Re: RE: RE: Modernism and Its Endless Returns to the Source , was Re: ...
Carrol, post modern emerges with both transformations in modern art and post-structuralist discourses. perhaps they merge in the 1960's with the situationists, guy deboard,et al, the involvement of Henri Lefebvre with a political-arts movement that rejected orthodoxy of all forms, defined the society of the spectacle. Post modern emerges with transformations in post-structuralism? What does that mean? Postmodernity waited for _de la Grammatologie_? It is difficult to take seriously that the situationists or Debord are some radical break with the past. The theory of the derive--situationism's urban component--took its cue from surrealism, with the added (Hegelian) assumption that political vanguardism could result from applying aesthetic avante-guardism to the public realm, aufgehebt into some new aesthetico-political utopia. It was the revved-up theory of the Crystal Palace writ large--very 1859. (If you've been to Urban Outfitters lately, you see this vision turned inside out: there, the aesteticized public space is drawn down to the size of the domestic and sartorial; in the absence of a reality of the situationist vision, the store's planners have covered it with projections and images of what the world outside isn't.) Interesting as Society of the Spectacle is, Debray has always been right about it: at bottom, it's History and Class Consciousness written for the age of (first-world) mass media, and crudely at that. Here I have to voice my contempt for many second rate Anglo-American academics who jump on such a bandwagon start labeling categorizing, talking writing ABOUT things rather than participating in THE THING (PROCESS) ITSELF, thus sowing even more confusion about that process. Not clear on this. Are arguments skeptical of the periodizing value of postmodern themselves postmodern--ie participating in the process itself? Or are they just sowing confusion? Christian
Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: fiscal policy
Did you get these income and savings #s from FoF? Christian - Original Message - From: Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2001 3:19 PM Subject: [PEN-L:18104] Re: RE: Re: RE: fiscal policy Forstater, Mathew wrote: Doug - so are you expecting that when figures for the current period come out, there will not be a reduction in aggregate income, only a change in the proportions of spending and saving? There may well be a reduction in aggregate income, but over the last 4-5 months, the personal savings rate went from 0.9% to 4.1% - still a ways from the long-term average of over 8%. So it could definitely go higher in anxious times. And as for investment, well as every Keynesian knows, confidence is extremely important to investment, and that's basically the motor of the system. Doug
Re: Re: fiscal policy
That's a big stimulus program - the biggest fiscal stimulus in at least 40 years, according to estimates I just saw from Wall Street guru Ed Hyman of ISI. A lot of it is targeted at the lower and middle income brackets, too. Bush is proposing a more aggressive stimulus program than the Dems or the AFL-CIO did. Doug How would you measure the size of this stimulus against others? Would it be measured only against other packages deemed stimulus rather than just deficit spending? What's ISI? Christian
Re: intro macro text
Hi Peter, I've been spending some time reading macro textbooks and I'm wondering what your particular reasons for not wanting AS/AD in there. Could you explain? -Christian - Original Message - From: Peter Dorman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2000 5:12 PM Subject: [PEN-L:810] intro macro text It's time for me to start looking for another introductory macroeconomics text. My criteria are: (1) clear exposition, preferably stripped down to the essentials, and (2) as little use of AS/AD as possible. (2) is really the most important. I'm one of those who think AS/AD is intellectually suspect, and I don't want to drag the issue into the classroom. I would much rather not assign the chapters that use this model. The question then becomes, does the text put its AS/AD stuff into a few clearly demarcated sections, or is it integrated into the full exposition? Please note that political/intellectual compatibility is not a criterion. The course is designed along critical thinking and empirical testing lines, and a reactionary text would be just as useful as a progressive one. In fact, a sympathetic treatment of new classical macro could be a plus. Any suggestions? Thanks, Peter
Re: Re: irrrational (feminist) calculations
My own view is that this problem is (partly) due to the fact that the gay men who control the fashion are not interested in real women but prefer them to look asexual or androgynous. Oh yeah, all my straight male students barf when I mention Tyra Banks. But now I see it: they're all dupes of an evil cabal of queer taste mavens led by the late Gianni Versaci--who undoubtedly controls their urges by way of media synergies forged with David Geffen. If only they could see the real women beyond the fashion industry, not prey to the fairy schemes of cultural decline-- women like Anna Kournikova. This was all covered in the _Narcissus_ chapter of _Dialectic of Enlightenment_, right? Ugh.
