The Costly Betrayal of Cost-Benefit’s Promise

Jerry Cayford Originally published here A conversation, eighty-some years ago, shaped our world today. The conversation was among three papers in economics. In 1939, Nicholas Kaldor and John Hicks published papers that steered economics through a major crisis, one that threatened its legitimacy as an advisor on public policy. With the Great Depression still raging […]

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Bichler & Nitzan, ‘Manuscripts Don’t Burn’

Manuscripts Don’t Burn SHIMSHON BICHLER and JONATHAN NITZAN September 2023 Keywords censorship, ideology, marxism, neoliberalilsm, peer review, plagiarism Citation Bichler, Shimshon, and Nitzan, Jonathan. 2023. ‘Manuscripts Don’t Burn’. Review of Capital as Power, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 175–189. Download PDF 1     Flat Reality The French Revolution changed the world. In the new order, the masters […]

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Bichler & Nitzan, ‘The Capital as Power Approach: An Invited-then-Rejected Interview’

The Capital as Power Approach An Invited-then-Rejected Interview with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan SHIMSHON BICHLER and JONATHAN NITZAN September 2023 Keywords capital accumulation, capitalization, interview, Marxism, modes of power, stagflation, systemic fear, value theory Citation Bichler, Shimshon, and Nitzan, Jonathan. 2023. ‘The Capital as Power Approach: An Invited-then-Rejected Interview with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan […]

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Money is power

Originally published at pluralistic.net Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license Cory Doctorow “Political economy” may sound like an obscure technical matter, but it’s a really very simple (and incredibly important) idea: That the economy is inevitably political, and there is no way to depoliticize economic theory. That is, every aspect of economics – […]

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Bichler & Nitzan, ‘Regime Change and Dominant Capital: Lessons from Israel’

Abstract Israel’s ongoing crisis – or ‘judicial coup’ in popular parlance – has elicited two opposite responses. The first comes from global rating agencies, economists and investment strategists who see Israel’s country risk rising. The opposite reaction, by Prime Minister Netanyahu and his acolytes, insists that the ‘coup’ is much ado about nothing, and that […]

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Alberta’s Rockefeller Coups, Part 5: Canada is an American Protectorate & Alberta is an Imperial Bezzle

Regan Boychuk Green Party of Alberta energy critic Author’s note Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The suggestion that a semi-secret conspiracy of racists transferred imperial control of Canada from the British to the Americans on the eve of the Second World War seems well worth skepticism. But doubt will melt as we meet the elite […]

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Di Liberto, ‘Differential Harm: Patterns of Uneven Destruction’

Abstract This essay opposes the idea that contemporary critical events like pandemics, global warming, environmental deterioration, et cetera, are to be considered as affecting humanity in a uniform way. Instead of seeing these phenomena like abstract universal threats, I propose to look at them through the lens of my concept of differential harm. By drawing […]

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Suaste Cherizola, ‘Estudiar el precio, olvidar el valor. Una alternativa al pensamiento económico tradicional’

Abstract Este artículo intenta sentar las bases para una comprensión de los precios radicalmente diferente a como los entiende el pensamiento económico tradicional. Tras revisar algunos aspectos relevantes de la crítica a la teoría del dinero como mercancía, se muestra que el pensamiento tradicional es incapaz de captar las propiedades irreductibles de los precios y […]

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Why Consumption Taxes (VATs) are Insanely Regressive

Originally published at Wealth Economics Steve Roth Following the community of Socks (?s) or “social democrats” out there on the interwebs (this is definitely my economic tribe), in articles, and in books, there’s a particular stance on a particular issue that I find perplexing, even anti-progressive. They’re generally quite keen on using “value-added” consumption/sales taxes […]

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McMahon, ‘Star Power and Risk: A Political Economic Study of Casting Trends in Hollywood’

Abstract This paper builds an empirical and theoretical model to analyze how the financial goal of risk reduction changed the insides of Hollywood’s star system. For the moviegoer looking at Hollywood cinema from the outside, the function of the star system has remained the same since the 1920s: to have recognizable actors attract large audiences […]

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Environmental conflict, capital as power … and a nice trip to London

Originally published at Manchester Metropolitan University Adam Marshall In recent years, as governments and corporations have intensified their efforts to locate, extract and monetise oil, gas, and various other biophysical resources, the world has simultaneously witnessed a proliferation of social resistance to these efforts. While such resistance can take many forms, it is invariably motivated […]

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Why are not-for-profit hospitals in the US so much more profitable than for-profit hospitals?

Christopher Mouré and Shai Gorsky When it comes to social institutions, not-for-profit organizations (NFPs) allegedly strike a balance between the private and public realm. While privately owned and operated, not-for-profits are distinguished by their ostensibly public purpose – in eschewing private profits, they claim to make the pursuit of some social benefit their primary objective. […]

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Bichler & Nitzan, ‘Inflation as Redistribution: Creditors, Workers, Policymakers’

Abstract This paper is part of a dialogue with Blair Fix on how inflation redistributes income between creditors and workers and the way in which monetary policy affects this process. In his 2023 paper, ‘Inflation! The Battle Between Creditors and Workers’, Fix shows, first, that the impact of U.S. inflation on creditor-worker distribution has been […]

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