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נסיכי הנפט מול קואליציית ההיי-טק (The Oil Princes versus the High-Tech Coalition)
Full text linkספרם של שמשון ביכלר ויונתן ניצן "הדרך לעזה" נראה כמקרה בוחן פרטי וכהרחבה של טענתם הכללית בדבר מהות ההון "כמוסד השליטה במשטר הקפיטליסטי", מעבר לכאן ועכשיו. ניתן לומר שהשאלה הנידונה היא כיצד הגענו מהקהילה הקמאית השוויונית דרך "משטרי כוח" בהשראתו של אל עליון כל-יכול, עד שלטון ההון במשטר הקפיטליסטי של ימינו. הטענה (הפסימית) היא, שמבחינתם של "אנשי התחתית", אין חדש תחת השמש ושלטון ההון הקפיטליסטי כישות זרה וכל-יכולה, איננו אלא המשך שלטון האוליגרכיות של העת העתיקה. אף על פי כן, למרות הטקסט הביקורתי, קשה שלא לראות את הסב-טקסט הניאו-מרקסיסטי של הספר. כלומר, כדיאלוג ביקורתי עם המרקסיזם. [. . .] קשה לקבל את הטענה "הגלובלית" כהסבר לכאן ועכשיו. אך "הדרך לעזה" הוא ללא ספק ספר מאתגר ומעורר מחשבה הראוי לקריא
Правда об инфляции (The Truth About Inflation)
Full text linkОт редакции: среди всего набора макроэкономических тем, текущие показатели инфляции — одна из самых популярных и часто обсуждаемых. Аргументы сторонников режима жёсткого инфляционного таргетирования хорошо известны, равно как и возражения противников подобного подхода. Не касаясь их содержания, этой статьёй мы хотим привлечь внимание российской аудитории к самому подходу измерения инфляции. Как следует из представленного текста, определение уровня инфляции на практике сталкивается с теми же проблемами, что несут и прочие “средние”, “общие”, “агрегированные” показатели. Это делает актуальным вопрос о внедрении секторального, адресного подхода в управлении ценовой динамикой — что касается как фискальных мер, так и ДКП.
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Милтона Фридмана нет в живых уже более десяти лет, но его призрак всё ещё преследует нас. В 1960-х годах Фридман заявил, что инфляция "всегда и везде является денежным явлением" — проблемой печатания слишком большого количества денег. С тех пор всякий раз, когда инфляция дает о себе знать, вы можете рассчитывать на то, что кто-нибудь оживит призрак Фридмана и обвинит правительство в том, что оно слишком много тратит.
Если бы только инфляция была такой простой.
Как и многое в экономической теории, мысли Фридмана на первый взгляд кажутся правдоподобными. Инфляция — это общий рост цен. А поскольку цены — это ничто иное, как результат обмена (благ) на деньги, то больше денег в обращении означает, что цены должны расти. Следовательно, инфляция "всегда и везде является денежным явлением".
К сожалению, при дальнейшем рассмотрении эта мысль рассыпается. Проблема в том, что она рассматривает инфляцию как равномерный рост цен. Теоретически это удобно, но эмпирически неверно. В реальном мире темпы инфляции сильно разнятся. В то время, когда цена на яблоки повышается на 5%, цены на автомобили могут вырасти на 50%, а цены на одежду — упасть на 20%.
Чтобы понять реально существующую инфляцию, нужно обратиться не к учебникам по экономике, а к реальным данным. Именно этим занимался политэкономист Джонатан Ницан во время своего докторского исследования в начале 1990-х годов. Его работа вылилась в диссертацию под названием "Инфляция как реструктуризация". В реальном мире, заметил Ницан, изменение цен всегда "дифференцированно", что означает наличие победителей и проигравших. Как следствие, инфляция не является чисто "денежным явлением", вопреки заявлениям Фридмана. Инфляция перестраивает социальный порядок.
Именно эта особенность инфляции в реальном мире является наиболее важной, поскольку она означает, что инфляция сигнализирует об изменении структуры власти в обществе. Предсказуемо, что именно эту особенность реального мира игнорируют мейнстримные экономисты — в основном потому, что она противоречит их стройной теории инфляции как "денежного явления". К счастью, доказательства очевидны. Инфляция является (и всегда была) в подавляющем большинстве случаев дифференциальной. Инфляция — это перестройка [экономики].