Brookings Phillips Curve Paper
Hey, Has anybody checked out the article by these Brookings folks about the changing face of NAIRU? It was mentioned a week or ten days ago in a WSJ article. I'm just reading through the abstract, but it seems that the basic idea here is that NAIRU changes depending on how wagemakers use information about inflation. Their idea is that wagemakers (and employees) tend to include inflationary expectations in their wage demands/offers only as inflation goes up. (ie. they don't act fully rationally, only "near-rationally".) One implication of this seems to be that, below a certain threshold, inflation is only secondarily wage-push inflation, and so must come from other sources. I'm supposing this would mean a change in Fed policy below some threshold inflation rate or above some (otherwise "low") unemployment rate. It doesn't seem to me, as the abstract suggests, to question the natural rate itself. The link below is for the abstract only. Christian http://www.brook.edu/views/papers/dickens/2602.htm
Re: Concerning Wynne Godley
Michael P wrote a while ago: "Wynne's work is based on basic accounting principles and so has the potential of being understood, and maybe even convincing. He shows what's behind the boom, and shows what would have to occur for it to continue, and that such a scenario is unlikely, but even trying it will be dangerous. The work also has important policy implications. Abolish the surplus, for starters." I have a question about the accounting principles, though. Godley uses the accounting identity that the private financial balance, the trade balance and the gov't balance (written as a deficit) have to sum to zero. I take this to be a restatement of the basic macro identity S - I = (G + TR - TA) + NX. No? This suggests that public sector surpluses add to private sector liabilities. I can understand that a surplus destroys certain kinds of wealth (ie govt debt), but I don't get how that becomes a balance sheet liability for the private sector. Christian
Re: Re: Re: Tax the Dead, They Won't Mind
I *finally* stop doing vulgar materialism and start doing cultural studies, and he wants facts... As a matter of fact, cultural studies so-called is very interested in facts. But, many times for the worst, it's not interested in their fact-ness. It is interested in the way that facts create meaning. That's not always a bad thing either. But, whatever. I don't find this argument persuasive because it *is* a public finance issue, or it should be made one. Historicizing Republicanism is fine. But in the present, doesn't this seem like one in a long list of measures that transfer wealth to the very richest? In this case, I much prefer your version of "vulgar materialism" (ie public finance) to "it makes me sad." The latter might be true, but it's beside the point. All best Christian
Re: Re: Re: Concerning Wynne Godley
Imagine that the households hold large amounts of government debt as assets. Other things being equal, if the government runs surpluses, then those assets disappear. I get that. I don't get why the disappearance of those assets automatically means that the wealth once held in them becomes a liability. Is it assumed that turning treasuries into cash amounts to a debit or consumption/investment? Christian
From the PC annals
Tom, what's the Leeson text you're citing? The most recent BIS annual report uses the Phillips curve to speculate about the effectiveness of a single ECB monetary policy. The authors judge that, although each country might have its own specific output gap/inflation relations, "imposing a common relationship does not worsen the ability of the Philips curve to predict inflation on the basis of the output gap." It cites a PC that uses plotted EU values to prove that they all lie reasonably near the curve--the one that they used the EU values to construct in the first place. The authors note that the slope of the PC in the 90's is much flatter than in the 70s and 80s--around .3 instead of .6. To account for the flatness of the curve, they suggest these reasons: "lower inflation, more credible monetary policies and downward nominal wage or price rigidities." So how is that an explanation? Lower inflation and more credible monetary policies can't explain the flatness of the curve. Lower inflation / output gap correspondence is what PC measures. More credible monetary policies likewise is an effect in search of a cause--more credible than what? Given what assumptions? Beating a dead horse, Christian
Re: Re: Re: Re: Moses and monetarism (fwd)
If there would be a philosophy or literature person here, s(he) would *really* be pissed, not only by the unprofessional use of language but also by ignorance. I am not a big fun of hermeneutics and deconstruction either, but I never make the mistake of considering those theorists writing outside the realm of philosopy of science. As something of a litcritter myself, I find denunciations of "lit crit sh*t" kinda banal. Like, okay, it's *just* literature (or fiction)---whatever. The basic point of such "sh*t" is that knowledges, like other things, are historical. There are no hidden meanings in texts--there are meanings generated in one way or another, by readers, schools, listservs, etc. (There are, btw, plenty of reasons to regard decon and other stuff as "sh*t": the things mentioned in this discussion are not among them.) As for PC, Jim said its empirical data waiting for a theory. Certainly. But it's not treated as such, generally--least of all by people like Greenspan and Co., who treat it as a full blown theory that needs to be disproved. There could be other uses, but I don't see them manifest very widely--though maybe I'm not looking hard enough. Christian
Re: Re: Moses and monetarism
But the positive/normative mix could be very different: it seems to me
that
the NAIRU theory could easily be interpreted as an argument for
overthrowing capital. "Capitalism requires a reserve army THAT BIG to
keep
it from punishing us with accelerating inflation??"
