Book Review – Page 3 – 黑料社区

In Service of Neoliberalism – The Art and Science of Perpetuating the 鈥楽tate versus Market鈥� Dichotomy

February 10, 2020February 11, 2020 RaghunathLeave a comment

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How should one assess a book on economic policy that takes a dim view of the state and redistribution in a country that is home to multiple and intersecting inequalities? Economic inequality and the role of the state in tackling inequality emerged as a major talking point in the last decade and it is likely that it will continue to animate academic and policy debates in the following decade too. Therefore, it would not be unreasonable to evaluate any book on economic policy based on the seriousness with which it engages with inequality and how it imagines state intervention in the economy. This review seeks to do precisely that by unpacking the conventional wisdom about the nature and role of the state presented in the book by Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah.Read More »

Is Degrowth an Alternative to Capitalism?

January 5, 2020 G眉ney I艧谋kara4 Comments

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The newest book by Giorgos Kallis, one of the most prolific degrowth advocates is entitled Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care. It is a short and accessible read which contains some important and unconventional arguments. In what follows, I will first briefly summarize the core arguments of the book, which promises to provoke important discussions on the matter of limits and subjects. Then I will reflect on the fuzziness of the primarily cultural conceptualization of capitalism, and argue that neither self-limitation nor degrowth qualifies as a mode of production, such that they could constitute an alternative to capitalism.Read More »

Finance Damages Democracy – and Brexit Will Make it Worse!

November 5, 2019 ewakarwowski1 Comment

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The 鈥榙o or die鈥� Brexit deadline this Halloween has come and gone without bringing much certainty about the policy and political landscape going forward. UK voters who hoped for a clear-cut end of the Brexit saga were disappointed as big questions remain unanswered while new ones have been added: What will the December election bring? Will there be a second referendum? A different deal? A further extension?聽

There seems, however, one definite outcome of the Brexit process: UK democratic institutions have been hollowed out permanently. Individual politicians have certainly contributed to this outcome. However, it would be too easy to blame the disintegration of democracy in rich countries entirely and exclusively on Johnson, Trump, and the like. Rather more systematic and structural trends are at play, which raise the old question of whether capitalism and democracy are compatible or rather contradictory systems. The claim that capitalism will usher in democracy, since free markets rely on an open societal order, or at least fundamentally weaken authoritarian regimes, has been proven untenable. This is particularly clear as the Chinese Communist Party tightens its grip over social media, using information technology to survey ever-growing parts of Chinese people鈥檚 lives.聽聽聽

It is striking though that among rich countries the crassest examples of democratic disintegration are unravelling in the two Anglo-Saxon economies which have been hailed as economic success stories during the 1990s and early 2000s: the UK and US. Much of their growth spurts over this period was fuelled by the increasing size and influence of their finance industries and so is the current hollowing-out of their democratic institutions. In brief, we are currently experiencing the effects that financialisation has on democracy. Of course, capitalism and democracy are generally difficult to reconcile as convincingly argued by Polanyi. The fact that a democratic order calls for equality of all citizens before the law and provides all of us with the same vote, while our economic order simultaneously introduces a strict hierarchy based on ownership is possibly the clearest illustration of the conflict between democracy and economic order. But it is further stoked under financialisation. This blog post unpacks how financialization affects democracy in a variety of ways, through three examples, namely social provisioning, the Euro crisis, and the Brexit saga.Read More »

An Alternative Economics Summer Reading List, 2019

July 3, 2019July 3, 2019 Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven2 Comments

pasted image 0.png This summer, we take stock of the most interesting economics-related books that have been released over the past year. Every year, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times makes a similar list. However, by his聽, he only reads within the tradition of his own training in mainstream economics. While聽聽includes several excellent books, such as聽聽by Frances Coppola and聽聽by Victoria Bateman, we are still struck by the strong white-male-mainstream-Western bias in Wolf鈥檚 list, with the books almost all written by white (20/21) men (18/21) about topics mostly focused on the US and Europe.聽

