Tag Archives: Making Life More Brutish

I have been reading Brown (2015). She acknowledges neoliberalism is difficult to define: "Three decades out, rich accounts by geographers, economists, political theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and historians grappling with these questions have established that neoliberalism is neither singular nor constant in its discursive formulations and material practices. This recognition exceeds the idea that a clumsy or inapt name is draped over a busy multiplicity; rather...

[embedded content]If you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you are sitting Suppose one wants to discuss capitalism versus socialism or some smaller matter. One might think the discipline of political economy, now known as economics would be helpful. But it is not. What is taught in most universities in the United States was shown to be nonsense more than half a century ago. I find it hard to account for this except on the grounds of political ideology. I realize...

[embedded content]Jeremy Rudd addresses the Cambridge Society for Economic Pluralism Jeremy Rudd has written: Mainstream economics is replete with ideas that 'everyone knows' to be true, but that are actually arrant nonsense. For example, 'everyone knows' that: aggregate production functions (and aggregate measures of the capital stock) provide a good way to characterize the economy's supply side; over a sufficiently long span - specifically, one that allows necessary price...

Authortarians in the United States are currently competing to see who can publish the most stupid book. Mark Levin is a strong contender. Much more drivel exists in the book under review in this post than described here. Levin goes on about selected philosophers in odd ways. I haven't seen others point out his curious grouping of Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx. They supposedly "argue for the individual's subjugation into a general will, or greater good, or bigger cause built on radical...

"The University [of Chicago] is the best investment I ever made in my life." -- John D. Rockefeller Consider the following people and selected activities: Lewis Brown founded the American Enterprise Institute, in 1938. Jasper Crane cofounded the Foundation for Economic Education, in 1946. Leonard Read cofounded the Foundation for Economic Education, in 1946. Harold Luhnow, even before 1947, directed spending for the Volker Fund. Sir Antony Fisher funded the Institute for Economic...

As far as I am concerned, cost-push inflation is a manifestation of class conflict between workers and owners. In the late 1970s, Paul Volker and Ronald Reagan took the side of the owners. I am willing to accept that Volker genuinely believed in Milton Friedman's incorrect quantity theory of money. And, since then, workers have been getting a smaller share in increased productivity. Some obituaries of Paul Volker exhibit an understanding of what he did. But I want to talk about my...

Here is a post from a blog devoted to cybercommunism. The blogger is glowing about Paul Cockshoot's work on refuting Hayek's supposed refutation of the possibility of a post-capitalist society. William Milberg writes about how it is becoming more common to use the word "capitalism", a word mainstream economists had mostly stopped using. Herbert Giants and Rakesh Khurana write about the corrupting effects of neoclassical economics on what is taught in business school and then practiced by...

This list is mostly a matter of aspirational reading. Maybe I want to read Ted Burczak's Socialism after Hayek. (The Amazon page has one of Herb Gintis' long reviews.) Binyamin Appelbaum's The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society is not even out yet, and already some mainstream economists are whining about it on twitter. William R. Clark and Vincent Arel-Bundock have a paper, Independent but not indifferent: Partisan bias in monetary policy at the...

The literature on neoliberalism is large. Here are some scholarly books on this subject or on related matters: The power of market fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's critique, by Fred Block & Margaret R. Somers (2016). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism's stealth revolution, by Wendy Brown (2015). The great persuasion: Reinventing free markets since the Depression, by Angus Burgin (2015). The strange non-death of neoliberalism, by Colin Crouch (2013). The birth of biopolitics: lectures at...