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Regime Change and Dominant Capital: Lessons from Israel
Full text linkIsrael’s ongoing crisis – or ‘judicial coup’ in popular parlance – has elicited two opposite responses. The first comes from global rating agencies, economists and investment strategists who see Israel’s country risk rising. The opposite reaction, by Prime Minister Netanyahu and his acolytes, insists that the ‘coup’ is much ado about nothing, and that the country remains stable and strong as ever. So, who is right
Stocking Up on Wealth … Concentration
Full text linkThere’s an old joke that economics is too important to be left to economists. In the same vein, I think rich people are too important to be left to the self-help industry.
Yes, the popular appeal of you-can-get-rich-too books is obvious. But what’s not obvious is why so few social scientists study wealth.1 Clearly, the public thirsts for serious inquiries about the rich. (Thomas Piketty’s opus on inequality was a bestseller.) But for the most part, social scientists are content to focus on ‘poverty’ and let the self-help gurus wax about ‘wealth’.
The irony, in my view, is that poverty and wealth are two sides of the same coin. Concentrated wealth begets concentrated poverty. Still, there is an asymmetry between the two extremes. As a rule, poor people have little power, which means they cannot be blamed for their own poverty. But almost by definition, the rich wield power to their own benefit, which means they create the conditions of their own opulence … and everyone else’s misery.
Given their power over society, I find myself on a research kick studying rich people. This post concludes the binge with a look at what drives wealth concentration among the richest Americans. I find that there’s a straight line between wealth concentration, corporate consolidation, and the strategy of ‘buying, not building’. In short, Peter Thiel is correct when he says that ‘competition is for losers’
Follow the Money: The Political Economy of Petrodollar Accumulation and Recycling
Full text linkThis thesis makes two unique contributions to the International Political Economy literature. It presents the first comprehensive, empirical investigation of petrodollar accumulation and recycling spanning the period 1980-2021. It also corrects the misconception that petrodollar recycling in the 1970s and 1980s involved the extension of loans to developing countries using fractional reserve banking and argues that these loans were the extension of created credit. Petrodollars garnered significant academic attention in the 1970s and 1980s when increased oil prices led to large influxes of petrodollars to oil-exporting states and widespread deficits and stagflation in oil-importing states. The recycling of these petrodollars led to increased militarisation in oil-exporting states, as well as increased national debts in oil-importing states which precipitated the developing world’s debt crisis. Between 1999 and 2021, oil prices have hit peaks higher than those reached in the 1970s and this has resulted in a similar transfer of petrodollars. This thesis uses a quantitative and qualitative methodology to explore the key role of petrodollars in the current global political economy, and to illustrate the impact they are likely to have in the future as resources deplete. Over the period 2004-2021, petrodollar accumulation averaged $1.27 trillion annually, with approximately 54.6 percent of this accumulated by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries. These petrodollars predominantly flow back into the global economy through one of two channels: economic, through increased imports and domestic expenditure; or financial, through foreign investments and the purchase of foreign exchange reserves. These recycling methods will have lasting implications as they impact on which oil-importers’ deficits are financed and which are not, and which businesses/industries are funded and which are not. The significance of petrodollar accumulation and recycling is likely to further increase in the future. While advances are being made in alternative energy, oil’s unique characteristics and its embeddedness in the petrochemical, agriculture, and transportation sectors make it invaluable in a petro-market civilisation which is dependent upon transnational supply chains and large-scale agriculture. This makes it likely that high oil-consumption rates will continue, as will petrodollar accumulation, until we reach depletion.
*** Posted with the author's permission **
Capitalizing a Cure. How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines
No full textCapitalizing a Cure takes readers into the struggle over a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance over business, biomedicine, and public health. When curative treatments for hepatitis C launched in 2013, sticker shock over their prices intensified the global debate over access to new medicines. Weaving historical research with insights from political economy and science and technology studies, Victor Roy demystifies an oft-missed dynamic in this debate: the reach of financialized capitalism into how medicines are made, priced, and valued.
