EconoSpeak

Carlos Joly, a finance-and-climate consultant, has a piece today on the upcoming election in Norway, one of the world’s major exporters of oil and gas.  To its credit, Norway puts its earnings in a fund to support future generations after its deposits are exhausted, known to economists as the Hartwick Rule.  That’s great for economic sustainability in Norway, but what about the threat its fossil fuel industry poses to the entire world?Joly notes that the mainstream parties consider only...

Back in 1979 philosopher Jean-François Lyotard was commissioned to do a report for the province of Quebec that turned into a book, The Postmodern Condition. I remember that book well because I read it during my graduate studies that focused on narrative analysis. A central theme of Lyotard's book was the "death of metanarratives," such as the Idea of Progress or Marx's Class Struggle as the engine of history.Fast forward to 2021 and "The Narrative" has become a core talking point of...

 Over this past weekend I was in Portland visiting for the first time family who gathered for a reunion, with my second daughter, Caitlin, with two of my grandsons, having moved there in January from San Francisco (she is a psychiatrist with the VA system). I had been through a few times in a car, but never stopped.  So curious to check it out.  I generally liked the place and had a good time.I also decided to check up on some of the hyperbolic claims I have heard over the past year plus or...

"The Ambivalence of Disposable Time: The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties At Two Hundred"Tom Walker, Contributions to Political Economy, Volume 40, Issue 1, June 2021, Pages 80–90, https://t.co/asxJczusCc pic.twitter.com/joEa6ZUdnh— Charles Wentworth Dilke (@Sandwichman_eh) June 22, 2021

When a framing becomes ubiquitous you forget it’s a framing.  This is what popped into my head when I read a headline this morning about the infrastructure bills pending in Congress: Democrats Hit the Road to Sell Big Spending Bills as Republicans Attack.Yes, they are proposals to spend money; that’s one way to look at it.  But they are also proposals to produce infrastructure and social services—the spending is for something.  Opponents have every reason emphasize the spending side, as in...

The world is made up of systems.  Our body is a system, or in fact a system of systems.  What we call “society” is another system of systems, as is the natural environment.  And all these meta-systems are themselves elements in even more encompassing systems that interconnect them.  But these systems are very complex, difficult to explain or predict.  One successful strategy, which has had a revolutionary impact on how we live, is analysis.  This approach segments complex entities into...

 Probably not, but recent events in Afghanistan suggest an example.  This would be the sudden departure just over two weeks ago on Aug. 15 from Kabul of then Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, which triggered the sudden collapse of his government and the unexpectedly sudden takeover of Kabul by the Taliban. Even they did not see this coming.  What was the black swan event involved?  It was reported in the Aug. 29 Washington Post that Ghani was told early in the afternoon that Taliban were in his...

The draft "Chapter Six" was preceded by an earlier version of the analysis of formal and real subsumption of labour under capital. That earlier version is 28 pages long in volume 34 of the Marx-Engels Collected Works. "Chapter Six," proper, is 111 pages long. The earlier version contains one mention of the "labour socially necessary." The later version contains 12 references to: socially necessary labour time (3)labour time socially necessarysocially necessary labour (4)objectified labour......

I thought this was going to be the final installment of my review of Marx's writing on socially necessary labour time but then I discovered, as I was going through my posts that I haven't done the draft "chapter six" that contains the fascinating discussion of formal and real subsumption. So there will be either one or two mores posts. Yay!!An index page of all the posts so far -- both numbered and unnumbered -- is here. Chapter 38, "Differential rent: general remarks," contains an...

Is it my imagination, or do vax- and mask-hesitant people, reported in news stories about the Covid Divide, almost always say they “have done their research” or something like that?  The medical people and public health advocates that get interviewed rarely seem to use this phrase, at least not in the first person.  More research, more unhinged beliefs—how does that happen?There are many parts to this story, but one is summed up in the word “research” itself.  In high school, students are...