To complement Wolf鈥檚 list, we have put together an Alternative Economics Summer Reading list with authors from across the world, with more varied backgrounds 鈥� and writing about more wide-ranging topics, and from a wider variety of critical perspectives. Our alternative list also reflects our belief that issues such as structural racism, imperialism, ideology and the philosophy of science are central to understanding economics.聽

It is not that we think that Martin Wolf is in particular responsible for the lack of diversity and monism in our reading decisions: other curators such as the Economist (for example,聽) also perpetuate the myth that the books worth reading about economics are mostly those written about the US and Europe, by white men trained trained in mainstream economics.聽Read More »

An Alternative Economics Summer Reading List

July 1, 2018July 1, 2018 Carolina Alves10 Comments

by Carolina Alves, , and Ingrid H. Kvangraven

This is a response list to recommending Economics books of 2018 for summer reading. While there are many good books listed, we were struck by the consistent monism in his choices, as the books are all by scholars based in either the UK or the US, 12/13 of the authors are men and most of them come from the same theoretical tradition. Such lists perpetuate the strong white male – and mainstream – biases in our field (the recent list by suffers from the same biases).

To counter these biases, and with the purpose of broadening our field to become more inclusive of diverse approaches and perspectives, we have put together an alternative list. We deliberately chose books by scholars approaching Economics with alternative theoretical frameworks and by scholars from groups that tend to be excluded from the field, namely women, people of color, and scholars from the Global South. We recognize that no one is exempt from biases, which is why we are providing an explanation for the motivation behind our selection. Due to institutional and language barriers we were unable to include as many scholars from the Global South as we would have liked. For example, we would love to read the new book by Laura Carvalho, but we are still waiting for the English translation. We hope you enjoy it and welcome more suggestions in the comments section.

Pitfalls of the Developmental State: The Fate of the Sudanese Economic Model

February 26, 2018February 26, 2018 tinashenyamundaLeave a comment

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I have lately been grappling with the question of how African states came into being, not just as political, but especially economic territorial units. Connected to this are questions of how experts, especially economists came to influence and account for what became national economies. At the center of the state, economy and society are critical question of development and welfare. How did independent African countries make sense of their inheritance and what mechanisms did they deploy to transform themselves into coherent nations of multiple but entangled identities with disparate circumstance but common material goals united by the logic of a national economy? As I grappled with these issues, a great new monograph informed by an impressive historiography has arrived. The author grounds his work in an archivally based history of the transformation of the Sudan into an economic unit between the 1940s and the 1960s. 鈥檚 new book: (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) is centred on addressing these question using the history of a territory that transformed from being an Anglo-Egyptian Sudan condominium into the independent state of Sudan.Read More »

Toward an Economic Theory of Imperialism?

July 5, 2017July 11, 2017 mohamedobaidyLeave a comment

鈥淥ur role is to widen the field of discussion, not to set limits in accord with the prevailing authority.鈥� Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)

This blog post aims to introduce Patnaik鈥檚 theory of imperialism 鈥� as developed in – and its relation to economic theory. According to Patnaik a cogent economic theory that seeks to understand the laws of capitalism necessarily stems from a coherent theory of money due to the central place money plays in a capitalist mode of production. Hence, the purpose of his scientific endeavor is to examine the underlying social arrangement behind the determination of the value of money. Consequently, the conceptual framework Patnaik establishes starts with the following question: what does determine the value of money?

e-Book Launch: Can Dependency Theory Explain Our World Today?

June 14, 2017May 1, 2018 黑料社区3 Comments

Is it time for dependency theory to make a comeback? Its central idea is that developed (鈥漜ore鈥�) countries benefit from the global system at the expense of developing (鈥漰eriphery鈥�) countries鈥攚hich face structural barriers that make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to develop in the same way that the already developed countries did. As neo-classical economics came to dominate the field in the 1980s, the theory lost prominence and traction. Given the vast imbalances that persist within and among nations in the global economy today, it鈥檚 an opportune time to revisit the framework.

To that end, INET鈥檚 Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) has released a new e-book, . The volume, released by YSI鈥檚 Economic Development Working Group, comprises interviews with 13 scholars from around the world who express a variety of viewpoints on the meaning and relevance of dependency theory in today鈥檚 context.

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