Popular Geopolitics,Audiences and Identities: Reading the ‘War on Terror’ in the Philippines

Audience research has traditionally been neglected within the subfield of popular geopolitics. However in recent years, geographers are increasingly focusing on the making of geopolitical meanings by audiences as they consume popular culture and related texts. Drawing on recent assemblage thinking in geopolitics, this paper argues that audiences form part of the animators of a network that links the human body with places, environments, objects and discourses related to geopolitics. By investigating Filipinos’ critical readings of and engagements with the ‘war on terror’ in Mindanao as represented through the national newspaper, the Philippines Daily Inquirer, the agency and power of audiences in the creative enactments of geopolitics and geography are illuminated. As such, understanding the complex interactions between popular media and its audiences can prove useful in casting insights into the everyday, geopolitical ‘playing out’ of issues of terrorism, violence and peace in the Philippines context and beyond.     

Securitising the Unconscious: The Bush Doctrine of Preemption and Minority Report

Using Minority Report as its interpretive guide, this essay considers how the securitisation of the unconscious is performed in primarily fiction (film) but also ‘fact’ (US foreign policy). The essay makes two general arguments. Implicitly, it argues that American moralities and what I call US moral grammars of war are not only formulated in traditional realms of politics but in geopolitical moral imaginaries in which US foreign policy intersects with popular (often filmic) imaginaries as well as with narratives about the family. Elaborating on this final point about the family, the essay explicitly argues that the feminine is the keystone of the US moral grammar of war in the war on terror because it is the foundational figure upon whom a specific articulation of a moral US ‘we’ is constructed. What this means is that as the US ‘we’ looks ahead to who a future moral American US ‘we’ might become (which is the theme of Minority Report and a theme in everyday post-11 September American life), it ought to begin by understanding how the feminine both secures and insecures the complex relationship between justice and security, particularly as it functions in relation to the present-day Bush administration’s policies of securitising the unconscious.     

Malthus versus Condorcet revisited

The article poses some counter-factual questions concerning the intellectual relationship between Condorcet and Malthus in the light of the latter's attack on Condorcet's Esquisse, bearing in mind the common ‘Smithian’ basis of their thinking and their background as ‘social Newtonains’ with an interest in placing the science of morals and politics on a rational basis. Malthus's reasons for opposing Condorcet's solutions to the population problem and their divergence over redistribution of income through social insurance are considered. Some stereotypical and ideological interpretations of Malthus as a bioeconomic determinist with demoralizing and reactionary tendencies are also discussed.     

Economics in Institutional Perspective,Memorial Essays in Honor of K. William Kapp

In the past, the standard discussions of market failures in economics textbooks confined themselves to issues involving externalities, public goods, and common property (open access). Subsequent to George Akerlof’s famous article “The Market for ‘Lemons,’” discussions of the problems created by asymmetric information gradually became standard fare, but the issues raised by thinking of asymmetric information in economic matters extend far beyond the used car and health insurance markets that are normally used as the paradigm cases. In fact, consideration of the problems of information will inevitably lead to an examination of the problems of market manipulation and fraud, especially in light of the 2008 financial crisis. Akerlof has travelled this path himself as indicated by his recent book with Robert Shiller, Phishing for Phools (2015). Akerlof and Shiller provide a litany of examples of manipulation and deception in advertising and in many markets including financial markets. They also have a chapter on “The Resistance and its Heroes” that highlights some of the people and agencies that have worked to expose and reduce phishing, but this chapter is remarkably sparse. What this article attempts to do is to fill out some of this history by focusing on the work of American institutional economists from Veblen to Galbraith, who critically examined the issues of manipulation and deception in advertising, salesmanship, and finance. Some general considerations relating to the problem of fraud are also discussed.     

Rhodes,Mugabe and the Politics of Commemorative Toponyms in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT

This paper is based on former Zimbabwean President Robert Gabriel Mugabe’s ninety-third birthday celebrations. It uses and goes beyond the said ceremony to interrogate the politics of commemorative toponyms in post-independence Zimbabwe. The event took place on 25 February 2017 at a school whose name Rhodes Estate Preparatory School (REPS) was changed to Matopos Junior School prior to the celebrations. The methodological framing of this discussion consists of a critical reading of the media’s representation of the name change and the debates that followed. Reference is specifically made to two Zimbabwean newspapers, The Patriot, which featured the story on 2 March 2017 under the heading “Rhodes ‘legacy’ finally put to rest” and the ZimEye’s story of 26 February 2017 headlined “Mugabe removes Rhodes.” Theoretically, the paper is framed within the critical approach to toponymy that interprets commemorative place-nomenclature as political arenas which could be used to think through issues of history and memory. In particular, it is argued in this paper that in post-independence Zimbabwe, place names, especially commemorative toponyms, are political spaces par excellence which we can use to study not only the country’s colonial history but also its postcolonial realities.     

Psychological War in Vietnam: Governmentality at The United States Information Agency

ABSTRACT

The United States Information Agency (USIA) has received little sustained scrutiny from critical military geographers, despite the major role it played in waging the Cold War. This article outlines the USIA’s role in waging psychological war in support of the US mission in Vietnam, notably its establishment in 1965 of the Joint United States Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO). Through an analysis of USIA operations, this article argues that psychological war can be understood as a governmental strategy to exert power over the people and territory of Vietnam. Through an examination of problems related to evaluating and conducting research for psychological war, this article questions the extent to which the United States succeeded in establishing this power, concluding that the effects of psychological war in Vietnam were, at best, inconclusive, and offer little evidence to support contemporary strategies to ‘win hearts and minds’.     

Geopolitics and the Screen: War,the Body and Violence

The paper investigates the promise of Carl Schmitt's concept of ‘nomos’ for developing new spatial imaginaries apposite to the study of ‘the border’ in contemporary political life, as per the aims of the ‘Lines in the Sand’ research agenda. Schmitt introduced the idea of a ‘nomos of the earth’ to refer to the fundamental relation between space and political order. There have been various historical expressions of the nomos, from the Respublica Christiana, to the jus publicum Europaeum, to a post–World War II (dis)order yet to be adequately theorised. We aim to explore the relatively overlooked spatial ontology of Schmitt's work and suggest ways in which it might prompt alternative ways of thinking about borders and bordering practices as representative of broader dynamics in the relation between space and political order.     

The Economics of Karl Marx: Analysis and Applications

Abstract

Controversy focuses on three questions: Is capital a distinct factor of production? Is capital quantifiable in a theoretically consistent manner? Are process stories necessary around convergence to, or changes in, equilibrium interest rates? To all, Kaldor answers ‘yes’ to Knight's ‘no’. The controversy is historically important in: 1) shifting issues in recurring twentieth century capital theory controversies from periods of production to production functions, from roundaboutness to diminishing returns; 2) revealing Knight's position on increasing knowledge offsetting diminishing returns over time as an unacknowledged ‘precursor’ of new growth theory; 3) marking the turning point for Kaldor's attachment to Austrian theory.     

Mainstream economics, heterodoxy and academic exclusion: a review essay

Does the mainstream of economic thinking and analysis tend systematically to exclude ideas and approaches that could enrich the field, and, as a consequence, have important questions and issues been shunted aside for nonobjective reasons? Two recent volumes by heterodox economists that address these questions are Geoffrey Hodgson's How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science, and Steve Keen's Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences. I evaluate their claims of academic exclusion and assess the current state of (selective) pluralism within mainstream economics.     

‘Humour is Serious’ as a Geopolitical Speech Act: IMDb Film Reviews of Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator

Humour is a manifold cultural institution through which society and space become politicised. In this paper, the political nature of humour is discussed by dissecting the IMDb film reviews of Sacha Baron Cohen's comedy, The Dictator (2012), a parody of democracy in which the topics of racism, political incorrectness and sexism, as well as their relationship to the discourses of Neo-Orientalism and the Global War on Terrorism, are present. The reviews are perceived as speech acts, which establish broader interpretative patterns through which audience may approach the questions related to the serious and political aspects of humour. The analysis focuses on how the ‘humour is serious’ claim and similar arguments are expressed in order to condemn or support the use of ‘immature’ and sophomoric humour within the context of politically sensitive issues. Similarly, the paper scrutinises how IMDb functions as a stage on which opportunity for political participation becomes accessible.     

Geopolitics and territorial issues: Relevance for South America

This paper surveys the impact of geopolitical thinking as applied to issues of territory in Latin America, with special emphasis upon its Southern Cone. The relevance of geopolitics is examined as an ideological doctrine and as a normative framework to understand territorial changes, territorial conflicts that have not escalated into fully‐fledged wars, and rare cases of actual wars fought in the twentieth century in South America. I question the changing meaning of geopolitical doctrines following the ‘third wave’ of democratization in Latin America by suggesting more ‘positive’ avenues for the former pernicious “implications of geopolitical doctrines, including economic development and regional integration. Finally, I juxtapose ‘conventional’ geopolitics with more recent ideas of ‘critical’ geopolitics and its potential implementation in the region.     

Art,Geopolitics and Metapolitics at Tate Galleries London

Art galleries and museums have often been considered as sites at which the international and the political are both enacted and reworked. But how exactly does art ‘do’ geopolitics? Taking existing work on art and geopolitics in the gallery and museum as its departure point, this article advances a specific conceptual argument for how art does geopolitics that connects thinking in this area with broader debates in aesthetics and politics. Building on Jacques Rancière’s account of art as a dispositif, it explores the aesthetic politics – or metapolitics – through which artistic interventions have raised questions of oil within the Tate Galleries in London. Drawing out its ambiguities as well as potential critical implications, the article illustrates distinct ways in which the metapolitics of art may be activated via a discussion of The Robinson Institute, 2012, and of a series of interventions conducted since 2010 by the group Liberate Tate. In conclusion, the article draws out connections between the metapolitics of art and questions of governmentality.     

Item non-response on income and wealth questions

This study investigates the mechanisms determining item nonresponse focusing on three issues: First, is there significant heterogeneity in item non-response across financial questions and in the association of covariates with item non-response across outcomes? Second, can the informational value of surveys be improved by matching interviewers and respondents based on their characteristics? Third, how does offering a “don’t know” answer option affect respondent behavior? The questions are answered based on detailed survey and interviewer data from the German Socioeconomic Panel using a broad set of income and wealth outcomes. We find considerable heterogeneity in non-response across financial items, little explanatory power of interviewer-respondent matches and strong evidence that ‘‘don’t know’’ answers result from mechanisms that differ from those yielding valid responses and outright refusals to respond.     

Lifestyle changes and the lifestyle selection process

This paper presents an analysis of barriers to the uptake of eco-friendly ways of life that is based upon an evolutionary complex systems approach to the workings of the mind and the choices that people make. It questions the effectiveness of price-based policies for promoting change and emphasizes the role of non-price factors and complementarities in choice. Inducing behaviour change may therefore require ensuring consumers’ lifestyle prerequisites are met. In the light of Hayek’s (1952) book The sensory order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), the paper examines the systematic processes by which cognitions are formed and minds evolve, and potential for inducing changes via policy measures that aim to derail stereotypical lines of thinking. Though the paper’s theoretical perspective differs from the behavioural economics that underpins the ‘Nudge’ approach to policy, the paper’s analysis is intended to be complementary with the ‘Nudge’ approach.     

Emil Lederer’s Theory of Economic Fluctuations and the Role of Financial Institutions

Abstract

Emil Lederer was characterized as the “leading academic socialist of Germany in the 1920’s” by Joseph Schumpeter and was a highly respected economist of his time. However, most aspects of his work remain totally unexplored. This paper focuses on Emil Lederer’s theory of economic fluctuations defending the thesis that certain aspects of Lederer’s conceptualization of economic fluctuations underwent considerable modifications when his 1925 article Konjunktur und Krisen is compared with his 1938 book Technical Progress and Unemployment, a shift unacknowledged so far in the literature. In his first attempt to tackle the issue, in Konjunktur und Krisen (1925), Lederer had constructed an explanation consistent with the so-called “disproportionality theory” introduced by Tugan-Baranowsky (codified as “early Lederer”). However, Lederer’s conception of the business cycle during the 1930s and especially in his major work Technical Progress and Unemployment underwent considerable modifications. Lederer’s (1938 Lederer, E. 1938. Technical Progress and Unemployment, Geneva: King and Son.  [Google Scholar]) analysis is, apparently, very ‘Schumpeterian’ (codified as “late Lederer”). In this version of his theory, the cycle is explained by supply-side factors, and more specifically by technical change. Additionally, Lederer’s view on the role of financial institutions (credit and banks) with regards to business cycles is analysed. Lederer avoided attributing a causative role to monetary factors. The interrelation between ‘real’ factors and financial institutions constitutes an essential element in his analysis of the business cycle.     

Samuelson’s operationally meaningful theorems: reflections of E. B. Wilson’s methodological attitude

This paper sheds new light on Samuelson’s early methodology as presented in his Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) by reflecting on the similarity between his mathematical economics and Edwin B. Wilson’s mathematics. Wilson was Samuelson’s professor of advanced mathematical and statistical economics; he was also a protégé of Josiah Willard Gibbs. Wilson defined mathematics as a language that consisted of three interconnected aspects: postulational, axiomatic, and operational. In his Foundations, in a Wilsonian style, Samuelson wrote in the opening page, ‘Mathematics is a Language’ and claimed that he offered operationally meaningful theorems. In this paper, it is argued that these maxims embodied Wilson’s approach, which framed Samuelson’s mathematical and statistical thinking around 1940 and which led him to present his work as being mathematically, theoretically, and empirically well founded. Wilson’s and Percy Bridgman’s operational methodologies are also compared and Wilson is presented as a mediator between Bridgman and Samuelson.     

