Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Economists often talk about income inequality the same way a doctor would talk about a child’s height. Just as a doctor would say “Sylvia continues to grow taller”, economists say things like “US income inequality continues to grow”. (Full disclosure, I’m sure I’ve said similar […]
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about Aaron Swartz. Swartz was an internet pioneer who, in his teens and early 20s, made huge contributions to computer culture. Among other things, Swartz helped develop RSS (which organizes web feeds), Markdown (a simple […]
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Scientists live and die by their scientific ‘impact’. For the uninitiated, ‘impact’ is a measure of a scientist’s contribution to their field. While there are many measures of scientific impact, almost all of them focus (in some way) on citations. So if more people cite […]
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix In a recent blog post called “How Not to Measure Inequality”, the anthropologist Jason Hickel argues that economists measure inequality the wrong way. Hickel thinks that standard measures of inequality (such as the Gini index), underestimate global disparities. The problem, according to Hickel, is that […]
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Karl Marx is probably the most important social scientist in history. But while his influence is beyond compare, Marx’s legacy is, in many ways, disastrous. Few thinkers have inspired so many people to commit crimes against humanity. Think of Stalinist gulags. