Friends, it's a new academic year, and I come with news for those of you interested in #PoliticalEconomy, the development of the #UnitedStates (political and economic), and the US in a #comparative framework.

Noam Maggor, Sofia Valeonti, Ariel Ron and I are launching a new website: https://www.politicaleconomylab.org/

It's a companion to our scholarly discussions on all of the above, and to our monthly Zoom seminar (and after our Paris conference of last May).

Come check it out!

#histodons #econhist

The application deadline for a position as a senior researcher in #PoliticalEconomy is fast approaching. We look forward to receiving your application by September 11: https://career.mpifg.de/jobposting/c8101072efac7170663e72565dca2459052acce30?ref=homepage

Calling postdoctoral researchers in #EconomicSociology and #PoliticalEconomy: If you’re interested in joining the MPIfG from October 2024, our call for applications for #postdoc positions is open from now until mid-December. More details on our website: https://career.mpifg.de/jobposting/dac010027182e91a293bb9f7ceeb6354509616390?ref=homepage

#AI #OpenAI #OpenSource #GenerativeAI #FLOSS #BigTech #PoliticalEconomy: "Taken together, we find that ‘open’ AI can, in its more maximal instantiations, provide transparency, reusability, and extensibility that can enable third parties to deploy and build on top of powerful off-the-shelf AI models. These maximalist forms of ‘open’ AI can also allow some forms of auditing and oversight. But even the most open of ‘open’ AI systems do not, on their own, ensure democratic access to or meaningful competition in AI, nor does openness alone solve the problem of oversight and scrutiny. While we recognize that there is a vibrant community of earnest contributors building and contributing to ‘open’ AI efforts in the name of expanding access and insight, we also find that marketing around openness and investment in (somewhat) open AI systems is being leveraged by powerful companies to bolster their positions in the face of growing interest in AI regulation. And that some companies have moved to embrace ‘open’ AI as a mechanism to entrench dominance, using the rhetoric of ‘open’ AI to expand market power while investing in ‘open’ AI efforts in ways that allow them to set standards of development while benefiting from the free labor of open source contributors."

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807

#JobOpening: We are seeking a comparative and/or international political economist to join our #PoliticalEconomy Research Area led by @luciobaccaro. Follow the link to read more and apply online by Sept. 11: https://career.mpifg.de/jobposting/c8101072efac7170663e72565dca2459052acce30

With #Japan’s ridiculously low wages I am amazed that there would be anything unexpected about a drop in private consumption.
“…unexpected drop in private consumption cast a pall over the outlook…”
#economics #politics #Jpoli #oligarchy #PoliticalEconomy #minwage

From: @mainichi
https://famichiki.jp/@mainichi/110890966184461163

TRENDS + ECONOMIC. “Asset Management Society” and the encroachment of rentier capitalism; an overview of Brett Christophers‘ oeuvre. https://compactmag.com/article/how-asset-managers-took-over-your-life

#economics #PoliticalEconomy #MarketConcentration #financialization

Just published: M. Koreh and R. Mandelkern

#welfarestate
#politicaleconomy

Trade-offs of government credibility institutions: market credibility vs. social credibility

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13501763.2023.2243295

I wonder if anyone else here has read Albert Camus' 'The Rebel' recently?

It's interesting. It is very clearly of it's time - a polemic within the debates that consumed the French left after the war, about how to react to the emerging picture of Stalinist repression - but what's interesting is just how old-fashioned it seems alongside more recent economic and cultural interpretations of Marx.

Camus critiques Marx principally for what he took from Hegel - for example the idea of a historical dialectic - rightly focusing on how teleological philosophies always contain the seeds of 'the ends justify the means' rationale for inhumanity. In taking this approach, he ignores almost entirely the economic and cultural analysis of the mature Marx, which via the Frankfurt School, Structuralism, Piketty, etc, now dominate left views of Marx. Camus spends many pages pulling apart the idea of the historic mission of the proletariat, for example, without any mention of the increasing socialisation of production - or indeed any of the economic concepts, such as alienation, commodity fetishism, even use, exchange and surplus value, that now seem central to us.