The way the PC gets explained in macro textbooks, though, there's no reserve
army, and there is no "it" that punishes "us." The PC is a graphic
representation of empirical evidence supporting an economic law. If you
start using a different lexicon ("capitalism," "reserve army," "punishment,"
etc.), you're not talking PC any more. You're talking about the uses of PC,
which is a different kettle of fish.
How do people who believe in PC make sense of Japan? Does it work all that
well with European numbers?
Christian
Workplace 3.1
distribute widely
an all-new format includes breaking news: * occupation at uiuc * strike
at uc * sit-in at osu * decision at the nlrb* vote at emu * election at
cuny * teach-in at gwu *
Issue 3.1 (May 2000) of *workplace: a journal for academic labor* now
available at:
http://www.workplace-gsc.com/
contributions by: * jamie owen daniel * doug henwood * ken surin * rich
daniels * leo parascondola * chantal sundaram * doug ivison * ellie
kennedy * mikael swayze * sarah riegel * aparna sundar and kyoko sato *
and many others
Feature sections
"The WTO and After," edited by Christian Gregory
"Organizing Canada," edited by Daniel Kim ("These young people are
being starved and bullied," wrote Margaret Atwood)
Interviews
"This raises the question of why labor has suddenly become a field in
which undergraduates and even high school students get energized and do
work. It feels like a new field to struggle in.." Barbara Bowen,
speaking with Ann Wallace
"I might call it the forgotten generation, to reflect the daunting fact
that a majority of people who did graduate work through the 90s have not
gotten or will not get permanent jobs." Jeffrey Williams, speaking with
Felicia Carr
_
Re: Re: RE: Regulation theory
Howdee, Regulation theory has any number of origins--Alain Lipietz, one its exemplars, argued that the analyses of "regulation" were in part an attempt to push the limits of Althusser's notion of "reproduction" in such a way as to imagine how different kinds of externalities, path dependencies, etc. were indispensible to capital's expansion (ie. the Keynesian welfare state). The term regulation, Lipietz argued, didn't just refer to the kinds of formal or official "rules" that guided labor-capital relations and reproduction: it referred also to the informal rules of behavior, custom, belief that were also indispensible for a regime of capital accumulation to take hold and become "self-sustaining." In his book "Mirages and Miracles," he describes the term "mode of regulation" by using Bourdieu's term "habitus"as a rough approximation. For both he and Aglietta, what was important about "Fordism" wasn't just the application of "Taylorist" principles of managment to industrial production, but also the constitution and operation of the monetary system during the "golden age" (Ch. 4 of Aglietta's _A Theory of Capitalist Regulation_). Since, Lipietz argued (in 1988) that the primary problem globally would be the need for debt as an indispensible "regulatory" condition of "globalization." (Lipietz, "The Enchanted World: Money, Inflation, World Crisis"). Bob Jessop has a fairly easy to read and very good intro to regulation theory in Michael Storper and Allen Scott, "Pathways to Industrialization and Regional Development." I'd also reccommend Alice Amsden's (dead-on) rejoinder to Lipietz about ten years ago in New Left Review. All best Christian
Re: Re: Re: Marx and financial crises
Doesn't that create a problem for your--and Michael's--argument that the only way out of a crisis (e.g., in Japan right now) is to liquidate real estate, liquidate labor, etc., as Andrew Mellon used to say? Edwin (Tom) Dickens I'm not Doug, but I thought the point was that Marx was wrong, but not for all places and all times. One could argue that Japan's crisis will require the liquidation of real estate especially, because the state has lent no small backing to its continued overvaluation--property taxes are much lower than sales or cap gains taxes All best Christian
Re: Re: Re: Re: Rentier's hoarding ?