Сегодня, когда инфляционные страхи возвращаются и призрак Фридмана воскресает, стоит напомнить себе о реальных фактах
The Road to Gaza, Part II: The Capitalization of Everything
Full text linkOur recent article on ‘The Road to Gaza’ examined the history of the three supreme-God churches and the growing role of their militias in armed conflicts and wars around the world. The present paper situates these militia wars in the broader vista of the capitalist mode of power. Focusing specifically on the Middle East, we show the impact these militia wars have on relative oil prices and differential oil profits and explain how the wars themselves, those who stir them and the subjects that fight them all get discounted into capitalized power
The Political Economic Roots of Hollywood Strikes, 1950-2023
Full text linkThis paper investigates the timing of labour strikes in Hollywood. The occurrence of strikes, such as the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023, can make sense when we have the hindsight to piece together the historical details of what created rifts between labour and management. But was 2023 a particularly fragile year for contract negotiations to break down with two of Hollywood’s creative labour unions? If labour demands were reasonable, why did studios refuse to agree with them? And if Hollywood studios are profitable, what makes management see the demands of labour as something “unreasonable”?
This paper uses multiple sources of empirical data to analyse the historical trends of strikes in Hollywood between 1950 and 2023. Strikes in Hollywood — particularly by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA — have common political economic roots. They tend to occur when the profits of major Hollywood studios are in a type of danger zone: when the differential profits of Hollywood are stagnating or declining. Differential profit is a relative measure of performance. Differential profit can be found in any situation where a firm or set of firms holds a better stream of income than what others hold. For example, differential gains still occur when a firm loses profit at a slower rate than others. In the case of the Hollywood studios, differential profit is measured against the largest firms in other business sectors.
The paper argues that relationships between management and labour in Hollywood are strained by the appearance of these danger zones of differential profit. When the differential profit of Hollywood’s major studios falls, the studios are pressured to increase their profits through aggressive methods such as cost-cutting. Data from 2006 to 2022 demonstrate that acts of cost-cutting hurt creative labour significantly more than studio management. As employment in arts, design, and entertainment occupations stagnated, management occupations increased in size around the 2008 WGA strike, as well as during the years before the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Management occupations also had higher wage and salary increases than arts, design, and entertainment occupations.
The paper also argues that alternatives to the aggressive approaches of increasing profits are unlikely to appear in the current business conditions of Hollywood film distribution, even with the growth of streaming media. With few exceptions, Hollywood studios since the 1980s have built a delicate system of risk reduction, which is disrupted by injections of green-field spending and investment. In other words, the major studios currently prefer stagflation over growth, a preference that creates managerial aversions to new employment, significant increases in compensation and other financial benefits in the next collective agreement
The Notions of the Valuable: How Symbolic and Economic Value Discuss the Fragile Nature of Ecology in Frank Herbert’s Dune
Full text linkWhat determines value? Value-theory is a complex field of study, but in Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel ‘Dune,’ there are especially two categories of value that come to light: economic and symbolic value. In the novel, economic and symbolic value are demonstrated by the natural resources of the spice mélange – a strange substance which allows interstellar travel within the fictional Empire but only found the desert planet Arrakis – and water, the building block of life which is almost non-existent on the planet. In this dissertation, these ideas are explored by using real-world theories of value and the different social groups within the novel to determine the value of water and the spice in ‘Dune.
The Road to Gaza
Full text linkYou can read, quote, reference and link this working paper, but you cannot reproduce or post it in any form unless permitted in writing by the authors
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The war that started in 2023 between Hamas and Israel is driven by various long-lasting processes, but it also brings to the fore a new cause that hitherto seemed marginal: the armed militias of the Rabbinate and Islamic churches. The Rabbinate militias, embodied in Jewish settler organizations, have taken over not only Palestinian lands, but, gradually, also Israeli society. The Islamic militias, represented by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, rose to prominence after the traditional resistance groups of the Palestinians – primarily the PLO and the PFLP and, by extension, also the Palestinian Authority – weakened and proved unable to reverse, let alone stop, the Israeli occupation.
The rise of these militias, though, is hardly unique to Israel/Palestine, or even the Middle East. It is part of a broader, global process, in which ‘private’ military organizations, financed by states, church-related NGOs and/or organized crime, fight for and against states as well as each other. The ascent of such groups is closely related to the decline of the nation-state and its popular armies, a model that developed in the wake of the French Revolution but no longer resonates with the increasingly globalized nature of capital accumulation.
Our previous studies of Middle East wars emphasized the ‘state of capital’ – our notion that the capitalist mode of power fuses state and capital into a single logic in which dominant capital groups are driven by the power quest for differential accumulation. We showed that, in the Middle East, this logic was imposed by a Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition of large oil and armament corporations, OPEC, financial institutions and construction firms, whose differential incomes and profits were tightly correlated with – and helped predict – the cyclical eruption of ‘energy conflicts’.
