Blog


November 18, 2014

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. …

November 17, 2014

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 …

October 31, 2014

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 …

October 17, 2014

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 …

October 8, 2014

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 …

September 25, 2014

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 …

September 5, 2014

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. …

August 20, 2014

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 …

August 11, 2014

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 …

July 25, 2014

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 …

July 16, 2014

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 …

July 8, 2014

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 …

June 26, 2014

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 …

June 15, 2014

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 …

June 12, 2014

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 …

April 24, 2014

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 …

April 1, 2014

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 …

March 5, 2014

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 …

February 27, 2014

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 …

February 25, 2014

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 …

February 13, 2014

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 …

February 4, 2014

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 …

February 3, 2014

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 …

January 14, 2014

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. …

January 12, 2014

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 …

January 12, 2014

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 …

January 5, 2014

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 …

hand bells
December 28, 2013

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. …

December 26, 2013

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 …

December 23, 2013

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 …

December 22, 2013

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, …

December 19, 2013

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 …

December 10, 2013

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 …

December 9, 2013

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 …

December 2, 2013

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 …

November 29, 2013

Edward Lam Found amongst some recent market commentary the chart above seems to be quite striking evidence in favour of the Capital as Power framework. The data series have been put together by the investment …

November 28, 2013

Tim Di Muzio Welcome to a weekly investigation into the fascinating world of corporate sabotage where human creativity, cooperation, mutual aid and well-being are all held ransom for the profit and power of dominant owners. …

November 20, 2013

DT Cochrane The market has spoken: it disapproves of Rob Ford. A Bloomberg article notes that Toronto’s borrowing costs have risen relative to those of other Canadian municipalities. The determinants of bond prices are complex. …

October 24, 2013

DT Cochrane It is exciting to see this website grow. Content is being added here and there, and our Working Paper Series has its first paper. What already stands out on this website, in my …

October 8, 2013

DT Cochrane The media is notoriously short sighted. Its reports on recent events are largely devoid of any historical consideration. This is equally true of market reports. Despite not putting market events into a historical …

September 29, 2013

DT Cochrane Girls wear pink. Boys wear blue. This seemingly universal gender dichotomy is actually a very recent invention, as this post on smithsonian.com makes clear. At the end of the 19th century, most boys …

September 10, 2013

DT Cochrane Wired has published a series of maps that try to visualize racial segregation in many of America’s biggest cities. From Wired: “The [maps], created by Dustin Cable at University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper …

August 29, 2013

DT Cochrane ‘Ask a Mortician’ is a quirky and informative Youtube series with mortician Caitlin Doughty. The most recent video touches on the political economy of the funeral business. The question is based on an …

August 21, 2013

DT Cochrane Sports writer Patrick Hruby offers a breakdown of recent turmoil over the possibility that Texas A&M football star Johnny Manziel broke college sports rules pertaining to the payment of athletes. The piece provides …

August 20, 2013

DT Cochrane The media company 21st Century Fox has purchased a five percent share of the website Vice for $70 million. The website produces a wide range of content. However, much of what it currently …

August 19, 2013

DT Cochrane The Brazilian government is due to spend R$200 billion (US$84 billion) on its ports, airports, railroads and roads over the next two years. This spending highlights the impossibility of separating ‘politics’ from the …

August 16, 2013

DT Cochrane This American Life is a great public radio show based out of Chicago. They just hit their 500th episode and to celebrate, Ira Glass talked with his other producers about favourite past episodes. …

August 16, 2013

DT Cochrane In the August 16 issue of The Financial Times, popularizing economics writer Tim Harford joined the chorus of voices raising the issue of income inequality. He asked whether or not we should care …