Doug is suggesting that the problem _might_ be solved the good old Maggie Thatcher or Attila the Hun way, imposing a shake-out that drives out the weakling capitalists and imposing wage cuts, deunionization, etc. on the working class. This would raise the rate of profit and eventually stimulate accumulation and recovery, if it doesn't cause underconsumption. There are also significant risks to this strategy, if taken seriously. If such "restructuring" were to provoke a more general banking / financial system crisis, Japanese would dump all those dollars, bonds, and dollar-denominated assets that it holds, which could spell the end of the U.S. ability to act as consumer of last resort--and hence, to its "New Economy" euphoria. (I think Taggart Murphy makes this point pretty well in his NLR piece.) All best Christian
Re: Re: Re: Re: ? Rentier's hoarding ?
Keynes called this situation a liquidity trap and felt this was a good argument for fiscal policy and government investment programs. Unlike private firms, the federal government can finance long-term projects with short-term debt. Ellen How do you think the situation in Japan reflects on Keynes' theory? Is it a case of financiers refusing to lend long--after all, there is plenty of long-term government debt floating around, but there seems to be no demand for funds in the private sector. Even if the government expenditures are overstated, should not Japan's fiscal policy to date stimulated more demand for savings? Also, there would seem to be an argument to be made that consumers in Japan *are* hoarding, as they have been dumping savings into the postal savings system, taking them out of private sector banks since 1990 (currently 37% of total Japanese savings are in the postal savings system, compared to 29% ten years ago). All best Christian
Re: Rentier's hoarding ?
Well, Doug said that Japan confirms Marx rather than Keynes. I didn't catch this. Doug, would you repost your comments? Isn't there something more fundamental going on, namely competition between nations based on the production of automobiles, computers, and capital goods such as machine tools? In the world capitalist economy, there are winner nations and loser nations just as within a capitalist economy there are success stories like Bill Gates and loser stories. Well, I was looking at it in terms of fiscal, not monetary policy. But sure, at the end of the day, you could say there's something more fundamental going on--i.e. that this is the malign invisible hand, wrecking an economy with enormous overcapacity and insufficient exit from unprofitable lines. But Japan's overcapacity was an effect of the asset bubble at the end of the 80's, itself the effect of monetary easing after the 1987 US market crash (to support the dollar) and the asset management strategies after the Plaza Accord (to restore Japanese "competitiveness") that induced the bubble. So there is competition; there are winners and losers. But there's no getting around the "externalities" that make up the field. (And I don't think it's not Marxist to say this.) All best Christian
Re: RE: domestic partnership
I would settle for a little sense in the debate. I'm tired of hearing Repugs and Dums alike say that if you allow for same-sex marriages, you allow for people to marry their dogs. Gay marriage = no marriage, since if you allow gay marriage, you allow everything. Ugh. Then again, I find it hard to get worked up on behalf of interests so parochial as the Human Rights Campaign. Hate crime to them is really terrible if you're a rich white boy, but if you're black and you get dragged behind a pickup until you're dead, they apparently have nothing to say about that. So what about that school bond issue? Christian I would imagine some gays would insist on the whole loaf rather than a cultural compromise, since compromise fails to deconstruct discrimination. What happened w/the school bond issue? That's what gets my hormones raging. mbs
Re: Re: Re: Re: De Long on NPR
Brad De Long wrote: No time. I only managed to say a quarter of what I wanted to say. Bob Edwards wanted to talk about self-help. So all my points about how the wealth-to-income ratio is high; how the skewness of the wealth distribution has grown; how we have the seeming paradox of low personal saving with high domestic investment, and so forth got lost... Domestic investment isn't *that* high. Computer investment is high, and is further inflated in "real" terms by that wacky deflator, but other forms of investment - business and residential structures, for example - are actually pretty low. But of course we don't need buildings anymore in the weightless economy. It's the consumption share of GDP that's off the charts. Doug I've been wondering about this for some time. I've been looking at J.P. Morgan, _World Financial Markets_ 2 April 1999, which reports that, through the last quarter of 1998, shipments of non-defense capital goods have approached zero. I'm not quite sure what the scale of this graph is, though. It says % 3m/3m, saar where the information of the scale is. What does this mean? The context of this graph is a discussion / prediction of a U.S. slowdown, and some worrying about the level of private debt. Best Christian
[PEN-L:10221] Re: Re: [stormingheaven] ebonics?
