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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
Capitalizing a Cure. How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines
Full text linkCapitalizing 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
Interest Rates and Inflation: Knives Out
Full text linkIf you’re just tuning in, I’ve spent the last few months debunking some common misconceptions about inflation:
Is inflation a uniform increase in prices? No. Inflation is wildly differential.
Is inflation driven by an ‘over-heated’ economy? No. Inflation tends to come with economic stagnation.
Do higher interest rates reduce inflation? No. Higher interest rates are associated with higher inflation.
As expected, the last claim put mainstream economists into war mode. You see, the belief that interest rates down-regulate inflation has come to be sacred. So by scrutinizing this idea with evidence, I was effectively torching an effigy of the pope. (Novelist Cory Doctorow helped fan the flames by writing an incendiary essay about my research.) And so I spent a ‘fun’ week on Twitter being bombarded by econo-scorn.
Now back to science. When I published ‘A Test of Monetary Faith’, I had more evidence in the pipelines — evidence that debunks the idea that interest rates down-regulate inflation. In this post, I’ll wade through the data.
The take-home message is clear: when we look at the World Bank database, there is no evidence that higher interest rates down-regulate inflation. If anything, the evidence suggests that rate hikes make inflation worse.
But before we get to the data, I’ll respond to some of the more cogent criticisms that economist hurled my way
The Key to Managing Inflation? Higher Wages
Full text linkFor the last few months, I’ve been diving into the economics of inflation. In this post, I’m excited to review some forgotten history.
Our journey starts with a basic question: what is the key policy tool for managing the rate of inflation?
According to mainstream economics, the key tool is the rate of interest. Hike this rate, economists argue, and you will cool an overheated economy, solving the problem of inflation. As you probably know, I don’t think much of this idea. (Criticism here and here.) And so I’ve been looking for alternative theories of inflation management.
After months spent in the library stacks, I’m happy to report that I’ve discovered some lost theory. During the mid-20th century, it seems that while most economists were jumping on the interest-rate bandwagon, a few researchers went in the opposite direction. They proposed that inflation could be treated with a dose of wage hikes.
Needless to say, this alternative theory remains virtually unknown. And on its face, it seems absurd. But as I’ll show, the wage-hike approach is strongly supported by evidence. Using standard economic tools, I find that rapid wage growth tends to be followed by a drop in inflation.
The message? Policy makers should reverse course. Instead of greeting inflation with a dose of interest-rate hikes, governments should reach for the wage-rate lever. Hike wages as fast as possible, and you will surely reduce inflation
Estudiar el precio, olvidar el valor. Una alternativa al pensamiento económico tradicional
Full text linkRESUMEN. Este artículo intenta sentar las bases para una comprensión de los precios radicalmente diferente a como los entiende el pensamiento económico tradicional. Tras revisar algunos aspectos relevantes de la crítica a la teoría del dinero como mercancía, se muestra que el pensamiento tradicional es incapaz de captar las propiedades irreductibles de los precios y la complejidad de los procesos que determinan las magnitudes monetarias. La crítica del pensamiento tradicional desemboca en un llamado a olvidar el concepto de valor y, en su lugar, elaborar estrategias para entender el funcionamiento de los precios. Siguiendo el trabajo de los economistas Jonathan Nitzan y Shimshon Bichler (2002, 2008), se propone que los cambios en la capacidad de control de los grupos sociales resultan en (y se expresan como) cambios en los niveles relativos de precios. Este desplazamiento permite construir una ontología del orden capitalista que no está fundada en las nociones de equivalencia y valor, sino en las diferencias de poder. Y hace posible reconocer al plano monetario como un fenómeno complejo e irreductible.
