The Bichler and Nitzan Archives
Not a member yet
759 research outputs found
Sort by
Stocking Up on Wealth . . . Concentration
Full text linkIt turns out that like the rest of us, billionaires experience wealth inequality. (Individuals who top the Forbes billionaire list are far richer than those at the bottom of the list.) Interestingly, this billionaire wealth concentration fluctuates over time … in tight correlation with the movement of the stock market. Why? A plausible reason — explored here – is that stock indexes like the S&P 500 are unwitting indicators of corporate concentration. And corporate concentration, in turn, seems to drive the concentration of individual wealth
Key points on Bichler/Nitzan’s text “Capital as Power”
Full text linkFROM THE ARTICLE: At first glance, it would appear that Deleuze’s concept of structure involves a complex form of so-called creorder, a term that appears at the forefront of the methodological findings of the economists Bichler/Nitzan. If the structure is actualized in each of its moments in processes, then Bichler/Nitzan describe this process with the term “creorder”. They consider this to be a highly artificial term, which is intended to indicate that a structure/order must constantly construct and reconstruct itself in (historical) time, just as a form must constantly transform itself. According to Bichler/Nitzan, in the context of creorder, the meaning of the relationship between Heraclitean becoming and Parmenidean being lies precisely in the fact that the fusion of verb and noun results in the term “creorder”: “To have a history is to create order – a verb and a noun whose fusion yields the verb-noun creorder.” On the one hand, the so-called creorder may be completely vertically or hierarchically ordered, as is the case in ultra-bureaucratic systems, for example; on the other hand, it may also be horizontal, as could be the case in radical democracies, or it may be in between order and disorder
Tracking the Fortunes of Corporate Psychedelia
Full text linkIn recent years, new biotech companies have emerged hoping to cash in on a medical psychedelics market expected to be worth billions. This article examines the business models of two of the largest such companies. According to conventional wisdom, for-profit players are best positioned to deliver new cures for mental illness at scale because of their ability to tap capital markets. The analysis presented here challenges this story on two counts. First, it argues that profitability in the pharmaceutical business depends not on rapid scaling per se, but on controlling and restricting access to maintain pricing power. Second, it claims that the unruliness of sychedelics – manifested in the presence of cheap generics, murky intellectual property claims, and high costs of administration – raises serious questions about their commercial viability. The article then assesses the sector’s embrace of Johnson and Johnson’s patented form of esketamine, Spravato, as its prototype for commercialization. Spravato may provide a pathway for profitability, but patients must contend with high prices and a drug that provides only short-term relief and requires indefinite dosing. Rather than disrupt Big Pharma, corporate psychedelia replicates its main features, raising questions about its claims to tackle the mental health crisis
Making America Great Again, 2024
Full text linkIn 2019, we published a RWER paper assessing Trump’s promise to ‘Make America Great Again’. Here are updates of two key charts from this paper
Degrowth and Capitalist Power: A Step Towards a Theory of Change
Full text linkThis article explores the relationship between degrowth and the theory of Capital as Power (CasP), aiming to understand how socio-ecological transformations can unfold against capitalist power dynamics. While degrowth scholars have largely overlooked this perspective on capital, CasP argues that capitalism is primarily a mode of power, with capitalisation quantifying power – the confidence in in – the ability to shape society against opposition. Key CasP concepts are brought into dialogue with degrowth research to identify potential implications and offer a step towards a theory of change for degrowth. The article first outlines the CasP perspective, including its notion of power, the process of capitalisation and the conflictual nature of capital accumulation, and highlights links with degrowth research. It then looks at the elements underlying the valuation of capital as power and how they provide entry points for degrowth transformations. The role of dominant capital groups and the concept of “sabotage” in exercising power over society are then addressed. As such, degrowth transformations must challenge the confidence of dominant capital groups in their ability to rule, as these groups inhibit possibilities for socio-ecological change. This dynamic, summarised in a conceptual diagram, provides a first step towards a theory of change for degrowth in the face of capital accumulation. Finally, the conclusion offers potential directions for further research
A Tour of the Jevons Paradox: How Energy Efficiency Backfires
Full text linkAccording to mainstream thinking, efficiency is a potent tool for conservation — a way to live better while using fewer resources. Unfortunately, this simple narrative is contradicted by overwhelming evidence. Instead of spurring conservation, efficiency seems to stimulate the consumption of more resources. This paper surveys the evidence for efficiency backfire and concludes that efficiency is a general tool for catalyzing technological sprawl
Rentiership and Intellectual Monopoly in Contemporary Capitalism: Conceptual Challenges and Empirical Possibilities
Full text linkThe concepts of rentiership and intellectual monopoly have gained increased prominence in discussions about the transformation of global capitalism in recent years. However, there have been few if any attempts to construct measures for rentiership and intellectual monopoly using firm-level financial data. The absence of such work, we argue, is symptomatic of conceptual challenges in delineating what precisely qualifies as rent, intellectual or otherwise. In place of static conceptions of rent and intellectual monopoly, we develop a dynamic framework for analyzing the processes of rentierization and intellectual monopolization and apply this framework to the analysis of the transformation of non-financial firms in the United States since the 1950s. We find that the timing and intensity of rentierization and intellectual monopolization differs significantly across sector and firm size and is heavily mediated by the uneven ramifications of government policy across companies and industries. Overall, our framework illuminates the variegated landscape of corporate power in the US, and offers a useful guide for critically interrogating rentierization and intellectual monopolization in other contexts
A Tour of the Jevons Paradox: How Energy Efficiency Backfires
Full text linkWhen it comes to our sustainability problems, striving for greater resource efficiency seems like an obvious solution. For example, if you buy a new car that’s twice as efficient as your old one, it should cut your gasoline use in half. And if your new computer is four times more efficient than your last one, it should cut your computer’s electric bill fourfold.
