What’s New


March 26, 2023

Jonathan Nitzan What is capital? Despite centuries of debate, there is no clear answer to this question – and for a good reason. Capital is a polemic term. The way we define it attests our …

March 24, 2023

Abstract Od głodu i biedy po zwykłe marnotrawstwo i nawracające fale przeróżnych kryzysów – to nie niepożądane skutki uboczne kapitalizmu, ale przejawy sabotażu. Bo nic nie utrwala władzy kapitału skuteczniej niż istnienie szerokiej rzeszy ludzi, …

March 23, 2023

Abstract RESUMEN. Esta tesis es un esfuerzo por desentrañar el papel que juega el campo financiero dentro del proceso de acumulación de capital y la manera en que condiciona el desarrollo de la lucha entre …

March 16, 2023

Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Last week I ran a Twitter survey to see what software my fellow researchers use. It turns out they like R: As an avid R …

March 9, 2023

Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow Capital-as-power, a framework from Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, holds that companies don’t seek to be as profitable as possible – but rather to accumulate as much power as …

February 22, 2023

Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix According to behavioral economics, most human decisions are mired in ‘bias’. It muddles our actions from the mundane to the monumental. Human behavior, it seems, …

February 6, 2023

Abstract Capitalizing a Cure takes readers into the struggle over a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance over business, biomedicine, and public health. When curative treatments for hepatitis C launched in 2013, sticker …

February 6, 2023

Abstract There is little doubt that, in the last hundred years or so, progress has been made in lifting more people out of extreme poverty. Yet, considerable economic inequalities both within and between nations persists …

February 3, 2023

Abstract הקפיטליזם שולט בעולם. דיונים סוערים מתנהלים בין המלומדים הממסדיים לבין “הביקורתיים” על טיבו של הקפיטליזם הגלובלי. הבעיה היא שטיבו של המוסד המרכזי בקפיטליזם — ההון — אינו ידוע. לאחר יותר ממאתיים שנה של התפתחות …

January 17, 2023

The Business of Strategic Sabotage SHIMSHON BICHLER and JONATHAN NITZAN January 2023 Abstract In a recent article, Nicolas D. Villarreal claims that our empirical analysis of the relation between business power and industrial sabotage in …

January 10, 2023

Regan Boychuk The bias of Alberta’s media in favour of our dominant industry is both pervasive and obvious to any careful observer. But how to prove it? Studies of media bias are notoriously difficult and …

December 21, 2022

Abstract This paper uses word frequency to track the rise and potential peak of capitalist ideology. Using a sample of mainstream economics textbooks as my corpus of capitalist thinking, I isolate the jargon of these …

December 21, 2022

Abstract Steve Keen’s book, The New Economics: A Manifesto (2021), offers a new path for economics, and for good reason. In his view, neoclassicism, the paradigm that rules modern-day economics, has become a serious menace: …

December 13, 2022

Regan Boychuk Author’s note: At the end of the First Cold War, Canada tried to make the polluter pay. This resulted in the United States launching an unknown, but successful coup in Alberta over the …

December 4, 2022

Regan Boychuk Author’s note: At the end of the First Cold War, Canada tried to make the polluter pay. This resulted in the United States launching an unknown, but successful coup in Alberta over the …

December 2, 2022

Regan Boychuk Author’s note: At the end of the First Cold War, Canada tried to make the polluter pay. This resulted in the United States launching an unknown, but successful coup in Alberta over the …

November 24, 2022

Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow Neoclassical economics is a hell of a drug. It has no theory of prices, no account of inflation, and its models all presume the existence of a perfectly rational …

October 31, 2022

Abstract Marxists love to hate the theory of capital as power, or CasP for short. And they have two good reasons. First, CasP criticizes the logical and empirical validity of the labour theory of value …

October 24, 2022

Originally published at Fresh Economic Thinking Cameron Murray Do you believe this headline? I don’t. The many problems with measuring a country’s wealth are on full display in this Credit Suisse report. But let’s start …

October 21, 2022

Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon Rotten Tomatoes (RT) found a way to get every last drop from the well of convenience. Film criticism is already pressured, tacitly by convention, or explicitly by …

October 3, 2022

Chris Mouré Note: this is the manuscript version of an article now featured in The Mint Magazine. Few will argue with the claim that shortages are socially harmful. Shortages, by definition, imply a lack of …

September 19, 2022

Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Ryan Kyger1 and Blair Fix Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds. — attributed to Richard Feynman2 Most scientists don’t …

