Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Why Did Trump Initially Support The Saudi-UAE Effort To Overthrow Qatar’s Government?  One of the more curious things in 2017 in the first year of the Trump presidency was how when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) placed a boycott on Qatar and more directly attempted to overthrow the government of Qatar, President Trump openly supported this effort initially.  He would later be pulled back from this position as his first Secretary...

The Ambivalence of Verfügbare Zeit Back in December I posted an excerpt from the Grundrisse, Reichtum ist verfügbare Zeit und nichts weiter, without noticing that in it was a prototype for Marx’s concept of socially necessary labour time (Gesellschaftlich notwendige Arbeitzeit):  Die Schöpfung von viel disposable time außer der notwendigen Arbeitszeit für die Gesellschaft überhaupt und jedes Glied derselben (d.h. Raum für die Entwicklung der...

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time VI: TSV part 3, chapter 21: “Our pamphleteer overlooks two things” Although Marx discussed socially necessary labour time in chapters 4, 8, 9, 16, 17, and 20, he didn’t mention it in chapter 21 where he discussed the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties by Charles Wentworth Dilke. Marx’s reticence here is notable if only for the fact that the pamphlet proposed a method for calculating a...

Imagine that in the 1970s you bought a plat along the coast in Florida that was on a large pile of sand that was basically at sea level upon which you planned to build a four-hundred unit, twelve story tall, condominium complex. This complex was to rest on a slab of concrete that rested atop the pile of sand and a lot of long pilings driven deep into the pile (but not to bedrock). If you will, the building(s) were to rest atop a concrete many-legged...

by Joseph Joyce “The Sources of International Investment Income in Emerging Market Economies” The Review of International Economics has published my paper on “The Sources of International Investment Income in Emerging Market Economies” in its latest issue. You can find the paper here, and this is the abstract: We investigate international investment income flows in 26 emerging market countries during the period of 1998–2015. Net investment...

by Joseph Joyce Will A Rise in Interest Rates Lead to a New Debt Crisis? The question of when the Federal Reserve will begin to reverse its loose policy stance continues to be a topic of widespread speculation. At last month’s meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, its members showed a willingness to cut back on asset purchases in 2022 and to raise interest rates in 2023 but kept monetary policy on its current setting due to slower...

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time: TSV part 3, chapter 20 Marx’s discussion of socially necessary labour time in Chapter 20 of Theories of Surplus Value is notable for the fact that it comes immediately before Chapter 21, where he doesn’t mention socially necessary labour time (but the concept lingers just below the surface in the latter chapter). He talked about how piece-work is actually a kind of time work in which the piece rate is set according...

by David Zetland Why we’re failing to stop climate chaos Climate chaos (CC) is the largest threat to our collective prosperity. (Water scarcity, biodiversity loss, increasing vulnerability to viruses and bacteria are a few more.) But “we” (citizens of rich countries) are having a hardER time understanding and addressing CC due to a few strategic mistakes, i.e., Most discussions of impacts focus on 2100, which is too far away from our time...

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time IV: TSV part 2, chapters 8, 9, 16, and 17 Nothing notable in these chapters. Chapter 8: Poor quality land requires more labour time than socially necessary (which is to say the average labour time required to produce a given output). Chapter 9: Socially necessary labour time is permanently established in nature, in industry it is constantly disappearing. Chapter 16: The value of labour is established by the...

Topical thread Unemployment is socially necessary. Tags: Disposable Industrial Reserve Army