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Thanks for the list, Jonathan. I have read Herman Wouk’s two-novel epic. The strength of that story, in my opinion, is how Wouk helps you imagine how big these “war machines” are. His description of Midway in unforgettable.
Sounds interesting, Jonathan. Off the top of my head I cannot remember if I have read a novel or book that focuses on the front-line experience.
While cinema has an abundance of war films that are too glossy and entertaining for their subject matter, there are some that do a great job representing the horrors and other-worldliness of the front line. In the case of the Russian front, I can think of two; one I have seen and one is on my to-watch list.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood is a beautiful, poetic film about a Russian boy who, because of his age and presumed innocence, is able to go back and forth across German lines. He survives on the handouts of Russian soldiers who use him to relay intelligence.
Come and See, which I have yet to watch, has been getting a lot of attention since its restoration. It is the type of film that definitely critiques the argument that, by virtue of showing acts of war, all war films are anti-war films. This argument might come across as naive, but this is how Steven Speilberg argued that Saving Private Ryan was anti-war.
One aspect of the GameStop story is definitely relevant to the CasP approach: the question of what the high market value of GameStop is resting on. Can we say GameStop is overvalued but without falling into the trappings of the real-nominal dichotomy?
Hopefully we find a method to integrate the old forum with the new one. In the meantime, readers can see that this issue has come up before, in the context of speaking about ‘bubbles’ in the stock market.
Remember when BitCoin’s price soared? Everybody jumped on the story, and if you listened to the predictions of certain circles, we would all soon be buying groceries and paying rent with de-centralized currency.
That is what is striking me with the reporting on the GameStop price jump. I don’t have a clear answer right now, but it is wild to see what people are already saying about the effect of the event on the future of Wall Street or even of capitalism.
My thoughts that people are jumping feet first into the “rebelliousness” of reddit’s behavior were confirmed when YouTube recommended to me Joe Rogan’s thoughts about it on his podcast. Because that is what I was thinking: “What does Joe Rogan think about this mess?!?”
A long history of non-US market-cap data will be trickier. I might be able to help, but I would need to check what my remote access can get me.
In the meantime, I found stock price data going back to 2000. Available here and also attached: https://www.marketindex.com.au/asx/ajl
A measure of differential price is possible, but it does come with the caveat that you don’t know what is happening with Common Shares Outstanding (CSHO).
A quick route to S&P 500 historical data is from Schiller, which is also used in BN’s papers on systemic fear: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/494/
I remember being overwhelmed while I was taking the course. My academic background made me a novice on multiple aspects of the research that was required. Keep fueling that curiosity to learn more–in whatever capacity–because who knows what can come from your explorations. After finally getting more comfortable with empirical work, I was energized from knowing that I had skills to see if evidence supported claims in political economy (to the best of my abilities and availability of data).
All the best to you as well, vbozic. If you don’t mind sharing, how did you find POLS 4292? I took Jonathan’s grad-level course years ago, but the 4th year course is very similar.
For safer browsing in 2021, uninstall Abobe Flash Player, as Adobe will not longer be updating for security. Adobe’s page. An updated browser (Firefox, Chrome, …) will also block Flash.
Ahh, memories of Flash. For those who know:
Apologies for the delay in my update. Below is a single image of the two plots above:
Sources: Global Financial Data, code _TFTASD for UK FTSE All-Share Return Index (w/GFD extension), 1694-2020. UK Composite Average Weekly Earnings series is from A47. Wages and Prices 1209-2016, A millennium of macroeconomic data for the UK, The Bank of England’s collection of historical macroeconomic and financial statistics. UK CPI is taken from A millennium of macroeconomic data for the UK.
I thought about Blair’s comment on runaway inequality. In this figure capital’s growth relative to labor is exponential and I think there is a simple reason why. The figure does not show what any real capitalist has earned because it spans hundreds of years. It is more of a symbolic representation of two types of life under capitalism. Say we have two families that in 1700 are at the same starting point. The “capital” family has bought into stock market and holds stock worth the return of 1. The “labour” family works for a living and also starts at 1. The huge growth of the “capital” family is a representation of someone buying stock in 1700 and holding up until the present.
The difference between continuous exponential growth of stock returns and the U-shape of historical income inequality might have something to do with generational change. Fortunes from 1700 do not straightforwardly carry over into the present. So much can happen: inheritance tax, lost fortunes, individuals enter and leave the market through buying and selling.
The following figures try to find the U-shape in the generational changes of stock returns and the stock/labor ratio. For comparison they are plotted against the .999 percent income of GBR, retrieved from WID.
Hi all, I’m a newbie to both the forum and CasP. Although I only stumbled across the CasP literature a couple of days ago (and have therefore only read a tiny fraction of it), I find the core arguments intriguing and persuasive. So much so that I am seriously considering using CasP as my main theoretical approach- even at this VERY late stage in my PhD research (I am currently in the early stages of writing up my findings!).
Welcome to the site. Always nice to see new people show curiosity about CasP research.
I could talk about my empirical research experiences for days. I also do think your thinking about the back-and-forth relationship between abstract theory and empirical data is meaningful.
To keep my thoughts focused I’ll try to give some practical advice to your questions:
(a) Do you think it would be feasible to undertake this sort of analysis within say the next 2-3 months?
Like Blair said, it depends. One way it depends is from the way this empirical work will integrate with your project. Let’s take a worse case scenario, where you find a bunch of interesting things and they contradict a lot of your working theories. When we work in pure theory, this scenario can’t occur because nobody intentionally makes a broken theoretical model. Additionally, my long experience with political theory is that academia eschews theoretical vacuums. We are often pressured to have a theory explain everything, or as much as possible. With what Marxism has become in the last 150 years, this pressure is high.
The empirical work can be a release valve, whereby you use the empirical work test hypotheses. These results can be unexpected or even hard to understand, but the trick is to adopt a different temperament to new research. Publication of negative or partially-negative results are everywhere in the sciences, but almost nowhere in the social sciences. Thus, could the empirical work be a way for you to gauge your confidence in what you are claiming? Are there arguments that require qualification? Is there evidence that existing theories of your project don’t easily overlap the facts?
(b) If you think (a) is feasible, it would be great to get some pointers on where I might find the relevant data and how best to go about analysing it?
If there is specific data that needs to be downloaded, you can always inquire on this forum. Some of us have access to financial databases (also check your university subscriptions) and some data gathering would take less than an hour of anyone’s time. Also don’t be shy about the smallest or simplest of questions. When I first started, I was amazed to learn how to create moving averages in Excel–this was taught to me in Jonathan’s course.
Have specific questions you want to answer. This is very important if your time is limited. Free-form quantitative research is very fun–you can gather and play with data–but it eats up a lot of time and often it does not reveal anything straight forward. Before I worked on my research on Hollywood cinema I tried to get some data on coffee bean prices from around the world. I found some but I had no theory or hypothesis I wanted to test. Therefore, I was sitting at home making time series (moving averages, rates of change) that looked like they said something (lines went up, lines went down), but I didn’t even know why I needed data on coffee bean prices in the first place.
Very interesting breakdown of the labour share of income. A quick reaction: I wonder if this figure can help show the degrees of sabotage in employment. At the most brutal end of the spectrum you have the decreasing compensation and decreasing employment. But that can be very socially destabilizing. The more strategic approach is keep employment per capita strong, but to make the meaning of employment worse (part-time, contract, fewer raises of income).