Relationship between patient-reported disease severity and other clinical outcomes in osteoarthritis: a European perspective

Abstract

Objective:

To determine how patient-rated osteoarthritis (OA) severity correlates with other patient-reported and clinical outcomes in the European clinical setting.

Methods:

We used the Adelphi Arthritis VII (2008) Disease Specific Program (DSP). OA severity was patient-rated using the question ‘How bad would you say your arthritis is now?’ with responses of ‘mild,’ ‘moderate,’ and ‘severe.’ Patient-reported outcomes included a 0–100?mm pain visual analogue scale (VAS); questions on daily functioning; Work Productivity and Activity Impairment (WPAI) scale; and EuroQoL (EQ-5D). Regression models and chi-square analyses evaluated relationships between self-rated OA severity and other outcomes.

Results:

Patient-reported data were available from 1739 individuals (63.1% female, mean age 64.4 [standard deviation 11.9] years) from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK. With increasing OA severity; mild (24.5%), moderate (56.3%), severe (19.2%), statistically significant differences (p?<?0.05) were observed with higher pain VAS scores (28.3, 49.9, 69.2, respectively), reduced function, and greater overall work impairment due to OA (24.3%, 38.5%, 68.6%, respectively). Significant associations of patient-reported OA severity with function and health status were indicated, including the EQ-5D health state index; 0.77 (mild), 0.62 (moderate), 0.30 (severe) (p?<?0.0001). Physicians tended to overestimate patients who rated their OA as mild, and underrate patients who rated their OA as severe.

Conclusions:

In five European countries, patient-rated OA severity was associated with other patient-reported outcomes, and may be of benefit in the clinical setting when choosing treatment options aimed at improving pain, function and productivity, providing an accurate and tangible assessment of patient’s perceptions of their disease.     

Sustainable competitive advantage and stock performance: the case for wide moat stocks

‘In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable “Moats”’. Warren Buffett Companies that have sustainable competitive advantages should be able to create a barrier (Moat) to prevent or lessen competition from other firms. The wider the Moat the greater the barrier and the more secure the company’s profitability. Using the Morningstar classification of ‘Wide Moat’ stocks, we construct annually rebalanced equal- and value-weighted portfolios to analyse their performance in order to determine if they deliver superior performance relative to standard benchmark portfolios. The period for our analysis extends from June 2002 through May 2014. We find that the ‘Wide Moat’ portfolios outperform both the S&P 500 and Russell 3000 indices generating higher average monthly and annualized returns, Sharpe Ratio, Sortino Ratio, Treynor Ratio, Omega Ratio, Upside Potential Ratio, M², M² Alpha, and cumulative returns. When we compute alpha using Carhart four-factor and Fama–French five-factor models, we find that ‘Wide Moat’ portfolios had significantly positive risk-adjusted alphas with both the models. ‘Wide Moat’ portfolios also lost less value during the 2007–2009 financial crisis compared to both S&P 500 and Russell 3000. In conclusion, we find that ‘Wide Moat’ stocks have created significant value for their investors over the course of our study.     

Karl Polanyi on economy and society: a critical analysis of core concepts

The Review of Social Economy was founded to highlight the irreducible social aspects of economic activity. Yet, the nature of the ‘social’ and the ‘economic’ are both unresolved, and they are much more problematic than often assumed. This article probes Karl Polanyi’s depiction of the relationship between the ‘social’ and the ‘economic’ and subsequent discourse on ‘embeddedness’. In his Great Transformation (1944) Polanyi associated the ‘economic’ with motives of material gain, while ‘social’ referred to norms of reciprocity and redistribution: his distinction between the ‘social’ and the ‘economic’ then focused primarily on different kinds of motivation. But in a 1957 essay he brought in different kinds of institutions that engender different types of motivation. Polanyi (1944) argued that after 1800 Britain was transformed into a market-oriented ‘economic’ system, based on motives of greed and material gain. He also proposed that an effective market system had to be ‘self-adjusting’ and free of political interference, despite his important additional claim that the state was involved in its creation. Some of Polanyi’s core concepts and arguments are contradictory and problematic, and need to be reconsidered, especially if his enduring insights are to be salvaged.