A Critical Analysis of Peltzman’s “The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation”

Karl Polanyi considered that the relationship between the markets and their societies was a central feature of any social order. He studied what he called \"ancient societies,\" to compare them with his own times, in an effort to understand that subject. This paper aims to show, following Polanyi's work on Classical Greece, that it is possible to make a clear analogy between the Athenian state and economy with the modern Welfare State. First, we present Polanyi's study of the early Athenian economy, focusing on the coexistence of a kind of state economic planning and a market. Second, we show how this relates to Polanyi's emphasis in the comparison of different societies and times. Third, we characterize the contemporary Welfare State to make an analogy between these two forms of economic organization. We conclude by underlining the relevance of this analogy in understanding the societies of today.     

农村集体建设用地使用权入市流转的可行性探析

在现行政策法规下,我国的农村集体建设用地使用权原则上是禁止入市流转的,但是随着社会经济的发展,集体建设用地使用权入市流转的趋势日益明显。文章从理论和现实基础两个方面对集体建设用地使用权入市流转的可行性作了探析,并从培育市场主体、市场体系、规范市场运作制度、完善配套措施等方面,为集体建设用地使用权入市流转提出了政策建议。     

Rotating group representatives and group members’ requests in repeated public goods game

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the effect of group representatives on contribution behaviour in response to group members’ requests in repeated public goods games. Data came from 135 students in 15 groups enrolled in the experiment, grouped in the following treatments: no group representatives (NR, NRG) and group representatives (R1, R2). We also tested initial requests wherein the group members’ initial requests (i.e. NRG, R2) mediated the positive relationship between individual-level contribution preferences and group contributions. We used a fixed-effects GLS regression and IV regression to analyse the effect of group representatives and group members’ requests. The results indicated the following: (a) rotating group representative/group members’ requests was related to group contributions at the session (within-members) and group (between-group) levels; (b) the reactions to members’ requests positively predicted group contributions; (c) subjects in the no group representatives treatment formed their requests by relying more on previous group contributions than subjects in the group representatives treatment, who relied more on the previous group members’ requests; and (d) the initial requests explained long-term contribution levels, which resulted in variations in group contributions observed between the NRG and R2 treatments. Our findings highlight the role of rotating group representatives in stimulating cooperation among members, while group members’ requests impel individuals to make contribution decisions at the group level.     

嵌入性理论研究综述

通过分析国内外有关嵌入性理论的原始研究文献,对嵌入性理论的发展脉络、分析框架和层次结构进行了综述,并对未来理论发展提出了相关建议。     

农村土地集体所有制对劳资关系形成的积极影响及启示

农村土地集体所有制作为一种\"普照的光\",使中国劳资关系形成跨越了残酷的原始积累阶段,避免了劳资关系发展初期易发的尖锐冲突,使中国劳资关系伴随着工业化城市化进程协调发展。社会主义公有制不仅需要而且可以与市场经济相结合,并使市场经济的作用得到有益发挥。必须坚定不移走社会主义道路,积极发挥社会主义基本制度的优势,更好更快地推进中国现代化进程,实现中华民族伟大复兴。     

The Double Movement Ten Years After the Fall of Lehman Brothers

Ten years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the sharpest moments of panic within the global—and particularly the United States banking system—a somewhat strange dynamic has appeared. While the principal agents behind the crisis have collapsed their own institutions, the markets that they dominated, and even provoked what has been called the third crisis of economic theory, their political power has not waned. This theme has been well addressed by some academics such as Philip Mirowski (2013 Mirowski Phillip. 2013. Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Crisis. London: Verso Books. [Google Scholar]), while it has flummoxed others. In this article, we will argue that Karl Polanyi’s theory of the “double movement” offers a coherent framework that is able to account for the history of the last ten years. Polanyi argues that different groups and members of society seek protection from the market, and that this search for protection has been the driving force between historical change. Polanyi does not ignore class; rather, he argues that different social classes can protect themselves in more or less effective ways. We argue that during the last ten years, the interests of globalized financial capital have been able to protect themselves with utmost effectiveness, while all other classes have been trammeled, often not even recognizing how or why actions are taken against the general interest.     