ABSTRACT. This article aims to lay the foundations for an understanding of prices radically different from the way they are understood by traditional economic thought. After reviewing some relevant aspects of the critique of the commodity theory of money, it is shown that traditional thought is incapable of grasping the irreducible properties of prices and the complexity of the processes that determine monetary magnitudes. The critique of traditional thinking leads to a call to forget the concept of value and, instead, to develop strategies to understand how prices work in reality. Following the work of economists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, it is proposed that changes in the level of control of social groups result in (and are expressed as) changes in relative price levels. This shift makes it possible to build an ontology of the capitalist order that is not founded on notions of equivalence and value but on power differentials. And it makes it possible to recognize the monetary plane as a complex and irreducible phenomenon
The Mismatch Thesis. Fiction and Reality in the Accumulation of Capital
Full text linkPolitical economists, both mainstream and Marxist, find it difficult to reconcile the «real» and «financial» appearances of capital. The conventional view is that «real» capital is an objective productive entity; that «finance» merely reflects this reality; and that, unfortunately, the reflection is often inaccurate, causing the two to «mismatch». This convention, we argue, is baseless if not fraudulent. First, although economists know full well that «real» capital, comprising different capital goods, cannot have a unique objective quantity – they measure this pseudo quantity anyway, arbitrarily. Second, when they realize that their arbitrary measure of «real» capital differs greatly from the corresponding magnitude of finance, they blame the deviation on invisible fluctuations in intangible capital, investor irrationality and market imperfections. And third, they insist that «real» accumulation drives «financial» accumulation, even though their own measures show that the two processes move in opposite directions
The Capital As Power Approach. An Invited-then-Rejected Interview with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan
Full text linkPREFACE. This interview was commissioned in October 2019 for a special issue on ‘Accumulation and Politics: Approaches and Concepts’ to be published by the Revue de la régulation. We submitted the text in March 2020, only to learn two months later that it won’t be published.
The problem, we were informed, wasn’t the content, which everyone agreed was ‘highly interesting and stimulating’. It was the format. To begin with, the text was suddenly deemed ‘too long’. Although the length was agreed on beforehand, the special-issue editors — or maybe it was their bosses on the Editorial Board — now insisted that we cut it by no less than two-thirds. They also instructed us to make our answers more ‘interview-like’ and ‘personal’. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, they demanded that we change our ‘tone’, which they found ‘unfair’ and ‘one-sided’. Translation: we should take a hike.
This encounter with two-minded editors wasn’t our first. In another Review of Capital as Power paper, titled ‘Manuscripts Don’t Burn’, we sketch our history with Jekyll & Hyde editors who often used ‘length’ and ‘tone’ to reject articles they had invited but couldn’t stomach.
But first, the original interview, in full
Masochistic Fun with Plutocratic Murder
Full text linkThere’s nothing like waking up to a boatload of Twitter scorn. It’s refreshing, in a masochistic sort of way. Some backstory. After most of my blog posts, I put the charts on Twitter, usually with a provocative caption. (It’s more fun that way.) So after last week’s review of Cory Doctorow’s book Red Team Blues, I tweeted the relation between income inequality and the rate of murder. The next morning my Twitter feed was … interesting. The tweet apparently went viral, helped along by a nice little insult from Nassim Nicholas Taleb: 'No. The statement by that fettuccinibrain is contradicted by his own graph. #fooledbyrandomness'. Apart from him calling me a fettuccini brain, I have a lot of respect for Taleb, who’s famous for (among other things) his excellent book Fooled By Randomness. It’s an engaging romp through the many ways that human’s get duped by random patterns. Back to the tweet. Taleb is implying that the relation between inequality and murder is essentially a random blob of data, and that I’m a fool to plot a trend line through it. I disagree
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
Re-Considering the Origins of the Climate Emergency: War, Finance, and the State
Full text linkOne of the most important and recurring debates in the field of International Political Economy and international affairs are the links between capitalism, fossil fuel energy and climate change. In these debates, the origins of our current climate emergency are rooted in how Britain became the first country to become reliant on mass production and consumption coal (fossil fuels) for economic growth, industrialization, as well as social reproduction. Britain becoming a coal-fire capitalist-imperial global empire deeply influenced and structured the current world order and global political economy which is still locked-into a vicious cycle of path dependency whereby balance of power, production and social reproduction is dependent on energy, predominately fossil fuels