Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Let’s talk sustainability. Unless you’re an anti-science crank, you probably agree that we’ve got a problem with carbon emissions. We need to drastically cut emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change. On this we should all agree. The question that’s open for debate is how to […]
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Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Yesterday I was reminded of what got me interested in economics. I’ll preface this by saying that I make my living as a substitute teacher in Toronto. It’s not glamorous, but it pays the bills. It gives me time to do research from outside academia. […]
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Abstract This historically and critically informed dissertation investigates the question why Canada has become one of the world’s leaders in promoting fossil fuels through its unconventional hydrocarbon industry in spite of the science and growing awareness of climate change. Using a critical historical political economy approach that encompasses both ecological or biophysical scientific realities and […]
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Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Do you believe in free markets? Do you think that unfettered competition is the best way to organize society? If so, this post is intended to shake your faith. No, I’m not going to argue that free markets are bad. Instead, I’m going to show […]
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Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix In this post, I’m going to return to the relation between energy and institution size. When we left off last time (in Groping in the Dark), I had described my struggle to understand how the size of firms and governments changes with energy use. It […]
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Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix In this post we’re going to take a journey into the world of power-law distributions. Power laws pop up again and again in my research. But I’ve never taken the time to discuss what makes them so weird. This post will be a little ‘power-law […]
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The Autocatalytic Sprawl of Pseudorational Mastery ULF MARTIN May 2019 Abstract According to Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler (2009), capital is not an economic quantity, but a mode of power. Their fundamental thesis could be summarized as follows: capital is power quantified in monetary terms. But what do we do when we quantify? What is […]
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Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix In the opening post of this blog, I described my ‘top-down’ approach to studying society. This means studying groups of people without trying to reduce everything to the actions of individuals. It’s not that I think individual actions are unimportant. Of course they are important. […]
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Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix There is an exciting side of blogging that I want to explore here. Blogging can tell the story behind research. This is something you don’t get in journals. Most scientific articles obey a formula that goes like this: Here is the question I asked. Here […]
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Blair Fix, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler The study of economic growth is central to macroeconomics. More than anything else, macroeconomists are concerned with finding policies that encourage growth. And by ‘growth’, they mean the growth of real GDP. This measure has become so central to macroeconomics that few economists question its validity. Our intention […]
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Abstract Where should we look to understand the origin of inequality? I propose an unusual window of evidence — modern societies. I hypothesize that evidence for the origin of inequality is encoded in the institutional structure of industrial societies. To test this idea, I use a model to project modern trends into the past. This […]
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Abstract Dematerialization through services is a popular proposal for reducing environmental impact. The idea is that by shifting from the production of goods to the provision of services, a society can reduce its material demands. But do societies with a larger service sector actually dematerialize? I test the ‘dematerialization through services’ hypothesis with a focus […]
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Abstract This paper discusses the dimension problem in economic aggregation, as it relates to ecological and biophysical economics. The dimension problem consists of a simple dilemma: when we aggregate, the observer must choose the dimension of analysis. The dilemma is that this choice affects the resulting measurement. This means that aggregate measurements are dependent on […]
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Abstract Human capital theory is the dominant approach for understanding personal income distribution. According to this theory, individual income is the result of ‘human capital’. The idea is that human capital makes people more productive, which leads to higher income. But is this really the case? This paper takes a critical look at human capital […]
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Propertization The Process by which Financial Corporate Power has Risen and Collapsed JONGCHUL KIM September 2018 Abstract Elsewhere I argue that the legal concept of property was created in the image of money in the late Roman Republic. Since then, the division of property and contract has been an underlying structure of Western law. The […]
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Theory and Praxis, Theory and Practice, Practical Theory CORENTIN DEBAILLEUL, SHIMSHON BICHLER and JONATHAN NITZAN April 2018 Abstract In their paper ‘The CasP Project: Past, Present and Future’, Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan invite readers to engage critically with their theoretical framework, known as capital as power (CasP). This call for further research, reactions and […]
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The CasP Project Past, Present and Future SHIMSHON BICHLER and JONATHAN NITZAN April 2018 Abstract The study of capital as power (CasP) began when we were students in the 1980s and has since expanded into a broader project involving a growing number of researchers and new areas of inquiry. This paper provides a bird’s-eye view […]
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Abstract SPANISH Si observamos la literatura sobre la Guerra del Líbano del 2006, llama la atención la ausencia de un marco teórico claro en la mayoría de los análisis. Igualmente se perciben notables discrepancias en algo tan básico como las causas de la guerra y encontramos destacadas diferencias en la explicación de la conducta de […]
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Abstract If you look today at the skyline of downtowns throughout the Middle East and beyond, the joint-stock corporation has transformed the urban landscape. The corporation makes itself present through the proliferation of its urban mega-projects, including skyscrapers, downtown developments and gated communities; retail malls and artificial islands; airports and ports; and highways. Built into […]
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Abstract What is the unit of analysis in economics? The prevailing orthodoxy in mainstream economic theory is that the individual is the ‘ultimate’ unit of analysis. The implicit goal of mainstream economics is to root macro-level social structure in the micro-level actions of individuals. But there is a simple problem with this approach: our knowledge […]
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