Category Archives: Social values

Profiting From Market Failure: How Today’s Capitalists Bring Bad Things to Life

By Douglas K. Smith, the co-founder of Econ4 and author of “On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We In An Age Of Me. Cross posted from Alternet

The long-running General Electric slogan sums up what capitalist cheerleaders love to say about markets: "We bring good things to life."

But is it really true? In reality, some capitalists have figured out how to profit by actually bringing bad things to life.

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America’s Broken Jobs Engine

There was rending of garments and wearing of sackcloth last week when the jobs report came in at only 80,000 new jobs created in June, the third disappointing report in a row. Pundits looked to find cheer despite the disappointing outcome. For instance, the number of hours worked rose, and 25,000 temps were added, which the optimists used to contend that employers saw more demand, but weren’t quite confident enough to make permanent hires. Citigroup’s Tobias Levkovich argued that more firms are planning to add jobs. The gloomsters pointed out that global manufacturing output is weakening, and new orders in particular are signaling contraction. And John Hussman noted (hat tip Scott):

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The Great Capitalist Heist: How Paris Hilton’s Dogs Ended Up Better Off Than You

By Gerald Friedman, who teaches economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author, most recently, of “Reigniting the Labor Movement” (Routledge, 2007). Edited by Lynn Parramore and produced in partnership with author Douglas Smith and Econ4. Cross posted from Alternet.

Summer 2009. Unemployment is soaring. Across America, millions of terrified people are facing foreclosure and getting kicked to the curb. Meanwhile in sunny California, the hotel-heiress Paris Hilton is investing $350,000 of her $100 million fortune in a two-story house for her dogs. A Pepto Bismol-colored replica of Paris’ own Beverly Hills home, the backyard doghouse provides her precious pooches with two floors of luxury living, complete with abundant closet space and central air.

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The Economist, Then and Now, on Bankers

Last week, the British press was in full-throated cry on the Libor scandal , both as a political story (the connections to the Conservative party; the questions over the Bank of England’s role) and for its economic repercussions (who else was involved, who wound up on the losing side). Many commentators took note of the Economist’s cover:

But despite the dramatic image and the use of the pejorative “banksters,” the article combined some helpful analysis with a call not to act against banks in haste

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Satyajit Das: Mr. Smith Goes to Leaves Wall Street

By Satyajit Das, derivatives expert and the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011)

Barclays Bank’s admission that they “fixed” money markets rates and JP Morgan’s admission that so called hedges were “incorrect” are merely symptoms of a deeply compromised global financial system. Significantly, even The Economist, sympathetic to capitalism and finance generally, resorted to the word “banksters”. Something is rotten it the state of global finance.

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Massive Furor in UK Over Libor Manipulation; Where’s the Outrage Here?

In case it isn’t yet apparent to you, the unfolding scandal over manipulation of Libor and its Euro counterpart Euribor is a huge deal. Even though at this point, only Barclays, the UK bank that was first to settle, is in the hot lights, at least 16 other major financial players, which means pretty much everybody, is implicated.

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Why Don’t Americans Take More Vacations? Blame It on Independence Day

An article in the Boston Review by professor of sociology Claude Fischer falls prey to a pattern that is all too common: attributing social/political outcomes to American attitudes without bothering to examine why those attitudes came to be.

Let me give you a bit of useful background before I turn to the Fischer article as an illustration of a lack of curiosity, or worse, among soi disant intellectuals in America, and how it keeps Americans ignorant as to how many of our supposed cultural values have been cultivated to inhibit disruptive thought and action.

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Philip Pilkington: Neoclassical Economics and the Foreclosing of Dissent – The Inner Death of a Social Science

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Heterodox economists – that is, those that do not subscribe to the neoclassical research program – often claim that they are marginalised within the profession. Anyone who has had dealings with academia would instinctively take such complaints with a pinch of salt. Indeed, academic quarrels often have as much to do with who said what at a dinner party as they have to do with questions of high theory. Academics, for better or for worse, are often characterised by their independent-mindedness… and with it: their stubbornness. This often leads them to partake in intellectual factionalism.

However, when I started studying economics and talking to heterodox economists, it quickly struck me that something wholly different was going on.

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Mark Ames: The Left’s Big Sellout – How the ACLU and Human Rights Groups Quietly Exterminated Labor Rights

By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. Cross posted from The Daily Banter.

Progressive intellectuals have been acting very bipolar towards labor lately, characterized by wild mood swings ranging from the “We’re sorry we abandoned labor, how could we!” sentiment during last year’s Wisconsin uprising against Koch waterboy Scott Walker, to the recent “labor is dead/it’s all labor’s fault” snarling after the recall vote against Gov. Walker failed.

The intellectual-left’s wild mood swings between unrequited love towards labor unions, and unrequited contempt, got me wondering how this abandonment of labor has manifested itself.

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The Semiotics of Markets

By Sell on News, a global macro equities analyst. Cross-posted from http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2012/06/finance-and-the-mafia-state/“>Macrobusiness.

The Economist this week had an interesting discussion about the epidemiology of financial contagion. It is interesting to observe the use of language. The article starts out with a correct observation about how economists choose a particular type of language used to lend their observations credibility:

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Michael Hudson/Jeffrey Sommers: Latvia is No Model for Austerity

By Michael Hudson and Jeffery Sommers, a distinguished professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee respectively, who have both advised members of Latvia’s government on alternatives to austerity. They are also contributors to the forthcoming book by Routledge Press: The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-Economic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic Model. Cross posted from the Financial Times by permission of the authors

Austerity’s advocates depict Latvia as a plucky country that can show Europe the way out of its financial dilemma – by “internal devaluation”, or slashing wages. Yet few of the enthusiastic commentators have spent enough time in the country to understand what happened.

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