wotjek wrote: That is an excellent argument. It is impossible to discuss language while abstracting form social, economic conditions that produced it. Language is merely a reflection of material reality that produced it, albeit it has an "institutional history' that outlives the material reality that gave birth to a certain form of expression. Impoverished reality of an underclass produces impoverished consciousness and impoverished means of communications. That is a very powerful anti-poverty arguement: we should abolish it, because it prevents people from achieving their full human potential. The p-c crowd, however, adhers to an idealistic viewpoint where symbols are more important than material reality. Thus symbolic expressions produced by underclass arre just as "valuable" as symbolic expressions of everyone else. Material poverty is "compensated" by symbolic richness. It is not difficult to see the reactionary nature of such idealistic pc attitudes in the preservation of social inequalities: it is, in fact, tantamount to saying: they can thrive on symbols, so we do not need to redistribute material wealth. Or worse yet, "we should not redistribute material wealth, because that may kill their 'culture'". Wotjek, you must be out of your mind. This is a good argument if you accept a couple of bad premises. First, "Ebonics" isn't a dialect or a substandard form of English. It is a pedagogical tool used to *talk about* some consistent features of non-standard dialects in a certain place at a certain time, etc. No one speaks Ebonics, just like no one speaks phonics. Second, language is not just a reflection of material reality. Language is a production--and like all forms of production it has places, durations, times, etc. In other words, it is not merely a superstructural byproduct of some material reality. It's bound up in its production and reproduction. Most of the so-called pc-ers that you talk about understand this. There are all kinds of pragmatic reasons for learning "standard English" whatever that happens to mean in a certain place or time. No one ever denied that--except most of the media during the whole Ebonics fracas. Most of all, using Ebonics doesn't mean jettisoning a minority culture or the sober recognition that some languages will get you farther than others, often for very stupid reasons. But your representation of the whole thing trivializes everything that could be productive about the discussion. Christian
[PEN-L:10200] Re: NY Times op-ed piece on global financial crisis
"The fact is that although millions of people in emerging markets have suffered horribly -- losing their jobs, going bankrupt, sinking into poverty -- the crisis wasn't long enough or deep enough to result in the kinds of corrective measures that would result in a less risky global economy. Indeed, little of a fundamental nature has changed, and in some respects the environment is more fragile today. . ." Indeed. As the new growth regime depends more and more heavily on the fortunes of the dollar, the entire arrangement becomes incredibly prone to collapse. According to UNCTAD, during 1998 the dollar appreciated significantly (upwards of 10%, as much as 77% for Indonesia) against every major currency except 4 (DM, pound, franc, lira--against which it depreciated by less than 1% average). For now, the U.S. can serve the happy functions of consumer of last resort and international finance shelter. As the U.S. accrues more debt and allows its balance of payments deficit to head skyward, the dollar will cease to be able to serve its reserve function--and the low inflation holiday in the U.S. will end. The new prosperity will look very different from that angle. The IMF's resistance to even the most modest of reforms, like Chilean-style capital inflow surcharges, some regulation of short-term cross-border interbank lending, or new terms for contracts (non-acceleration clauses, etc.) has been incredibly short-sighted. Were not the IMF an annex of the Fed-Treasury-Wall St., one has to wonder if we'd understand this to be the scandal it is. Christian
[PEN-L:8569] LM magazine
louis, so, you're going to send this puffball little recommendation for moby's new cd to the list (moby? did i read you right? with that soporific cheezball mirthful-dirge-cum-moog "everything is wrong" crap? the guy who peddles his meat-bad-jesus-good politics for warner brothers? ... ), and then try to tag doug for publishing an article in LM? come on. it would be different if doug weren't right--in fact, what's so amazing is how scrupulously you actually avoided talking about the content of the piece. correct me if i'm wrong, but you seem to be pissed because doug published a piece that skewers marxist romanticization of crisis in a journal that skewers the left in general. or that's apostolic about its relation to rcp. so what's your point? if you're trying to say that doug isn't a genuine revolutionary (z), or not really marxist (yawn), or doesn't have good political judgment (?), how bout just saying so? at least then we wouldn't have to wade through all of this innuendo. and maybe there might be something else to say about the politics of publishing (something not already covered in the thread about your o'connor review), eh? best christian
[PEN-L:6842] Re: Re: Re: Bubble bursts finally with a vengence!
howdee, although wall street prices aren't indexed in the cpi, i'm wondering if there is some relationship between the stock market boom and inflation. perhaps what the notion of a "bubble" is supposed to imply--but given that securities are relatively liquid, wouldn't there be something to the idea that the boom increases money supply (broadly construed) and hence might have something to do with inflation? how much of this would depend on international markets? that is, does this come down, internationally and nationally, to a problem of liquidity preference? christian