Most interestingly, perhaps, he focuses on Marx's 'prophesies' in a way that now feels outdated, not just because they constitute such a very small part of Marx's writing - but by events. Camus writes as if his own time was the end of history, which had already delivered its verdict - whereas from our perspective it has become much harder to pronounce on whether trends within capitalism identified by Marx - such as increasing accumulation by a smaller and smaller elite - were indeed mistaken. Now we tend to think: 'Hmmm... maybe he was right after all...'.

At the time I would I'm sure have been on Camus' side - like Orwell inclined more to anarchism that communism - but now perhaps Sartre's inclination not to polemic, but to reconcile existentialism and marxism, seems more considered.

#camus #existentialism #marxism #anarchism #philosophy #politicaleconomy

#EU #Google #Search #SearchEngines #ContentModeration #PoliticalEconomy #AI #GenerativeAI: "In this piece, which frames the special issue, “The State of Google Critique and Intervention,” we provide an overview of research focusing on Google as an object of critical study, fleshing out the European interventions that actively attempt to address its dominance. The article begins by mapping out key areas of articulating a Google critique, from the initial focus on ranking and profiling to the subsequent scrutiny of user exploitation and competitive imbalance. As such, it situates the contributions to this special issue concerning search engine bias and discrimination, the ethics of Google Autocomplete, Google's content moderation, the commodification of engine audiences and the political economy of technical systems in a broader history of Google criticism. It then proceeds to contextualize the European developments that put forward alternatives and draws attention to legislative efforts to curb the influence of big tech. We conclude by identifying a few avenues for continued critical study, such as Google's infrastructural bundling of generative artificial intelligence with existing products, to emphasize the importance of intervention in the future."

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517231191528

Are you a researcher in #EconomicSociology or #PoliticalEconomy? If you're interested in joining us for between 2 and 12 months as a guest scholar, our Visiting Researchers Program is open for applications until Oct. 31. Researchers at all career levels are invited to apply!

https://career.mpifg.de/jobposting/9608367686f5f6c08b6bc6d6376866ca660560210?ref=homepage

Before the Treaty of Lisbon, a substantial literature used #voting #power indices to analyse possible voting rules in the EU's Council of Ministers. But voting in the Council is only one step in passing a law. Our method can be applied also to the interplay with the #EU Commission and the EP.

We estimate a model of this #bargaining process. You can see the paper presented at the #nber #politicaleconomy workshop tomorrow.

Inflation has many causes, only one of them is sometimes the price of financial capital. Yet, bourgeois economist always seem to think it’s the only cause.
Relying on what I’ve observed in my area (not analysis) it seems that this is a combination of supply chain disruptions, hoarding of wealth by private equity firms, and affordable housing shortages. All of these factors are only indirectly affected by the interest rate. So instead of throwing people out of work and on to the streets by raising rates, how about planning for import-substitution for goods we can produce locally, appropriating stagnant wealth, and increasing the affordable housing supply? We have also always had price control regulations as an option.
It’s so intellectually disappointing, and awful to observe economists still seeing inflation as a product of working class prosperity. This is inflation caused by greed and austerity, not too many people with jobs.
#cdnpoli #inflation #politicaleconomy #economics

#USA #Biden #PoliticalEconomy #NeoKeynesianism: "The global trend is plain to see. Virtually everywhere, redoubled consumption of fossil fuels is undercutting the possibility, already remote, for countries to meet their long-term commitments to carbon neutrality. Everywhere too, governments are directly intervening in their national economies through price controls, trade restrictions, industrial subsidies, and targeted investments to transform their productive infrastructure, measures that would have been unthinkable not so long ago, when official doctrine held that markets knew best and governments should just get out of their way. It would appear that neoliberalism is dead and buried, replaced by the very thing it was supposed to have definitively ended: state-directed economic development.
What accounts for this stunning reversal? In one plausible explanation, a crisis of legitimacy has unfolded through a series of destabilizing political and economic shocks in the G7 countries over the last fifteen years, forcing the policy elite to learn from their mistakes. The devastating aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, and the lack of any real recovery from it, provided the soil from which so-called populist challenges sprang forth from the right and the left over the ensuing decade, shaking the political establishment from its complacent stupor. Trump was the exclamation point of this sequence."

