intense debate on the transition from feudalism of capitalism, the so-called first Brenner debate.

Second Brenner debate

In 1998, Brenner published the text The Economics of Global Turbulence and represented herein the hypothesis that the main capitalist countries will be since the early 70s in a long-running economic downturn in growth towards a secular stagnation. The reason for this is after burner unplanned, uncoordinated and competitive -based nature of the capitalist mode of production, which leads to over-capacity and over-production. According to Brenner, this results in a falling rate of profit with the consequence declining growth of investment, output, productivity, and rising unemployment.

Burner central thesis is thus that persistent, not adjusted by economic downturns overcapacity, especially in the manufacturing sector would form the determining factor for the onset of the 1970s phase of the long stagnation of the world economy. A discussion of this thesis sparked by the turn of the millennium from the so-called second burner debate.

In 2002 published burner after the bursting of the New Economy bubble the book The Boom and the Bubble. The U.S. in the World Economy, which resulted from projects launched second burner debate to discuss the cause of the current recession in the United States. Brenner also justified the cause the bursting of the speculative bubble in the stock markets with the widespread construction of excess capacity. The majority of economic analysts did not recognize as the same mechanisms by which the exchanges have initially driven the boom, later, the economy would have drawn parallel to crash in the stock market down. The economic mainstream have thus failed to recognize that the long-lasting downturn in growth since the early 70s by exchange- driven bubbles can not be cured (see Brenner 2003). The book was translated into Korean, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Turkish.

Burner post has been credited with parts embossed Marxist authors to help by returning to the empiricism of Marxist theory approaches to an empirical foundation ( cf. Frieder Otto Wolf 2003).

In 2006, the first time in 1998 published work, The Economics of Global Turbulence, supplemented by a longer epilogue of burner for susceptibility to crisis of capitalism in the middle of the first decade of the new millennium has been reissued.

Publications

Monographs

• Boom & Bubble, The U.S. in the world economy. VSA, Hamburg 2002 ( Original title: The Boom and the Bubble, The U.S. in the World Economy ), ISBN 978-3-87975-886-9.
• New Boom or New Bubble? Is the current recovery in the U.S. economy a bubble? . VSA, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 978-3-89965-914-6.
• The Economics of Global Turbulence. Verso, New York 2006, ISBN 978-1-85984-730-5.

Article

• What is Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America The Origins of the Present Crisis. 2 October 2009. Centre for Social Theory and Comparative History. Paper 2009-1. Articles on the financial crisis from 2007

Meetings

• Klaus Draeger: Construction neo-Marxism. The Regulation School and Robert Brenner to the turbulence in the global economy. In: Prokla. 123, Munster 2001, ISSN 0342-8176, pp. 177-202.
• Frieder Otto Wolf (2003 ): On the second burner debate afterword: Robert Brenner (2003), Boom & Bubble, Hamburg, pp. 331-337.
• Kai Burmeister, Reinhold Rünker: capitalism today - The second Brenner debate and its significance for left-wing politics. In: spw - socialist politics and business. 135, Dortmund 2004, ISSN 0170-4613.