Blog
DT Cochrane An op-ed on the advocacy website Oil Change International examines the high levels of debt within the oil business and the consequences of that debt for extraction. It postulates a dangerous positive feedback …
Max Ajl A review of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bickler’s The Scientist and the Church. Originally published at Jadaliyya Howard Page, a director at what was then Exxon, was once asked, “What would have happened …
DT Cochrane The IMF recently announced that China’s currency, the CYN (Chinese Yuan Renminbi), would be included in the IMF’s basket of currencies, known as the SRD (special drawing rights). The designation comes after China …
Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan Repost from Real-World Economics Review Blog If we are to believe the conventional creed, Hollywood films are highly risky investments. According to De Vany, revenue forecasts have zero precision, which …
Jonathan Nitzan Blair Fix, a PhD student in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, points to some important limitations of income inequality data. In a recent posting on capitalaspower.com, Fix shows …
Tim DiMuzio is lecturer in International Relations and public policy University of Wollongong in Australia. His book, The 1% and the Rest of Us: A Political Economy of Dominant Ownership, examines the insular lives of …
DT Cochrane The Globe & Mail recently published a roundup of seven analyses of the Canadian housing sector. All of the analyses took some position on whether or not housing in Canada is “overvalued.” The …
DT Cochrane The logic of accumulation is not the only logic that motivates capitalists. As fully actualized human beings, they remain complex in their desires. Rather, the logic of accumulation is dominant and, Nitzan and …
Joe Francis New data on the profitability of Argentina’s largest corporations help explain the origins of its last military dictatorship. During Argentina’s military dictatorship of 1976-1983, up to 30,000 people were killed by the armed …
Mladen Ostojic Recommended reading by the Transnational Institute (TNI) of Policy Studies: This paper demonstrates that the interests of American banking and government have converged since the early 1980s and relates this trend to modern …
Jonathan Nitzan In his November 29, 2013 piece, ‘Low Capex, High Market Cap: A New High for Corporate Sabotage?’, Edward Lam lends support to CasP’s sabotage thesis by showing how firms with relatively low ‘greenfield’ …
Joe Francis New data illustrate the extent to which economists have stopped discussing each other’s work. Once upon a time, economists regularly used to publicly criticise each other’s work in academic journals. But not any …
Phil Leech According to some forecasters the price of oil might hit $75 a barrel soon. Goldman Sachs has even predicted a $70 barrel of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) in 2015. If the price does …
DT Cochrane A systemic review [PDF] of systemic reviews of scientific literature on the relationship between sugar and obesity found, unsurprisingly, that there is bias in the reviews conducted on behalf of the sugar business. …
Frederick H. Pitts Resonance and dissonance in the rhythms of freelance creative work In the last blog, I applied some of Nitzan and Bichler’s ideas to freelance work in the creative industries. I utilised their …
Frederick H. Pitts Creativity, sabotage and the management of risk and responsibility in freelance creative work Nitzan and Bichler theorise a dissonant relation of sabotage between power and creativity, business and industry. What they show …
Frederick H. Pitts Capital as Power, risk-aversion and the avoidance of uncertainty Mainstream critiques of contemporary capitalism conducted in the wake of the Great Recession tend to indict a number of factors. Perceived short-termism. The …
Frederick H. Pitts Rhythms of Risk and Responsibility in Freelance Creative Work This series of blogs applies Nitzan and Bichler’s theory of capital as power to the empirical concern of freelance work in the creative …
Joseph Baines How do we make sense of the role of different participants in futures markets? According to the conventional wisdom, market participants can be put into two different categories: hedgers and speculators. Hedgers, such …
DT Cochrane Canadians take pride in Tim Hortons. It is an icon of contemporary Canadiana. When news emerged that Burger King (BKW) was planning a takeover, the media was filled with stories of people’s outrage. …
Shai Gorsky This series of posts will explore some contemporary fields in “complexity science”. They summarize experiences from the Santa-Fe Institute Complex Systems Summer School 2014, with the hope of suggesting to readers useful research …
DT Cochrane The world of traders has largely been outside political economic analysis. With financial values treated as ‘fictitious’ representations of real values, trading is, at best, a distortion. The actual individuals who perform this …
DT Cochrane Harvard Medical School researchers Michelle Holmes and Wendy Chen wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about research they published in 2010 that found aspirin may be an effective treatment for breast …
