Uncertainty,Control, and Karl Polanyi’s Protective Response

Post-Keynesian institutionalist economists like Wallace Peterson and John Kenneth Galbraith recognized that the impact of uncertainty on economic wellbeing depends in part on the degree of control people have over the sources and consequences of it. Given the inability of government and other large institutions to reduce uncertainty or to provide citizens with the ability to manage it, mediating structures are considered as an alternative means of promoting economic security. The article concludes by describing and evaluating several of these alternatives.     

Financialization,Class Interests,and Karl Polanyi’s Protective Response

Many observers expected a stronger countermovement against neoliberalism following the Great Recession. This article argues that such a protective response failed to materialize because the financialization process has aligned the preferences of labor and rentier classes. The result has been weaker support in democracies for expansionary monetary and fiscal policies during the early stages of recessions, which further lowers aggregate spending by increasing uncertainty. Thus, reversing the culture of financialization may be a necessary condition for preventing and responding to financial crises.     

Financialization and Society’s Protective Response: Reconsidering Karl Polanyi’s Double Movement

Financialization challenges Karl Polanyi’s thesis of double movement, the thesis that efforts to extend the market evoke efforts to protect humans, nature, and means of production from market forces. Financialization refers to the increased power of financial institutions. The government protects the incomes and assets of financial institutions, but it does little to protect the incomes and assets of households, which are necessary for people to afford healthcare, education, emergencies, retirement, and so on. Polanyi criticized nineteenth-century civilization for transforming land, labor, and the means of production into commodities, using economic insecurity to motivate humans. The development of intangible property allowed business to expand the market in two ways: (i) restricting output to drive up profits and (ii) liquefying consumer assets to provide credit to consumers to increase spending. The implications of that process manifested themselves in the financial crisis of 2008. Market capitalism represented the attempt to organize commodities based on economic rationality. Similarly, the twentieth- and twenty-first-century capitalism represents the effort to “rationally” organize society according to the value of intangible assets. Both efforts failed, indicating the continued relevance of Polanyi’s thesis.     

Public Policy Adrift: Veblen’s Blind Drift and Neoliberalism

This paper considers the factors that currently shape and direct public policy formation in the United States. The paper begins by articulating the general position of institutionalists with regard to the purpose of public policy analysis and formulation. Next, a discussion of Thorstein Veblen’s view is presented focusing on his rejection of meliorative tendencies in the economy and the meaning of his concept of blind drift as applied to the likely direction of ongoing social processes. Then, we explore a contemporary analysis of the belief in the role of meliorative trends in contemporary social and economic policy analysis and discussions by James K. Galbraith. Then, we examine Philip Mirowski’s recent analysis of the shaping of the direction of public policy debate by what he refers to as the neoliberal thought collective as a mitigating factor to the blind drift suggested by Thorstein Veblen.     

Veblen’s System of Conspicuous Waste

Abstract:

The touchstone by which Thorstein Veblen evaluated an expenditure was “whether it furthers the life process taken impersonally.” For Veblen, the economic problem involved the problem of social provisioning, the way a community provides for itself. To a large degree, social provisioning has been impeded by the system of conspicuous waste, a “scheme of properties, decencies, and standards of living, the economic motive of which is competitive spending.” The system of conspicuous waste represents a cultural unfolding of conspicuous waste, prompted by the introduction of continuous-mass production in the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries. Conspicuous waste refers to the allocation of resources, time, and effort that detract from the life process. Veblen rejected the idea that the system of conspicuous waste benefits society. For Veblen, the standard of living refers to that level of consumption at which people are expected to consume. Products that prove serviceable, however, may also serve as symbols of invidiousness. Veblen used the system of conspicuous waste to compare the diverse cultural responses of England and Germany to the same technology in the early twentieth century. The system, however, plays a central role in absorbing increases in output and maintaining profits. Whether it can continue to do so remains questionable.     

Right-Wing Populism and Neoliberalism in Germany: The AfD’s Embrace of Ordoliberalism

This article analyses the ambiguous relation between right-wing populism and neoliberalism in Germany. It concentrates on the connections between and convergence of right-wing populism and ordoliberalism, a specific type of neoliberalism that was developed by the Freiburg School since the late 1920s and which the new right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) explicitly focuses on in its economic programme. In its attempt to analyse the affinity of the AfD to ordoliberalism, this study relies on Michel Foucault’s account of ordoliberalism in his book The Birth of Biopolitics and his concept of governmentality. It was found that the AfD wants to bring ordoliberalism into service of an authoritarian project in Germany and beyond. This economic approach combines neoliberalism with authoritarian forms of government through the governmentalisation of the state. Ordoliberals prescribe a regulatory framework for the economy which is centred on the creation of a competitive order. It is meant to produce and justify social differences. Right-wing populists connect the economic differentiation system provided by ordoliberalism with the differentiation systems of nation, race, religion and culture. Thus, the neoliberal principle of competition is used not only to justify inequality among German citizens but also among European countries.     