Theory of Public Choice: A Review Article

In this article, we analyze at a conceptual level some of the more relevant effects of the neoliberal takeover on the provision of social costs, including employment, health care, and nutrition. Adopting key perspectives of Karl Polanyi and other thinkers, we develop our examination under the seemingly perpetual conflict between markets and social reproduction. We argue that financialization has both expanded market spaces and changed relationships within those spaces. The ever-greater domination of financial markets means that employment has become increasingly more precarious in the strict spaces of the labor market. At the same time, financialization has steadily eroded the social forms that exist outside of formal markets, greatly weakening the mechanisms through which societies can both defend themselves from predatory markets and reproduce themselves with some degree of purpose and hope for the future.     

区域产业集群品牌的术语、权属和商标保护模式分析

将基于区域产业集群发展形成的产业集群整体品牌命名区域品牌具有明显的缺陷,最适宜的名称术语应为区域产业集群品牌。区域产业集群品牌是一种区域俱乐部产品、区域共有产权和标识性知识产权。区域产业集群品牌的法律保护应采取地理标志集体商标、证明商标保护模式。     

Neoliberalism,Polanyi’s Protective Response,and Veblenian Waste

As capitalism unfolds, continual technological advance — in combination with the relentless accumulation imperative — serves to amplify material progress. The expanding economic sphere begins to pervade the everyday lives and thinking of the individual. The institutionalization of the market fundamentally changes the structure of society and, in so doing, fundamentally changes the institutional structure through which individuals are socialized. The social dislocation generated therein prompts Karl Polanyi’s protective response. Despite this market intensification, the existence of the economic surplus undermines the syllogistics of market-determined pricing. Evidence of the economic surplus and Veblenian waste as well as of the fact that the competitive law of value is not operable under neoliberalism is found in the lobby industry and campaign contributions. This research seeks to explicitly connect the concepts of Polanyi’s protective response with Veblenian waste and the economic surplus in order to better understand how the irrational system of neoliberalism continues to evolve.     

Institutional Matrices Theory,or X- and Y-Theory: A Response to F. Gregory Hayden

This article draws attention to issues about the institutional matrices theory (IMT) as perceived by and raised in the article by F. Gregory Hayden. To clarify the “controversial” points, I structure my response narrative along two lines. First, I present the prehistory of IMT, or X- and Y- theory, including earlier work by scientists related to the concept of institutional matrix. I connect the development of the actual IMT with the period of “perestroika” and the associated market experiments and reforms in Russia and Eastern European countries. One could see that the effects of market reforms in Russia were different in comparison with other countries in economic transition. I show that the institutional approach was accepted as more relevant to understanding the unexpected results in Russian society. I present IMT as a development of the ideas of Karl Polanyi and Douglas North to answer the challenges of explaining the real social and economic processes in Russia, as well as its wider application to a broader range of economic and social situations in different countries. Second, I then present the main IMT theses, giving special attention to the issues as perceived and raised by Hayden. In conclusion, I suggest the possibility of a joint project that combines IMT consideration and the social fabric matrix (SFM) concept of F. Gregory Hayden.     

Remittances and Households in the Age of Neoliberal Uncertainty

International migration and remittance flows have been reframed as catalysts for poverty reduction and development through marketization. Growth, measurement, and promotion of global remittances have emerged against the backdrop of neoliberal structural adjustment programs and financialization. Those processes have paralleled the emergence of the transnational household as a global institution. The article suggests that transnational households characterize a new stage of neoliberal capitalist development. The article revisits Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and discusses how active governance and neoliberal discourse regulate and frame labor and remittances as “fictitious commodities.” Further, it is argued that transnational households take active roles in Polanyi’s “double movement,” by providing social protection amidst narrow public responsibility for provisioning. The article identifies this as a new element of “the great transformation,” and referring to J. K. Galbraith, as a new age of neoliberal uncertainty.     

Climate Change and the Polanyian Counter-movement: Carbon Markets or Degrowth?

