734 research outputs found
Sort by
Pravda o inflácii: prečo sa Milton Friedman mýlil, nie prvý raz
No full textMilton Friedman už viac ako desaťročie nie je medzi nami, ale stále nás prenasleduje jeho duch. V 60-tych rokoch Friedman vyhlásil, že inflácia je „vždy a všade monetárnym fenoménom“ – problém spočíva v tlačení priveľa peňazí. Odvtedy so železnou pravidelnosťou, vždy keď začne strašiť inflácia, určite sa nájde niekto, kto vyvoláva Friedmanovho ducha a obviňuje vládu, že má priveľké výdavky.
Keby to však s infláciou bolo také jednoduché.
Ako mnohé závery ekonomickej teórie, aj toto Friedmanovské myslenie vyzerá na prvý pohľad rozumne. Inflácia je všeobecný rast cien. A keďže ceny nevyjadrujú nič iné, len peňažné transakcie, keď je v obehu viac peňazí, znamená to, že ceny musia byť vyššie. Preto inflácia je „vždy a všade monetárny fenomén“.
Je smola, že pri podrobnejšom preskúmaní tohto fenoménu musíme toto myslenie zavrhnúť. Hlavný problém je v tom, že s infláciou narába ako s rovnomerným zvýšením cien. Toto je pohodlné pre teóriu, ale empiricky to nie je pravda. V reálnom svete je inflácia veľmi nerovnomerná. Napríklad v určitom čase si všimneme, že cena jabĺk stúpla o 5 %, ale zároveň cena áut o 50 %, pritom cena oblečenia mohla klesnúť o 20 %.
Ak chceme pochopiť skutočnú podstatu inflácie, nesmieme študovať ekonomické učebnice, ale si musíme všímať údaje z reálneho sveta. Presne toto urobil začiatkom 90-tych rokov politický ekonóm Jonathan Nitzan počas svojej práce na PhD. Jej výsledkom bola dizertácia Inflation As Restructuring (Inflácia ako reštrukturalizácia). Nitzan si všimol, že v skutočnom svete sa ceny menia veľmi rozdielne, čo znamená, že vždy na tom niekto získa a niekto stratí. V dôsledku toho inflácia nie je len „monetárny fenomén“, ako prehlásil Milton Friedman. Inflácia reštrukturalizuje sociálne usporiadanie.
Práve táto vlastnosť inflácie je v reálnom svete najdôležitejšia, lebo jej pričinením inflácia signalizuje zmenu v mocenskej štruktúre spoločnosti. Podľa očakávania, práve tento jav z reálneho sveta ekonómovia hlavného prúdu ignorujú – do veľkej miery preto, že to nezodpovedá ich úhľadnej teórii o inflácii ako „monetárnom fenoméne“. S dôkazom si našťastie poradíme sami. Inflácia je (a vždy aj bola) veľmi nerovnomerná. Inflácia vykonáva reštrukturalizáciu.
Dnes, keď zažívame návrat obáv z inflácie a zároveň ožíva Friedmanov duch, stojí za to podrobnejšie sa pozrieť na fakty z reálneho sveta
Firming Up Hierarchy
Full text linkIf an unmarked package arrived at your door, how would you figure out what was inside? The catch is that you cannot open it.
As a social scientist, I deal with this ‘black-box’ problem all the time. I (metaphorically) watch people go to work at firms. And I see them come home with income. Then I try to picture the ‘machine’ that gave people money.
In my mind’s eye, I see a machine called hierarchy.
Inside each firm, I imagine a corporate hierarchy that sorts workers into a chain of command and assigns them income based on their rank. Or in more personal terms, when people go to work they have a boss. And their boss makes more money than them.
In a colloquial sense, we all know that this is how firms work, because we’ve experienced it as workers. In other words, as individuals, we get an ants-eye view of the corporate hierarchy. But what we can’t do is play god and study corporate hierarchy by cutting the ant’s nest in half. Corporations tend to dislike that.
And so as scientists, we’re left with a black-box problem. If we want to study how hierarchy affects income, we have to do it without opening the corporate box. Our only option is to ‘stand’ outside firms and watch what goes in and out. Then we see if these observations are consistent with what we think goes on inside.