September 9, 2022

Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow The starting gun on Big Tech trustbusting was fired in 2017, when Lina Khan, then a law student (now an FTC trustbuster!) published “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” a law-review article …

September 6, 2022

Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like …

September 1, 2022

Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon Like other streaming services, Netflix does not make its user data public. To date, there are two exceptions to this privacy. Netflix released a large dataset of …

August 23, 2022

Abstract Covid-19 and the Global Political Economy investigates and explores how far and in what ways the Covid-19 pandemic is challenging, restructuring, and perhaps remaking aspects of the global political economy. Since the 1970s, neoliberal …

August 20, 2022

Abstract Rapid technological change is often touted as a fundamental reality of capitalist societies. It is also often presented as concrete evidence for the supposed progressive improvement of material well-being that characterises the capitalist system …

July 21, 2022

Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Today I’m trying a different type of post — one that’s not a deep dive, but instead, a rapid-fire summary of an important topic. My …

July 15, 2022

Tim Di Muzio Any student of capitalism knows it is a distinct economic system prone to periodic crises. These crises come in many forms and are typically studied after the fact, as the work of …

July 13, 2022

Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow Two quotes to ponder as you read “Purdue’s Poison Pill,” Adam Levitin’s forthcoming Texas Law Review paper: “Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain …

June 23, 2022

Pensions and Power The Political and Market Dynamics of Public Pension Plans ERALD KOLASI June 2022 Abstract This paper uses the theory of ‘capital as power’ to analyze the struggle over public pensions in the …

June 16, 2022

Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix There’s something mysterious about finance. The symbols are arcane. The math is complex. The practitioners are impressively educated. And the stakes are high. All of …

June 7, 2022

Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow I was 12 years into my Locus Magazine column when I published the piece I’m most proud of, “IP,” from September 2020. It came after an epiphany, one that …

May 13, 2022

Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix They say that Americans love two things: freedom … and guns. The trouble with guns is obvious. The trouble with freedom is more subtle, and …

May 10, 2022

Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon On the question of who judges the quality of a film, it is easy to start with a notion that the ultimate judge of a film’s quality …

May 4, 2022

Blair Fix The Review of Capital as Power is pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 Capital as Power Essay Prize: First Prize: ‘Costly Efficiencies: Healthcare Spending, COVID-19, and the Public/Private Healthcare Debate’, by …

May 3, 2022

Costly Efficiencies Healthcare Spending, COVID-19, and the Public/Private Healthcare Debate CHRIS MOURÉ May 2022 Abstract Proponents of private healthcare often claim that the private sector is more ‘efficient’ at delivering healthcare services. This paper tests …

April 29, 2022

Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow Two of the most astute IP scholars I know also happen to be two of the best legal writers I know, and also happen to work at one of …

April 24, 2022

Abstract In the March 2021 issue of Harper’s, Scorsese wrote an essay to pay tribute to Federico Fellini, the Italian director who directed such great films as La Strada, 8 1/2, La Dolce Vita, Nights …

hype (from wiki commons)
April 23, 2022

Hype The Capitalist Degree of Induced Participation YURI DI LIBERTO April 2022 Abstract Power is usually considered as either a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ construct, as in the power to force action versus the power to …

April 8, 2022

Abstract In Hollywood, the goals of art and business are entangled. Directors, writers, actors, and idealistic producers aspire to make the best films possible. These aspirations often interact with the dominant firms that control Hollywood …

April 5, 2022

Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762 In his epic 18th-century treatise Discourse on Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued …

April 1, 2022

Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow In my 2017 novel WALKAWAY, there’s a scene where the protagonists get into a self-driving car owned by a ruthless plutocrat, only to discover that it moves faster than …

March 30, 2022

Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix A few months ago, I went down a rabbit hole analyzing word frequency in economics textbooks. Henry Leveson-Gower, editor of The Mint Magazine, thought the …

March 22, 2022

Originally published at pluralistic.net Cory Doctorow The quest to bring antitrust law to bear against tech companies is finally paying off, but it’s been a long, hard slog. At the vanguard have been two legal …

March 10, 2022

Originally published at Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Today a rant about textbooks. Every year governments spend billions of dollars on public education, teaching students knowledge that was itself created by publicly funded …

March 9, 2022

Originally published at notes on cinema James McMahon We ended the last post with a scenario of someone dreaming of their film going all the way to the Academy Awards. But I also waved away …

March 3, 2022

Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler Originally published on Twitter During the twilight of feudalism, wars, whose cost soared in tandem with their material scope and unit price, were the most financially demanding expenses. Changing military …