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Ecological Limits and Hierarchical Power
Get PDFNowadays, it is commonplace to claim that the economy overuses our limited material and energy resources and that this overuse threatens both human society and the biosphere. Other than anti-science cranks, the only ones who seem to deny this claim are mainstream economists. In our view, though, this conventional condemnation of the economy is somewhat misleading. As we see it, the root of our ecological problems lies not in the ‘economy’, but in the hierarchical power structure of capitalism
PIB: Métrica Defectuosa en el Corazón de la Macroeconomía
Get PDF“Argumentamos que el PIB real es una métrica profundamente defectuosa. Es presentada como una medida objetiva de la escala económica. Pero cuando vemos debajo de su superficie, encontramos una subjetividad paralizante”.
Esa afirmación proviene de Blair Fix -economista especializado en energía y desigualdad por la Facultad de Estudios Ambientales de la Universidad de York-, Jonathan Nitzan -profesor de economía política en la misma universidad-, y Shimshon Bichler- profesor de economía política en diferentes universidades de Israel-, en una investigación conjunta publicada recientemente.
En su trabajo, Fix, Nitzan y Bichler analizan y desnudan varias falencias en la métrica del PIB real, encontrando sus debilidades incluso en la lógica y la matemática que lo subyace, comenzando con el uso del año base para calcular su valor, algo que de entrada desdibuja su objetividad y legitimidad como medida, pese a que es apenas “la punta del iceberg” de los problemas de PIB
Design & Capital
Get PDFWhy should designers, who would be far happier claiming to be in their jobs for the sake of creativity, to help people live happy lives, to be cool and different and make cool and different things, be better at capital accumulation than the rest of the FTSE100? Why would a focus on the ‘fit’ between problems, users, ideas and institutions have anything to do with capitalisation? Is there a fundamental connection between the theories and processes of design and capital accumulation
A New Cosmology for Analyzing Capitalism and the Global Order. Review of Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder
Get PDFFROM THE REVIEW: Capital as Power is a fascinating book because it dares to challenge conventional wisdom while offering a coherent and persuasive theory as a replacement. This is especially what I liked about this book. It's easy enough to criticize the world and say that things are terrible. That seems to be a favorite pastime for just about everybody nowadays. But it's far more difficult to offer a comprehensive alternative that plausibly explains, through engaging theoretical and empirical analysis, how much of the world works. That's what Nitzan and Bichler have done with this masterpiece.
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This is one of the greatest works in political economy to have come out in this century. I especially like that they analyze economics as a social construct rather than as an objective scientific discipline, which it most certainly is not. Having said that, I don't agree with Nitzan and Bichler on everything. For one, they have a basic causality problem: if all human history simply boils down to a power process, then what explains the power process itself? Where does that come from, what are its causal antecedents? You cannot really answer this question without stepping, one way or another, into the material realm of energy flows and conversions. In other words, you can't explain the causation of a social process by repeatedly invoking some other social process, because that leads to an infinite regress. Eventually there has to be something outside of human society that has a powerful impact on the evolution of society itself. There must be a series of bridges between the ecological realm and human civilization, but Nitzan and Bichler don't really bother with any of that. Their central theory, however persuasive, will always remain provisional and incomplete until a more comprehensive theory comes along that integrates changes in the natural world with changes in human societies
The Harder They Fall
Get PDFUntil a few months ago, the stock market narrative in the United States could have been summarized by the popular acronym BTFD – or ‘buy the fucking dip’. Analysts and strategists, emboldened by the world’s synchronized recovery, Trump’s pro-business policies and ample liquidity, predicted that equities would continue rising and recommended that investors take advantage of any temporary weakness to augment their stock holdings in anticipation of further upside. But the atmosphere of boom has since given way to doom and gloom. With equity markets having entered ‘correction’ territory, many observers, including some of the world’s richest investors, now warn of a coming crash and a protracted ‘bear market’.
On the face of it, this shifting sentiment has much to do with investors anticipating an earnings reversal. Corporate earnings growth has reached extreme levels from which a downturntrend in profits – and therefore in equity prices – seems imminent. But then, why should forward-looking stock prices be dependent on current earnings in the first place?