Speaking of observations from firms, in this post, I unpack data from a landmark 2019 paper called ‘Firming up inequality’. In that article, economists Jae Song and colleagues use data from the Social Security Administration to reconstruct the income distribution within US firms from 1981 to 2013. Their results are a goldmine for studying the hierarchical pay structure within firms.
Using Song’s data, here’s the idea that I’m going to test. I think that the recent rise in US income inequality is being driven by a redistribution of income within firms. In short, I believe that corporate hierarchies have become more despotic. Corporate elites have taken income that once went to the bottom of the hierarchy and redirected it to the top.
To test this idea, we’ll take a meandering route. First, I’ll tell you about my model of corporate hierarchy and how it explains income as a function of ‘hierarchical power’. Then I’ll give you a tour of US income inequality, and show you why it’s plausible that the recent rise in top incomes is being driven by growing ‘hierarchical despotism’. Next, I’ll break out the math and build a model of the US corporate landscape. I’ll use this model to predict the redistribution of income within US firms. Finally, I’ll compare the model’s predictions to the real-world trends reported by Song and colleagues. If all goes well, we’ll get some insight into the machinations of US corporate hierarchy.
My results? I find that to a surprising extent, the redistribution of income within US firms can be explained by a single parameter — a change in the rate that income scales with hierarchical power
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
From Passive Owners to Planet Savers? Asset Managers, Carbon Majors and the Limits of Sustainable Finance
Full text linkThis article examines the role of the Big Three asset management firms – BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – in corporate environmental governance. Specifically, it charts the Big Three’s relationships with the publicly-owned Carbon Majors: a small group of fossil fuels, cement and mining companies responsible for the bulk of industrial greenhouse gas emissions. It finds that the Big Three much more often than not oppose rather than support shareholder resolutions aimed at improving environmental governance. Notably, this is even the case with the Big Three’s environmental, social and governance funds. A more fine-gained analysis shows that the combined voting decisions of the Big Three are more likely to lead to the failure than to the success of environmental resolutions and that, whether they succeed or fail, these resolutions tend to be narrow in scope and piecemeal in nature. Based on these findings, the article raises serious doubts about the Big Three’s credentials as environmental stewards
In Search of Sabotage
No full textA key aspect of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s theory of ‘capital as power’ is that it treats property not as a productive asset, but as a negative social relation. Property, Nitzan and Bichler argue, is an institutional act of exclusion. It is the legal right to sabotage […] In this series, which we are calling ‘In Search of Sabotage’, we will investigate how capitalists’ success relates to various social outcomes. If Nitzan and Bichler’s sabotage thesis is correct, a win for capitalists ought to come at the detriment of society at large. With this idea in mind, here is the road ahead. In each installment of this series, we will pick something that we think is a social ‘bad’. (In this post we look at income inequality.) Then we’ll see how this social bad relates to capitalists’ success, as measured by Bichler and Nitzan’s power index. As we work through the data, we have no idea what we’ll find. So join us in this journey of science in action
Pensions and Power. The Political and Market Dynamics of Public Pension Plans
Full text linkThis paper uses the theory of ‘capital as power’ to analyze the struggle over public pensions in the United States. While mainstream commentators claim that public pensions must be ‘reformed’ because they are ‘under funded’, I argue that the metrics used to make this argument are unsound. Instead, the push to privatize public pension systems is driven less by actual funding problems, and more by the desires of elite investors who seek to control pension capital and reap the enormous investment fees associated with it. I propose that the deconstruction of public pensions is part of a larger effort to undermine collective action, so as to remove resistance to dominant capital
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
No Shortage of Profit: Semiconductor Firms and the Differential Effects of Chip Shortages
Full text linkFew will argue with the claim that shortages are socially harmful. Shortages, by definition, imply a lack of something – not enough stuff to go around. A shortage of food implies hunger; a shortage of electricity implies darkness. But are shortages harmful to everyone equally? And if they are not, does this mean that shortages can also be good for some As the US government prepares – via the CHIPS Act—to hand semiconductor firms around 50 billion USD to help solve the ongoing shortage of semiconductors, it seems worth asking how we arrived at this particular shortage, and whether the answers to the above questions can help us avoid such shortages in the future. Over the past year, I looked into the business of semiconductors. Particularly, I examined the historical relationships between chip production, chip prices, shortages, and profits. I made some surprising findings. First, there is a close negative correlation between the expansion of chip production and changes in prices in the US. This means that when production growth slows down, so does the rate at which chip prices fall. Second, among the dominant semiconductor firms, there is a close negative correlation between the rate of new investment and differential profitability. By differential profitability, I mean profitability relative to a benchmark average – in this case, relative to the average profitability of the 500 largest US-listed firms (measured by market value). Third, there is a close relationship between the appearance of a semiconductor shortage and the differential profitability of these large firms. This relationship has two salient characteristics: shortages tend to appear immediately following a period in which dominant firms trail, rather than beat, average profitability; and dominant firms tend to beat average profitability during years in which a shortage appears. In short, not only do dominant semiconductor firms tend to have significantly higher profits during shortages, but the shortages themselves do not appear to occur by accident
Have We Passed Peak Capitalism?