Sraffa’s Constructive and Interpretive Work,and Marx

ABSTRACT

This article provides a summary account of Piero Sraffa’s constructive and interpretive work on the classical approach to the theory of value and distribution and its relationship with Marx’s contributions. It is shown that in the early phase of his constructive work Sraffa developed his equation systems by adopting a ‘physical real cost’ approach and a strictly objectivist point of view, and completely eschewed Marx’s labour-based approach and the related Marxian concepts. Only at a later stage did he explore systematically the relationship between his own modern re-formulation of the surplus approach to the theory of value and distribution and Marx’s contribution. He considered Marx’s most important analytical contribution to the further development of the surplus approach to consist of the re-integration of circular production relations, which allowed him to see the existence of a maximum rate of profits and its role in an analysis of accumulation and technical change.     

Infrastructure,women’s time allocation,and economic development

This paper develops a gender-based OLG model of endogenous growth to analyze the impact of infrastructure on women’s time allocation between market work, raising children, own health care, and home production, and its implications for education and health outcomes. Women’s health status in adulthood, which affects productivity and wages, depends on their health status in childhood. Threshold effects in health and life expectancy, associated with access to infrastructure, may generate multiple development regimes. Whether an increase in government investment in infrastructure succeeds in shifting the economy to a high-growth equilibrium depends crucially on how women reallocate their time and the strength of congestion effects.     

Children’s Snacks,their Ads and Consumer Sovereignty

Abstract

The concept of sovereign consumer preferences is challenged from three sides: child consumers, unhealthy food and advertising. The two theoretical concepts of merit goods and libertarian paternalism are implemented in order to classify situations in which full consumer sovereignty does not apply. An empirical analysis of ads for children’s snacks reveals the libertarian paternalist perspective as helpful for understanding the demand for and justification of ‘soft’ governmental intervention in the case of the advertised snacks, whilst the ads for these snacks may well be demerit goods. The banning or heavy taxation of these ads is therefore advocated.     

Waves of Populism: A Recent Manifestation of Polanyi’s “Double Movement”?

Abstract:

Since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008, there has been a new wave of populism in the United States and in Europe. The hypothesis of this article is that this GFC has created the conditions for the resurgence of populism. According to Polanyi’s work of 1944, The Great Transformation, the market is “utopian” and must be imposed by the state. Further, there is a disciplinary dimension, which separates the individual worker from the community, for the purposes of allowing the “prod of hunger” to be effective. This disciplinary dimension of the market, which is based on Polanyi’s analysis of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, can be extended. Several phenomena in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have intensified the tensions inherent in the market: fragmented production by means of finely divided global supply chains, increasing inequality due to the market structure; automation, declining labor share; increasing indebtedness; financialization; and erosion of protective labor market institutions, such as welfare and unionization. Populist movements are part of the backlash or “double movement” against these tensions inherent in the market.

Polanyi’s analysis may contribute to a greater understanding of what may be a global inflection point at present.     

China’s Reform: History,Logic and Future

This paper is a brief introduction of the core content and basic concepts of the book China’s Reform: History, Logic and Future, and gives answers to questions such as why China’s reform and opening-up policy has achieved great success, why the catch-up mode, extensive and extractive development mode China adopted in the past three decades are no longer sustainable and what China’s market-oriented reforms should aim to achieve in the next stage so that readers can have a profound understanding of China’s reform. Planning ahead, from the perspective of sustainable economic development, China badly needs to transform from factor-driven growth to efficiency-driven and innovation-driven growth, the key to which is to further encourage the liberalization of thought, promote reform and opening-up, unswervingly follow the path of economic liberalization, marketization and privatization, to establish an inclusive modern market system, to allow the market to play a decisive role in resource allocation and the private economy to play a dominant role in the national economy. The market-oriented reform is a complicated project and China is faced with at least three different aspects of reform in some key areas—the main body of private economy, the liberalization of financial market and the marketization of land. Meanwhile, China needs to efficiently balance three elements of good governance, that is, the rule of law, execution and democratic supervision, so as to facilitate the modernization of state governance system and governance capability.     

Women’s rights and development

Why has the expansion of women’s economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question by focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and declining fertility) exacerbated the tension in men’s conflicting interests as husbands versus fathers, ultimately resolving them in favor of the latter. As husbands, men stood to gain from their privileged position in a patriarchal world whereas, as fathers, they were hurt by a system that afforded few rights to their daughters. The model predicts that declining fertility would hasten reform of women’s property rights whereas legal systems that were initially more favorable to women would delay them. The theoretical relationship between capital and the relative attractiveness of reform is non-monotonic but growth inevitably leads to reform. I explore the empirical validity of the theoretical predictions by using cross-state variation in the US in the timing of married women obtaining property and earning rights between 1850 and 1920.