Jeremy Green With the Bank of England signalling an impending interest rate rise, monetary policy has returned to centre stage. Since 2008 we have lived through a period of extremely unorthodox monetary policy characterised by …
DT Cochrane The replacement of labour by machines has brought many improvements in social well-being. New machines have made a wide variety jobs safer and less physically debilitating. Yet, the process is far from decisively …
Joseph Baines The corn-ethanol boom represents one of the most dramatic changes in the world food system in recent decades. The ethanol sector now absorbs around 40% of the corn produced in the US. Surging …
James McMahon John Oliver, a former correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, now has his own HBO show. Like what he did on The Daily Show, Oliver’s Last Week Tonight brings irreverence and …
DT Cochrane What is a tree worth? Is this a question you’ve ever pondered? Does it seem like an odd question? Perhaps it seems like an inappropriate question? How could someone possibly attach a financial …
Tim Di Muzio The Privatization of Money: The Greatest Sabotage in Human History? Part II Last time we found out that modern money is created when commercial banks make loans to people and businesses. They …
DT Cochrane Television personality Kevin O’Leary is best known as the ‘asshole’ on the investment reality shows Dragon’s Den, in Canada, and Shark Tank, in the United States. The shows have self-styled entrepreneurs bring forth …
Tim Di Muzio The Capitalization of Money Creation: The Greatest Sabotage in Human History? Every year in my course on Political Economy in the New Millennium I ask my students to do an exercise. The …
Ilirjan Shehu Speaking to students in Jakarta, Indonesia, US Secretary of State, John Kerry, declared a few days ago that climate change is the world’s “most fearsome” weapon of mass destruction. Likening climate change to …
James McMahon Over at Heterodox Microeconomics Research Network they have a thorough list of academic publications that are relevant to heterodox theories of capitalism. The list covers the following subjects: History and Methodology of Heterodox …
Eric George Since 2012, the U.S Department of Justice has launched a series of private negotiations with Wall Street banks relating to their involvement in the 2008 financial crisis. The DoJ made headlines this November …
Sandy Hager In an interesting piece for the Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell assesses Obama’s declaration to ‘go it alone’ in light of the ‘obstructionist Republican agenda’ in the US Congress. In a recent State of …
Tim Di Muzio The Constitution of the United States of America It is by now fairly clear that the Congress of the United States is a ‘do-nothing’ Congress populated by 268 millionaires (out of 534 …
DT Cochrane Toronto’s Pearson Airport was recently thrown into chaos when bad weather forced it to suspend ground operations. For eight hours, hundreds of flights scheduled to land and take-off were unable to do so. …
DT Cochrane The title of this piece might make readers think of capitalist power over the masses. However, in this case, I’m thinking of how capital serves to discipline the decision-makers of capitalism. A recent …
Ilirjan Shehu Brussels Business is a documentary about the important role dominant capital has played in the shaping of the European Union from its early days. It explores the secretive activity of big business and …
Tim Di Muzio Royal Authority and Private Property Last week we considered the concept of ownership though the work of Veblen and Marx. We noted that the establishment and protection of private property involved the …
DT Cochrane A recent episode of Planet Money describes a long running feud between two makers of hand bells. The story itself was interesting. However, two parts jumped out at me as relevant to CasP. …
Jeremy Green The contested nature of the economic ‘recovery’ has become the central theme of British political debate. The next election, in 2015, will be fought on these terms, with the Coalition government trumpeting its …
Tim Di Muzio Sabotage and Ownership Last week we considered how the capital as power framework seeks to conceptualize two different forms of sabotage: a general sabotage that limits the potential of humanity in which …
The First Speaker Series on the Capitalist Mode of Power was sponsored by the York Department of Political Science and the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought. Talks were held at York University, Toronto, …
James McMahon Found this video when browsing Boing Boing. Originally posted by NASA, this video is fascinating. It may also stand as a metaphor for the methodological problems in political economic theory. Consider part of …
Tim Di Muzio Last week we looked briefly at the origin of the term ‘sabotage’ and found that it was more associated with the working class than it was with elite power – those who …
DT Cochrane The EU has fined a selection of European and U.S. American banks €1.7 billion for rigging major interest-rate benchmarks. The article notes that the benchmarks – Libor, and the Tokyo and euro area …
DT Cochrane This is an interesting NYT article about buying habits, market research and advertising. It describes how Target has been able to compile and analyze customer data in order to identify women who are …