Full text linkAmong leftists, predicting the end of capitalism is a favorite parlor game. For example, as a graduate student in the 2010s, I remember discovering the 1976 edition of Marx’s Capital and being struck by the introduction. Written by the Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel, the foreword concluded that it was ‘most unlikely’ that capitalism would survive another half-century.
This prediction (and many like it) did not age well. What capitalism’s critics often misunderstand is that social orders rarely ‘die’. More often, they fade into irrelevance. Just as no one can point to the end-date of feudalism, it seems unlikely that capitalism will have a decisive ‘finish’. But what it may have is a peak.
The goal of this post is to chart the rise (and potential peak) of ‘capitalism’ … as I understand it. This caveat is key. To study a social system, we must first define it. To many people, capitalism is a ‘mode of production’ (a definition inherited from Marx). The view that I take here, however, is that capitalism is primarily an ideology — or what Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler call a ‘mode of power’. Capitalism is a set of ideas that justify the modern social order.
Although there are many ways to chart the rise of capitalism, what interests me here is that it was the first major ideology to have spread during the era of mass publication. That means capitalism’s rise (and potential peak) should be visible in the word frequency of written language
Die Wahrheit über Inflation (The Truth About Inflation)
No full textMilton Friedman ist seit mehr als einem Jahrzehnt tot, doch sein Denken wirkt noch immer nach. In den 1960er Jahren erklärte Friedman einmal, dass Inflation immer und überall ein monetäres Phänomen sei — ein Problem der zu hohen Geldmenge. Seither kann man sich darauf verlassen, dass, wann immer die Inflation steigt, jemand das alte Diktum von Friedman bemüht und den Staat beschuldigt, zu viel Geld zu drucken.
Wenn es nur so einfach wäre.
Wie vieles in der Wirtschaftstheorie erscheint auch Friedmans Diktum auf den ersten Blick plausibel. Inflation steht für einen allgemeinen Anstieg der Preise. Und da Preise nichts anderes sind als der Austausch von Geld, bedeutet mehr zirkulierendes Geld, dass die Preise steigen müssen. Folglich ist Inflation „immer und überall ein monetäres Phänomen“.
Einer näheren Betrachtung hält Friedmans Diktum aber nicht stand. Das Problem besteht darin, dass die Inflation als ein gleichmäßiger Preisanstieg verstanden wird. Das ist theoretisch bequem, aber empirisch falsch. In der realen Welt weicht die Inflation nämlich stark voneinander ab. Während der Preis für Äpfel um 5 % steigt, kann der Preis für Autos um 50 % steigen und der Preis für Kleidung um 20 % fallen.
Um zu verstehen wie Inflation tatsächlich funktioniert, dürfen wir uns nicht auf Lehrbücher aus den Wirtschaftswissenschaften verlassen, sondern müssen auf reale Daten schauen. Das hat der Politologe Jonathan Nitzan während seiner Doktorarbeit in den frühen 1990er Jahren getan. Seine Arbeit gipfelte in einer Dissertation mit dem Titel »Inflation As Restructuring«. In der realen Welt, so stellte Nitzan fest, ist die Preisentwicklung immer „differenziell“, d. h. es gibt Gewinner und Verlierer. Daraus folgt, dass Inflation kein rein „monetäres Phänomen“ ist, wie Milton Friedman behauptete. Inflation strukturiert die soziale Ordnung um.
Heute, da die Inflationsängste zurückkehren und Friedmans Diktum wiederbelebt wird, sollten wir uns an die realen Fakten halten