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The Great Gatsby Curve Among America’s Über Rich
Full text linkEconomists are not known for their literary imaginations. Flip through any economics textbook and you’ll find a barrage of terms like the ‘Philips curve’ and the ‘Fisher effect’. The jargon is simple enough — empirical relations are usually named after the person who discovered them. But this convention is neither descriptive nor fun.
The exception to this vanilla naming practice is a pattern called the ‘Great Gatsby curve’.1 It’s named after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous book The Great Gatsby, which explores the roiling inequality and tumultuous class dynamics of the 1920s. The Great Gatsby curve is an empirical relation between social inequality and social mobility. As inequality rises, social mobility tends to decline.
In this post, we’ll look at the The Great Gatsby curve among America’s über rich. As it turns out, these folks are not immune from inequality. Nor are they immune from an ossifying social ladder. In other words, among America’s richest people, the Great Gatsby curve is alive and well
דם ונפט במזרח התיכון. סיבוב רווחים נוסף (Blood and Oil in the Orient. Another Round of Profit)
Full text linkשורשי המלחמה בין חמאס לישראל הם רבים ומסועפים. ביניהם, הקונפליקט הארוך בין התנועה הלאומית הפלסטינית לבין התנועה הציונית, האיבה בין הכנסיות הרבניות לאיסלמיות על נספחיהן, הסכסוך הממושך בין מדינות המזרח התיכון למדינת ישראל, בין התרבות המערבית למזרחית, בין המעצמות השונות הבוחשות באזור – חלקן מעצמות שוקעות כמו ארה"ב ורוסיה, ואחרות קוראות התיגר החדשות כמו סין ואיראן. אבל במלחמה הנוכחית עצמה מדובר בקונפליקט בין שתי קבוצות מיליציות עיקריות: מצד אחד מיליציות הכנסייה הרבנית. אלה הן ארגוני המתנחלים, שהשתלטו על שטחים פלסטיניים בחסות ובמימון מסיבי של כל ממשלות ישראל. הן השליטו בהדרגה את סדר היום התקשורתי שלהן, השתלטו על המפלגות המרכזיות, על תודעת רוב המצביעים בישראל, על החינוך שהפך בשיטתיות לגזעני-לאומני, על תקציבים ציבוריים מרכזיים. הן שיתפו פעולה עם קבוצות ההון הגדולות והעמיקו את אחיזתן בחברה בחסות הניאו-ליברליזם, ובעיקר הן החדירו את אנשיהן לעמדות פיקוד בצבא הישראלי. הן גם מתכננות, אם לא יהיה מוצא אחר, להשתלט סופית על ישראל באמצעות הפיכה מעין צבאית ולהשליט את משטרן, משטר הכנסייה הרבנית. וכך, החברה הישראלית לפותה בגרונה במלכוד הכיבוש ללא מוצא בידי תשלובת מיליציות רבניות של מתנחלים שגרעינן בשטחים הכבושים הפלסטיניים בחסות הממשלים הישראליים ואוליגרכים מקורבים.
מצד שני, בהעדר מוצא מן המלכוד הישראלי, שקעו ארגוני ההתנגדות הפלסטיניים הישנים, בעיקר הפת"ח והחזית העממית, ועמם "הרשות" הפלסטינית. כישלונה המוחלט של התנועה הלאומית לבלום את הכיבוש המתפשט העלה למרכז הבמה את המיליציות המזוינות של הכנסיות האיסלמיות, הסונית והשיעית. אלה הן החמאס והג'יהאד האיסלמי. הראשונה מומנה על ידי המשפחה המלכותית של ערב הסעודית ומדינות נפט אחרות (ולאחרונה על ידי קטאר). השנייה פועלת בחסות ובמימון אייתולות איראן ושלוחותיהן במזרח התיכון.