But this mode of power comprises not two elements, but three. In addition to state and capital, it also includes the supreme-God churches, and in this paper we outline the role of these churches and their militias in capitalism generally and in Middle East wars specifically
Consolidation and Crisis in the US Banking Sector 1980-2022
Full text linkMuch of the economic analysis of banking crises focuses on the interplay between concentration and stability. A common theory is that concentration is associated with greater stability, whereas competition is associated with instability. In this view, there is a trade-off between, on the one hand, the higher prices and higher profits associated with a banking cartel, and on the other, frequent banking crises and lower prices caused by a fragmented sector. However, this theory is not entirely convincing. Principally, it tends to treat competition and concentration as independent variables, whereas in reality, causality works both ways: banks actively work to transform the structure of the system and transcend apparent constraints – whether through coordinating interest rates, influencing policy, or by transforming the business landscape through corporate amalgamation. In addition, the last two major banking crises in the US occurred in dramatically different conditions of concentration from one other, complicating any obvious empirical connection between concentration and stability.
In this paper, I try to move beyond this hypothesis by investigating the relationship between corporate concentration and banking stability through the lens of organized power. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, I make two claims. First, since the 1980s, the differential profitability of large banks has been driven by corporate amalgamation. Second, crises tend to be followed by an increase in the pace of amalgamation. As a result, since the 1980s, banking crises have preceded a dramatic redistribution of resources and control to a handful of large banks. While it is not clear that concentration makes a banking crisis less likely, the evidence suggests that crisis makes concentration more likely. Though the research presented here is only tentative and exploratory, it indicates that since the 1980s, large banks have remade the business and regulatory landscape in ways that defy the logic of a simple binary relationship between concentration and stability, and that this needs to be taken into account when analysing the dynamics of banking crises
From Commodity to Asset: The Truth Behind Rising House Prices
Full text linkWhen it comes to rising house prices, nearly everyone has a theory about the cause. There’s ‘too much foreign money’. There are ‘too many immigrants’. There’s ‘too little construction’. And so on.
What unites these explanations is that they appeal, in some way, to the idea that rising prices are caused by a mismatch between supply and demand. And surely that’s true, right?
Yes, it is true … in the same way that death is caused by dying. But of course, that’s circular logic. And so it goes with ‘supply and demand’. Since prices are always caused by the interplay between what we want and what we can get, evoking ‘supply and demand’ leads us pretty much nowhere. Worse, it often puts the focus on short-term patterns, when the real scientific payoff lies in studying price trends over the long term.
Speaking of the long term, many people assume that rising house prices are a recent problem. But in the United States, the pattern dates to the early 1970s. For almost a century before that, US house prices had been dropping against income. And so Americans treated their house like a ‘commodity’ — a thing they bought to live in. But from 1972 onward, house prices began to slowly appreciate against income. And so Americans started to treat their house like an ‘asset’.
It’s this transformation — from commodity-like depreciation to asset-like appreciation — that is the real story of house prices. And the truth is that this story can’t be understood using popular scapegoats. To see why US house prices headed south and then north, we need to forget about supply and demand and instead, peer into the belly of industrialism. We need to ground house prices in the use of energy.
Now, if going from prices to energy sounds like a non sequitur, I’ll show you why it makes sense. And I’ll show you how, when we bring debt into the energy fold, we can explain almost all of the historical variation in US house prices.
The lesson here is simple yet disturbing. When it comes to rising house prices, the trend has less to do with a ‘supply crisis’, and more to do with basic physical limits to industrial supply chains
The Business of Strategic Sabotage
No full textIn a recent article, Nicolas D. Villarreal claims that our empirical analysis of the relation between business power and industrial sabotage in the United States is unpersuasive, if not deliberately misleading. Specifically, he argues that we cherry-pick specific data definitions and smoothing windows to ‘achieve the desired results’; that these ‘results are driven by statistical aberrations’; and that his own choice of variables pretty much invalidates our conclusions. In this brief response, we offer an easy-to-follow, step-by-step reply to his complaints
Do High Interest Rates Reduce Inflation? A Test of Monetary Faith
No full textWhenever inflation rears its head, the call soon comes to raise interest rates. The rationale is simple. Higher interest rates put a damper on the supply of money. And this monetary clamp slows inflation. It’s so intuitive that it must be true.
Or is it?
As the Reverend Brooke observes, it takes a person of true conviction to ignore apparent contradictions. As such, this post is designed to test your monetary faith. According to monetary orthodoxy, higher interest rates reduce inflation. Yet the evidence demonstrates that the opposite is true: higher interest rates are associated with higher inflation. With this evidence in mind, I invite you to read on. Put your monetary faith to the fire and see if it can survive