In the midst of a wave of market expansion, carbon markets have been proposed as the best way to address global climate change. While some argue that carbon markets represent a modern example of a Polanyian counter-movement to the environmental crisis, we adopt a structural interpretation of Polanyi to refute this claim. Carbon markets represent a further expansion of markets that fails to address the underlying contradictions related to the commodification of nature. In addition, they increase risks to society and the domination of economic elites. While carbon markets further subject social and ecological relations to market mechanisms, we examine degrowth as a possible response to climate change that prioritises social and environmental goals over economic growth. While degrowth continues to be dismissed as impractical or impossible, a growing number of scholars, scientists and activists argue it is the only way to address global climate change. In contrast to carbon markets, we argue degrowth could represent a genuine Polanyian counter-movement in response to climate change. In addition, degrowth could help all those disenfranchised by market fundamentalism by addressing the triple crises related to the commodification of land, labour and money.     

On Profits and Hospitals

Empirical evidence strongly suggests that something other than pay is sought in work. By emphasizing consumption over production, the worker as a producer was eclipsed by mainstream economics and replaced by the worker as a consumer. The analysis of the relational dimension of work life was also discarded. We argue that the decision to work and behavior at work is very much driven by the search for relational goods and moral goods, defined as intangible entities that emerge from social interactions. The "goodness" of relational and moral goods stems from their being commonly shared. Two properties of both goods — commonality and immanence-in-action — rule out the possibility of their being captured in a utility maximizing framework.     

Nano-worlds as Schumpeterian emergence and Polanyian double-movements

The overarching question raised in this special issue is whether societies can, do or indeed should steer new and emergent science and technological development and its management on to trajectories construed as more or less 'desirable'. It therefore sits at the interface of two arenas. These are governance: processes of shaping/steering emergent technologies and markets; and sustainability: normative agendas incorporating a range of potentially competing conjectures and internally inconsistent desires such as to facilitate rather than stifle innovation, to enable economic development, to anticipate or deploy strategies to cope with risk and uncertainty, and to encourage technological developments that benefit rather than harm humans, their quality of life and the natural environment. Despite the potential for apparent empirical inconsistencies and contradictions that manifest as outcomes of the negotiation of these aims, there is (pace Karl Polanyi) a normative entry point to all of the articles and the material they draw upon, which is the idea that markets and technologies should be the handmaiden of societies, not vice versa.

It is now widely recognized that 'nanotechnology' is a diverse set of feasible procedures emerging from scientific possibilities to enable the production of artefacts at the nanoscale creating new products, processes and services. Attention has to be paid to the desirability of these artefacts, which involve social, economic, ecologic, political and ethical matters that surround their emergence. The purpose of this special issue is to set out the current and future prospects for the widespread use (or innovation) of technological convergence at the nanoscale to create nano-artefacts, and the needs for governance and regulation that will accompany these innovations.     

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.     

Polanyi’s ‘substantive approach’ to the economy in action? Conceptualising social enterprise as a public health ‘intervention’

For several decades now, critical public health researchers have highlighted the deleterious effects that pursuing neoliberal policies can have on the ‘causes of the causes’ of poor health and upon growing health inequalities. This paper argues that the conceptual tools of Karl Polanyi can help lend particular insight into this issue. The specific example that this paper focuses upon is the ‘social enterprise’: a form of organisation that combines both social and business objectives. The paper explores, conceptually, whether social enterprises may have the potential to act as one component of a neo-Polanyian countermovement: helping to re-embed the economy back into society, and offering greater recognition for a more comprehensive and socially imbued concept of health. Importantly, this potential is critically examined in the context of neoliberal hegemony, where challenges to the status quo have regularly been met with assimilation, co-option and/or repression.     

The Dowry Gift in South Asia: An Institution on the Intersection of Market and Patriarchy

Abstract

Dowry refers to marriage gifts that are instrumental to the negotiation of the marriage contract. Historically, the dowry gift was constituted by law across the Roman empire. While dowry has become largely irrelevant in Europe in contemporary times, it is still pervasive across the Brahmanical Hindu societies of South Asia. Moreover, what was traditionally token gifts from friends and well-wishers has taken on the form of “new dowry” since the colonial period. “New dowry” is heavily composed of cash and market goods, including land and is frequently accompanied by violence against new brides when their families fail to make larger dowry gifts with higher market value. This article examines the evolution of “new dowry” through a Polanyian lens. Unlike the neoclassical Beckerian approach which takes an ahistorical outlook to marriage as a “market” for matching partners and dowry as a market price, the substantivist lens à la Polanyi investigates the historical evolution of “new dowry” through the advent of market processes in the colonial period and the countermovement of legal reform in the post-colonial period.