המיליציות הללו הן חלק ממגמה עולמית שבה פורחים מיליציות וארגונים צבאיים "פרטיים" הנלחמים ברחבי העולם, לרוב בחסות ובמימון מדינות אבל לעתים גם נגד צבאות מדיניים.
פריחתם של הצבאות הפרטיים והמיליציות בעולם באה עם שקיעתה של המדינה הלאומית, דגם שהחל במהפכה הצרפתית ובצבאות העממיים שהתפתחו ממנה. מסגרת מדינית-לאומית זאת כבר אינה מתאימה לתהליך הצבר ההון הגלובלי הנוכחי.
וכאן נכנס התהליך העיקרי של הקפיטליזם העולמי כיום, שהוא המניע העיקרי של המלחמות המחזוריות במזרח התיכון: רווחי קבוצות ההון הדומיננטיות. מאמר זה מנסה להציג את המלחמה הנוכחית בפרספקטיבה אחרת, פרספקטיבה אותה התחלנו לתאר במאמרים ובספרים מאז סוף שנות השמונים של המאה העשרי
הקפיטליזציה של סרטי הקולנוע (The Capitalization of Movies)
Full text link"תוך פחות מארבעים שנה הצליחו בעלי הסרטים לא רק להכפיל את הריכוזיות לנקודה שבה כ-90% מהכנסות הסרטים מתקבלות מ-10% בלבד מכלל הסרטים, אלא גם לצמצם פי ארבעה את הסיכון הדיפרנציאלי של רווחיהם" • מתוך ספרם של יהונתן ניצן ושמשון ביכלר, ההון ושברו
Why Scorsese is Right About Corporate Power
No full textIn the March 2021 issue of Harper’s, Scorsese wrote an essay to pay tribute to Federico Fellini, the Italian director who directed such great films as La Strada, 8 1/2, La Dolce Vita, Nights of Cabiria and Satyricon. Scorsese writing on Fellini is definitely newsworthy for cinephiles who want to know about Fellini’s beginnings in Italian neo-realism (for example, he worked with Rosselini on Rome, Open City), or who simply want to be reminded of why his filmography is so great. However, the news of this essay’s arrival went well beyond film studies and had very little to do with Fellini. People were talking about the essay because Scorcese framed his tribute to Fellini – which was both personal and knowledgeable – with an argument about the decline of cinema as an art form.
This paper explains why Scorsese is right about the differences that exist between himself and a director like Fellini. In fact, we can use Scorsese’s argument as a platform to widen our perspective on the political economy of Hollywood. The story Scorsese is telling about the business of Hollywood is a story about business interests wanting to reduce risk. The ambiguity of risk in this story – is it financial risk or is it aesthetic risk? – is a helpful shortcut to understanding what reducing risk means for those who have control over the industrial art of filmmaking. When the Hollywood film business is estimating its future earnings, risk perceptions account for the possibility that the future of culture will be different–and perhaps radically different–from what capitalists expect it to be. This logic of capitalist accounting, while quantitative in expression (prices, income, volatility, etc.), is social in essence. For this reason, the capitalization of cinema cannot overlook any social dimension of cinema, be it aesthetic, political or cultural. The eye of capitalization searches for any social condition that could have an impact on “the level and pattern of capitalist earnings” (Nitzan & Bichler, 2009, p. 166).
This paper is a lightly edited compilation of a two-part series originally published by Notes on Cinema in June and July, 2021. It has been re-published here with permission of the author
The Business of Strategic Sabotage
No full textMarxists love to hate the theory of capital as power, or CasP for short. And they have two good reasons. First, CasP criticizes the logical and empirical validity of the labour theory of value on which Marxism rests. And second, it offers the young at heart a radical, non-Marxist alternative with which to research, understand and contest capitalism. With these reasons in mind, it is only understandable that most Marxists prefer to keep Pandora’s box closed, and few challenge CasP directly.