Roy’s account moves between public and private labs, Wall Street and corporate board rooms, and public health meetings and health centers to trace the ways in which curative medicines became financial assets dominated by strategies of speculation and extraction at the expense of access and care. Provocative and sobering, this book illuminates the harmful impact of allowing financial markets to determine who heals and who suffers and points to the necessary work of building more equitable futures
상품에서 자산으로: 권력으로서의 자본과 금융의 존재론 (From Commodities to Assets: Capital as Power and the Ontology of Finance)
Full text link자산은 자본가 계급의 실천 및 사고방식을 형성하는 데 결정적인 개념이다. 하지만 자본 주의에 관한 비판적 분석은 상품교환을 자본주의 분석의 초석이라 승인하는 경향이 있다. 이 논문은 다른 접근법을 취한다. 나는 자산이 자본주의에 대한 과학적 연구를 위한 견고한 출발점을 제공한다고 주장한다. 자산에 대한 분석은 경제적 거래에 대한 일반적 서술을 정 교화할 수 있도록 해주고, 그런 한에서, 자산 분석은 금융 분야를 재개념화하기 위한 기틀 을 마련해줄 수 있다. 이 두 가지 쟁점은 밀접히 연관된다. ‘자산이란 무엇인가’라는 질 문에 대한 답은 ‘금융이란 무엇인가’라는 질문을 해결할 수 있는 좌표를 제공해줄 것이 다.
저자 제수스 수아스테 체리졸라(JesÚs Suaste Cherizola)는 멕시코 푸에블라 오토노마 대학교(Universidad Autónoma de Puebla)에서 박사학위를 받았고, 권력자본 이론을 전공하는 사회학자이다. 저자는 이 논문을 통해 경제학과 사회과학에 새로운 아이디어를 제공한 기여로 2021 CASP Essay Prize를 수상했다. 따라서 제도주의 경제학 현장에서 이 논문이 지니는 학술적 가치가 높은 평가를 받았다고 볼 수 있다.
In this paper, the author analyzes the concept of 'assets', a crucial concept in the practice and mindset of today's capitalist class. In particular, it emphasizes the emerging importance of assets in financialized capitalism by contrasting them with the concept of commodities, which have enjoyed an important place in the analysis of conventional capitalism. Recently, in the critical academia of finance and money in the West, especially in the sociology of finance, the concepts of capitalization and assetization are emerging as a powerful analytical framework that reveals the characteristics of modern capitalism by replacing the existing commercialization and financialization. The paper provides a clear explanation of the concept of asset, capitalization, and capitalization from the perspective of power capital theory. In addition, by emphasizing the difference between commodity exchange and asset trading, which has been presented centering on the existing Marxism, it explains well why the asset type and the process of assetization can be an important analytical framework for studying today's financial capitalism. Therefore, this paper in domestic academia, it can provide impetus to advance the discussion of financialization in terms of capitalization and assetization, and it can also serve as a useful reference point for understanding recent academic discussions on the changes and core of modern capitalism.
Author Jesús Suaste Cherizola is a sociologist who received her Ph.D. from Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico, and specializes in power capital theory. The author won the 2021 CASP Essay Prize for his contributions to new ideas in economics and social sciences with this paper. Therefore, it can be said that the academic value of this thesis has been highly evaluated in the field of institutional economics
Why Are Not-For-Profit Hospitals in the US So Much More Profitable Than For-Profit Hospitals?
Full text linkFROM THE ARTICLE: When it comes to social institutions, not-for-profit organizations (NFPs) allegedly strike a balance between the private and public realm. While privately owned and operated, not-for-profits are distinguished by their ostensibly public purpose – in eschewing private profits, they claim to make the pursuit of some social benefit their primary objective. However, not all not-for-profits are equal. While most make little or no revenue, let alone net income, some NFPs collect billions in revenue and hundreds of millions in net income
Billionaires are so Predictable
Full text linkHave you ever wondered what it takes to become a billionaire? Do you need rare genius? Exceptional acumen? Miraculous foresight? An uncompromising work ethic?
On all four counts, the answer is no.
It turns out that to become a billionaire, what you really need is the right social setting. You need to live in a society that is suitably rich and appropriately unequal. Without those things, your chances of wearing the billionaire badge are low.
In this post, I’ll do the math.
