Video of Blair Fix's Presentation – Economic Growth as a Power Process
January 27, 2016
Is economic growth a miracle of the free market? According to mainstream theory, growth is best ensured through conditions of ‘perfect competition’. However, economic growth is tightly correlated with the concentration of power in the hands of large corporations. Why? The capital as power framework provides potential answers that turn mainstream theory on its head: growth seems to be intimately related to the formation of hierarchy.
Blair Fix is a PhD student at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University (blairfix@gmail.com)
This presentation is the second in the Second Speaker Series on the Capitalist Mode of Power, organized by capitalaspower.com and sponsored by the York Department of Political Science and the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought.
Refreshments will be served and all are welcome.
WHEN: Tuesday, October 27, 2015, 3:00-5:00 pm
WHERE: Verney Room, 674 South Ross, Keele Campus of York University
FULL TEXT:http://bnarchives.yorku.c
There may be a flaw in the biophysical approach contained in the quote “Energy consumption is the most meaningful way to measure economic scale”. When it comes to biological organisms you can clearly see where one organism starts and stops, it has skin tissue or something of the like, this is not so easy when it comes to measuring an economic form. If a Swiss corporation is on Canadian soil, which economy is one measuring? This gets even more complicated if the company is on the border and uses a US power grid. Its difficult to say something is growing when you can’t really state where or what it is. You could be placing a frog on a turtle and measuring some mix of energy from both. Perhaps it should be also rephrased “energy consumption is the most meaningful way to measure economic development/complexity” since scale implies distance which is a different physical entity entirely.