Sometimes, though, the wall of silence breaks, typically by a lone Marxist who lashes at the ‘idealist’ renegades of forward-looking capitalized power and reiterates the good old ‘material reality’ of backward-looking labour time. Since these occasional critics are often confident in their dogma and rarely bother to understand the CasP research they criticize (let alone the broader body of CasP literature), their critiques scarcely merit a response. But occasionally, they accuse us of empirical wrongdoing – and these charges do call for a reply.
Such accusations are levelled in a recent paper by Nicolas D. Villarreal (2022), titled ‘Capital, Capitalization, and Capitalists: A Critique of Capital as Power Theory’. In his article, Villarreal claims that our empirical analysis of the relation between business power and industrial sabotage in the United States is unpersuasive, to put it politely. 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.
Unfortunately, Mr. Villarreal’s empirical counter-analysis leaves much to be desired. His ‘reproduction/refutation’ of our work is not only poorly documented, but also uses incorrect variables, including ones that differ from those labelled in his own figures (gross instead of net income, domestic instead of national variables, national categories mixed with domestic ones, etc.). So instead of trying to reverse-engineer his results, here is our own easy-to-follow, step-by-step reply to his complaints. Hopefully, this reply will make future critics a bit more careful with their dismissive arguments
From Operation Warp Speed to TRIPS. Vaccines as Assets
Full text linkThis chapter examines the political economy of biopharmaceutical innovation, focusing primarily on vaccines in the Covid-19 pandemic. This analysis aims to make visible the deep entanglements that entrench an extractive and dysfunctional innovation ecosystem, calcifying inequities in global access to essential medicines. The chapter argues that the current inequities in vaccine access are not new or anomalous and that they are the result of a complex yet strategic enmeshment among the logics of war and biomedicine, asset accumulation, and intellectual property. Uneven access to Covid-19 therapeutics can be traced to these three elements, which have built inequity into the political economy of biomedicine long before the current pandemic. The first section in the chapter teases out the first entanglement by unpacking Operation Warp Speed (OWS) as the culmination of a historical war-biomedical nexus driven by the United States, which has important implications for the global political economy of biomedical innovation and North-South asymmetries. The second section places OWS in the broader context of an extractive innovation ecosystem guided by a logic of differential accumulation characterised by the assetisation of publicly funded research. The final section explores how asset accumulation logics and unequal access to therapeutics are embedded in the international architecture of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) regime
Das Ritual der Kapitalisierung (The Ritual of Capitalization)
No full textWenn man genau hinhört, kann man zuhören, wie Jeff Bezos immer reicher wird. Da ist es schon wieder, dieses Geräusch. Eine weitere Milliarde in Bezos‘ Kassen. Lassen Sie uns diesen Klang des Geldes mit ein paar Zahlen belegen. Seit 2017 ist das Nettovermögen von Bezos um etwa 4 Millionen Dollar pro Stunde gewachsen – das ist etwa das 500.000-fache des US-Mindestlohns. In normalen Zeiten wäre diese Anhäufung von Vermögen absurd. Heute, da viele Arbeitnehmer aufgrund einer schweren Pandemie ihre Arbeit verlieren, ist sie obszön.
Bezos steht zwar für den Gipfel des kapitalistischen Exzesses, aber sein Reichtum ist Teil einer längeren Geschichte. In den letzten vier Jahrzehnten sind die Aktienkurse in die Höhe geschossen, während die Löhne stagnierten. Was hat dieser Trend zu bedeuten? In diesem Beitrag möchte ich dem Aktienmarkt auf den Grund gehen. Doch zunächst werde ich erklären, was der Aktienmarkt nicht ist: Er ist kein Indikator für die Produktionskapazität. Er ist auch kein „fiktives Kapital“. Was ist er dann?