Our ‘CasP model of the stock market’ (2016) quantifies the changing importance of current earnings for US stock prices. This importance scales with the power of stock owners relative to workers: the higher the power, the greater the importance of current earnings. Now presently, this power is at record highs, which makes equity prices hypersensitive to changes in current earnings, and current earning are about to tank. Buckle your seatbelts for a hard fall
Wars Have Become Too Cheap to Boost Growth
Get PDFFROM THE NOTE: This week, with the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Atlanta anticipating sharply lower GDP growth for 2019:Q1, President Trump presented a ‘Budget for A Better America’, calling for a smaller government and a bigger military. Forty years ago, the very same call was hailed as the best recipe for renewed growth. The U.S. ruling class was getting ready to install Ronald Reagan as President, abandon the Cold War and embark on neoliberalism, and it argued that, for that shift to succeed, the country needed a leaner government in order to unleash its entrepreneurial spirit and crowd-in private investment, and that it required a strong military in order to boost its global muscle and open world markets for its products and capital. Ideology aside, one key reason for the growth optimism of the time was rising military spending. . .
Literature and Political Economy: An Invitation
Get PDFMost people think of science and literature as distinct human endeavours. According to received convention, science is mostly about ‘mind’, whereas literature is largely about ‘heart’. Science, goes the argument, is by and large rational, literature primarily emotional. Science is about thinking, literature about feeling.
The practical implication of this duality is that many who consider themselves scientists – particularly in the so-called ‘social sciences’ and especially in ‘economics’ – pay little or no attention to belles-lettres. As far as they are concerned, fiction, poetry and drama are diversions from serious academic work. Occasionally, when going on vacation or to an academic conference, they’ll throw a few cheap thrills into their handbag for ‘relaxation’. They’ll use them instead of sleeping pills after they are done surfing their phones and zapping their telescreen’s channels.
Now, it is true the that line between creative belles-lettres and capitalized cheap thrills has blurred in recent decades – so much so that it’s sometimes difficult to tell them apart. And it is also true that as the number of new novels exploded, their average quality plummeted.
But these shifting patterns are secondary. There is no need to read Leon Trotsky’s path-breaking book on Literature and Revolution (1925) or C.P. Snow’s warning on The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959) to realize that literature in general and novels in particular remain crucial for understanding – and occasionally affecting – the socio-scientific history of humanity
Ecological Limits and Hierarchical Power
Get PDFNowadays, it is commonplace to claim that the economy overuses our limited material and energy resources and that this overuse threatens both human society and the biosphere. Other than anti-science cranks, the only ones who seem to deny this claim are mainstream economists. In our view, though, this conventional condemnation of the economy is somewhat misleading. As we see it, the root of our ecological problems lies not in the ‘economy’, but in the hierarchical power structure of capitalism
The Harder They Fall
Get PDFUntil a few months ago, the stock market narrative in the United States could have been summarized by the popular acronym BTFD – or ‘buy the fucking dip’. Analysts and strategists, emboldened by the world’s synchronized recovery, Trump’s pro-business policies and ample liquidity, predicted that equities would continue rising and recommended that investors take advantage of any temporary weakness to augment their stock holdings in anticipation of further upside. But the atmosphere of boom has since given way to doom and gloom. With equity markets having entered ‘correction’ territory, many observers, including some of the world’s richest investors, now warn of a coming crash and a protracted ‘bear market’.
On the face of it, this shifting sentiment has much to do with investors anticipating an earnings reversal. Corporate earnings growth has reached extreme levels from which a downturntrend in profits – and therefore in equity prices – seems imminent. But then, why should forward-looking stock prices be dependent on current earnings in the first place?
Our ‘CasP model of the stock market’ (2016) quantifies the changing importance of current earnings for US stock prices. This importance scales with the power of stock owners relative to workers: the higher the power, the greater the importance of current earnings. Now presently, this power is at record highs, which makes equity prices hypersensitive to changes in current earnings, and current earning are about to tank. Buckle your seatbelts for a hard fall
On the Power Theory of Capitalism
Get PDFFROM THE REVIEW: Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan are Israeli political economists. Together they’ve created a thought-provoking power theory of capitalism and theory of differential accumulation. The theory is not “pie-in-the-sky,” but is based in their analysis of the political economy of wars, globalization, etc. The theory is not something new, however. It reflects the works of Thorstein Veblen, Karl Marx, Michał Kalecki, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Lewis Mumford. Considering the foci of their research and the works they use as a starting point, neither Bichler nor Nitzan can be called economists, in the way that identifier is used today...