https://brooklynrail.org/2023/07/field-notes/The-Economic-Consequences-of-Neo-Keynesianism

#PoliticalEconomy #Inflation #Neoliberalism #ClassWar: "So this is where we have arrived in 2023: to bring inflation back to 2 per cent while preserving the banks, common sense insists that we need higher interest rates for longer, plus austerity. And, at this point, you have to ask whether western elites have learnt anything from the last decade and a half.

How long is it since we were calling for a new social contract, championing democracy against lopsided capitalism and asserting the priority of sustainable development and the climate crisis? Of course, price stability is important and even moderate inflation inflicts real costs, notably on vulnerable groups. But the cost of living crisis is a social problem that should be addressed with adequate welfare support.

We are told that abandoning 2 per cent would make a society such as Britain into a joke. There are plenty of ways in which the UK has made itself a laughing-stock of late, but to use that as an argument for a radical and deliberately recessionary policy is to add injury to insult. You don’t demonstrate that you are serious by compulsively clinging to symbols and obsessing about your reputation. It is precisely that kind of politics, piled on top of years of austerity, that led Britain into the folly of Brexit."

https://www.ft.com/content/2e2c5a23-af05-4124-ac6b-73e34651a5de

GOVERNANCE. And “regulatory moats.” https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/20/regulation-altman (At some point we’ll have to wake up to the damage caused by market concentration in the economy and become realists about how it came about.)

#PoliticalEconomy #economics #regulation #governance #politics

RT @DrSyedMustafaA1@twitter.com

Looking forward to delivering my presentation exploring entanglements of #PoliticalEconomy, #PoliticalEcology, and #PoliticalTheology at the Critical Ecology of #AI workshop in this conference. https://twitter.com/retnolaras/status/1648705561054306306

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/DrSyedMustafaA1/status/1671460399219179524

#Europe #Imperialism #PoliticalEconomy: "Tame empires came at a high cost: permanent continental separation. Polanyi imagined these units as autarkic, free from the world-swallowing universalism of both capitalism and socialism. Contemplations of a post-imperial EU must not indulge the fantasies of some east European conservatives that the end of the Cold War could mean a comfortable “return to Europe” if that means turning their back on the world at its doorstep. It’s not just the EU that has colonial origins – the entire world does. As Bhambra has written, the biggest obstacle to understanding decolonisation is the misconception of European states “being nations and having empires”. Shedding the latter allowed them to become more of the former. Addressing Europe’s colonial past will require more than token recognition of past sins. More radical solutions include the proposal of E Tendayi Achiume, the UN’s special rapporteur on race and racism, on migration as decolonisation: free movement into the former metropole as the most effective form of reparations. Europe’s past is not offshore. As the Egyptian politician Hamdeen Sabahi put it in 2012, “The Mediterranean is a lake.”"

https://www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-essay/2023/06/europe-rotten-core

@ChrisMayLA6 Interesting graphic. I don't know nearly enough about internal #us #politicaleconomy to hazard a guess as to why.

A breakdown of internal migration in terms of #race #gender and #class would be a starting point.

#SundayThought:

The central question that defines how you see #economics, #politicaleconomy, or even #politics more widely is this:

Are we here to serve the needs of the economy, or is the economy here to serve our needs?

Too often while purporting to believe the latter, policy is made as if the former was what is needed.

Only when we see markets & economic relations as the means to an end (our wellbeing) rather than an end in themselves will we really get to grip with our current problems!