Die Börse, so argumentieren Jonathan Nitzan und Shimshon Bichler, ist die Art und Weise, wie Kapitalisten ihre Macht quantifizieren. Um zu verstehen, wovon Nitzan und Bichler sprechen, werden wir das Ritual entlarven, das unsere Gesellschaftsordnung bestimmt – das Ritual der Kapitalisierung. Lesen Sie weiter, um die rote Pille zu schlucken und den Schleier der kapitalistischen Ideologie zu lüften
El Capitalismo Contemporáneo y la Ontología de las Finanzas
Full text linkRESUMEN. Esta tesis es un esfuerzo por desentrañar el papel que juega el campo financiero dentro del proceso de acumulación de capital y la manera en que condiciona el desarrollo de la lucha entre las clases sociales por la distribución de la riqueza y el control político de la comunidad. El punto de partida es la pregunta por la validez de ciertas distinciones fundamentales de la economía política: ¿cabe sostener la distinción entre una economía real y una financiera, entre el valor y el precio, entre la esfera productiva y la esfera de las especulaciones bursátiles? ¿Se sostiene la distinción entre un capitalismo industrial y uno financiero, o entre un capital financiero y uno productivo?
ABSTRACT. This thesis aims to unravel the role played by the financial field within the process of capital accumulation and the way in which it conditions the development of the struggle between social classes for the distribution of wealth and political control of the community. The starting point is the question of the validity of certain fundamental distinctions in political economy: are the distinctions between a real and a financial economy, between value and price, between the productive sphere and the sphere of stock market speculations useful? Does the distinction between an industrial and a financial capitalism, or between a financial and a productive capital, hold?
*** Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 **
The Political Economy of Hollywood. Capitalist Power and Cultural Production
No full textIn Hollywood, the goals of art and business are entangled. Directors, writers, actors, and idealistic producers aspire to make the best films possible. These aspirations often interact with the dominant firms that control Hollywood film distribution. This control of distribution is crucial as it enables the firms and other large businesses involved, such as banks that offer financing, to effectively stand between film production and the market. This book analyses the power structure of the Hollywood film business and its general modes of behaviour. More specifically, the work analyses how the largest Hollywood firms attempt to control social creativity such that they can mitigate the financial risks inherent in the art of filmmaking.
Controlling the ways people make or watch films, the book argues, is a key element of Hollywood’s capitalist power. Capitalist power—the ability to control, modify, and, sometimes, limit social creation through the rights of ownership—is the foundation of capital accumulation. For the Hollywood film business, capitalist power is about the ability of business concerns to set the terms that will shape the future of cinema. For the major film distributors of Hollywood, these terms include the types of films that will be distributed, the number of films that will be distributed, and the cinematic alternatives that will be made available to the individual moviegoer. Combining theoretical analysis with detailed empirical research on the financial performance of the major Hollywood film companies, the book details how Hollywood’s capitalist goals have clashed with the aesthetic potentials of cinema and ultimately stymied creativity in the pursuit of limiting risk.
This sharp critique of the Hollywood machine provides vital reading for students and scholars of political economy, political theory, film studies, and cinema
Political Economy of Capital Accumulation (YorkU, LAPS/POLS 4292 6.0, Undergraduate, Fall Term, 2022-23)
Full text linkDESCRIPTION AND OBJECTIVES. Capital is the central power institution of capitalism: iCapital is the central power institution of capitalism: it is the main force underlying the relentless transformation of power relations in capitalist societies. The course explores the accumulation of capital from three interrelated perspectives: conceptual, historical and empirical. At the conceptual level, the course examines the evolution of orthodox and critical theories of value and how these theories serve to explain and justify contending notions of accumulation. At the historical level, it traces the development of capital from its humble pre-capitalist origins to its present world dominance. At the empirical level, it studies and juxtaposes the qualitative and quantitative aspects of capital accumulation and explores what they mean for the contemporary political economy. In parallel to these explorations, the course introduces students to the art and science of empirical research. By the end of the course, students are expected to be able to develop and integrate theoretical arguments with their own empirical work