Using data from Forbes, I’ll show you how the billionaire headcount varies across countries. Then I’ll show you how to predict this variation. Forget about character traits and personal histories. We don’t need them. To predict how many billionaires a country has, we can get surprisingly far just by knowing the distribution of income
Teknojätit ja pääoman vallankäyttö (Techno giants and the use of power by capital)
Full text linkPääoma valtana -viitekehys, jonka on kehittänyt Jonathan Nitzan ja Shimshon Bichler, esittää että liiketoiminnan tavoite ei ole ‘liikevoiton maksimointi’ vaan differentiaalinen yhteiskunnallisen vallan akkumulointi. Tätä viitekehystä teoreettisena lähtökohtana käyttäen analysoin Googlen ja Microsoftin vallan akkumulointistrategioita. Esitän kvalitatiivista ja kvantitatiivista näyttöä, josta käy ilmi, että huolimatta siitä että Google ja Microsoft tällä hetkellä saavat suurimman osan liikevoitostaan erillisestä liiketoiminnasta (ja näin perinteisen logiikan mukaan ne eivät ole toistensa suoranaisia kilpailijoita), nämä kaksi yritystä ovat kuitenkin kilpasilla keskenään tietojenkäsittelyteollisuuden kontrollista
Blood and Oil in the Orient: A 2023 Update
Full text linkThe 2023 war between Hamas and Israel elicits many different explanations. As with previous regional hostilities, here too, the pundits and commentators have numerous overlapping processes to draw on – from the struggle between the Zionist and Palestinian national movements, to the deep hostility between the Rabbinate and Islamic churches, to the many conflicts between Israel and Arab/Muslim states, the contentions between the declining superpowers (United States and Russia) and their rising contenders (like China, Iran, Turkey), the rift between western and eastern cultures, and so on.
The experts also highlight the growing importance of local militias – from Jewish settler organizations, to ISIS, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthi movement, the Wagner Group and Kadyrovites Chechens – groups that operate under different political, religious and criminal guises, with varying financing and support from local, governmental and international sources to proxy and/or challenge different states.
Our article does not deal with these specificities. Instead of focusing on the particular and unique, we concentrate on the general and universal. Concretely, we argue that the current war between Hamas and Israel shares an important common denominator with prior clashes in the region – namely, that it constitutes an energy conflict and that it correlates with the differential nature of capital accumulation. We coined these two terms in the late 1980s and have studied their underpinnings and implications for the Middle East and beyond ever since. Our purpose in this paper is to highlight our theoretical arguments, update some of our key empirical evidence and show how both the theory and findings apply to the current Hamas-Israel war
Massaging the Message: How Oilpatch Newspapers Censor the News
Full text linkFROM THE ARTICLE:
In their book Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argue that the mainstream media functions largely as a propaganda arm for the state. When the war drum beats, the corporate media tows the government’s line, censoring facts that don’t fit the official narrative.
Outside of war, media bias is typically less overt. But to the careful observer, it can still be discerned. In this case, our careful observer is Canadian oil critic Regan Boychuk.
Boychuk lives in Calgary — a prairie city that is famous for two things. Calgary hosts the world’s largest rodeo. And it is the corporate heart of the Canadian oil business. Calgary … home to cowboys and crude-oil CEOs.
As you might guess, our story of media censorship is not about cowboys. Calgary’s main newspaper, the Herald, is staunchly pro-oil. And that means its editorial pages are filled with oilpatch jingoism. However, the rest of the paper is an archetype of neutral reporting. Just kidding.
Unsurprisingly, the Herald’s pro-oil stance shapes the content that appears in the paper. This post takes a quantitative look at the editorial ‘curation’.
Most of the heavy lifting has been done by Boychuk, who had the brilliant idea to track the reporting of environmental journalist Mike De Souza. Between November 2010 and July 2013, De Souza wrote a series of articles documenting scandals related to the Canadian oilpatch, and its staunch defender, the Harper government.
At the time, De Souza was working for Postmedia, a news conglomerate that operated a wire service for its many subsidiaries. So when De Souza’s pieces were published, they were delivered to local papers like the Ottawa Citizen, the Edmonton Journal, and the Calgary Herald.
Here’s the catch. Although owned by the same conglomerate, these local papers had leeway to edit (or shelve) their wire-service articles. The result, Boychuk realized, was a controlled setting to analyze media censorship. Earlier this year, Boychuk published his findings in a piece called ‘Proximity to Power: The oilpatch & Alberta’s major dailies’.
My contribution here is mostly visual. I’ve taken Boychuk’s investigation and translated it into charts. The results largely speak for themselves. As De Souza’s articles approached the center of Canadian oil-and-gas power in Calgary, they were increasingly gutted, and their message changed. It’s a fascinating case study of how business interests shape the news