Tag Archives: Karl Polanyi

Karl Polanyi’s masterpiece The Great Transformation was written during the Second World War and published in 1944, but the relevance and importance of this preeminent book has continued to grow. 75 year later, The Great Transformation — an admirable treatise debunking the false creed of economic determinism and market fundamentalism, and elaborating on their hazardous ramifications — remains fresh and enlightening, and it is indispensable for understanding the current phenomena of our...

Weekend reading.The American ProspectKarl Polanyi Explains It All Robert Kuttner

Paul Krugman still wrong. The mainstream model of an economy based on general equilibrium, rational utility maximization, and money neutrality is one of a possible world that doesn't exist and can't exist in a monetary production economy. There is nothing wrong with constructing models of possible worlds, and, in fact, all models exist in possibility space, not real space. But it is wrong to claim or imply that such models of possible worlds apply to the real world when there is evidence...

Karl Polanyi famously argued that land, labor, and money are “fictitious commodities.” They cannot be fully subjected to the dictates of the market without spurring backlashes that seek to re-embed them in society.… Polanyi was right to see land and labor in parallel, but we should now go further in unpacking globetrotting versus place-based industries and ask why “common good” frames have been so frequently embraced for environmental issues and rejected for global labor issues. Economic...

More than a century ago, the effective operation of the public economy was a significant, active concern of economists. With the insurgence of market-centrism and rational choice economics, however, government was devalued, its role circumscribed and seen from a perspective of “market failure.” As Backhouse (2005) has shown, the transformation in economic thinking in the latter half of the 20th century led to a “radical shift” in worldview regarding the role of the state. The very idea of a...

Robert Kuttner reviews Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left by Gareth Dale (Columbia University Press).The New York Review of BooksThe Man from Red ViennaRobert Kuttner