In short, boosting efficiency seems like a straightforward way to reduce your use of natural resources. And for you personally, efficiency gains may do exactly that. But collectively, efficiency seems to have the opposite effect As technology gets more efficient, we tend to consume more resources. This backfire effect is known as the ‘Jevons paradox’, and it occurs for a simple reason. At a social level, efficiency is not a tool for conservation; it’s a catalyst for technological sprawl.1
Here’s how it works. As technology gets more efficient, it cheapens the service that it provides. And when services get cheaper, we tend to use more of them. Hence, efficiency ends up catalyzing greater consumption.
Take the evolution of computers as an example. The first computers were room-sized machines that gulped power while doing snail-paced calculations. In contrast, modern computers deliver about a trillion times more computation for the same energy input. Now, in principle, we could have taken this trillion-fold efficiency improvement and reduced our computational energy budget by the same amount. But we didn’t.
Instead, we took these efficiency gains and invested them in technological sprawl. We took more efficient computer chips and put them in everything — phones, TVs, cars, fridges, light bulbs, toasters … not to mention data centers. So rather than spur conservation, more efficient computers catalyzed the consumption of more energy.
In this regard, computers are not alone. As you’ll see, efficiency backfire seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Far from delivering a cure for our sustainability woes, efficiency gains appear to be a root driver of the over-consumption disease
Who Controls the Public Debt? A Critical Review of Sandy Brian Hager’s Public Debt, Inequality, and Power
Full text linkHager’s project examines the historical development of US public debt ownership and its political implications. His main innovation is to approach the topic from the perspective of disaggregated social class and frame questions of public debt ownership in terms of social inequality and power. He tackles four questions: who are the owners of the public debt; what are the distributional effects on income and wealth; what are the implications of increasingly foreign public debt ownership; and what is the relationship between debt-ownership concentration and political influence. He argues that the increasingly unequal power of bondholders undermines the ability of the US government to pursue a more equitable and democratic fiscal policy, which is essential to tackling a range of social issues (including inequality itself). The project is illuminating and has important political implications, though due to the narrow scope of the project, Hager gives light treatment of some key aspects of the relationship between debt and power
Is Bitcoin More Energy Intensive Than Mainstream Finance?
Full text linkWhen it comes to Bitcoin, there’s one thing that almost everyone agrees on: the network sucks up a tremendous amount of energy. But from there, disagreement is the rule.
For critics, Bitcoin’s thirst for energy is self-evidently bad — the equivalent of pouring gasoline in a hole and setting it on fire. But for Bitcoin advocates, the network’s energy gluttony is the necessary price of having a secure digital currency. When judging Bitcoin’s energy demands, the advocates continue, keep in mind that mainstream finance is itself no model of efficiency.
Here, I think the advocates have a point.
If you want to argue that Bitcoin is an energy hog, you’ve got to do more than just point at its energy budget and say ‘bad’. You’ve got to show that this budget is worse than mainstream finance.
On this comparison front, there seems to be a vacuum of good information. For their part, crypto promoters are happy to show that Bitcoin uses less energy than the global banking system. But this result is as unsurprising as it is meaningless. Compared to Bitcoin, global finance operates on a vastly larger scale. So of course it uses more energy.
To be meaningful, any comparison between Bitcoin and mainstream finance must account for the different scales of the two systems. So instead of looking at energy alone, we need to look at energy intensity — the energy per unit of circulating currency. That’s what I’ll do here. In this post, I compare the energy intensity of Bitcoin to the energy intensity of mainstream US finance.
Which system comes out on top? The results may surprise you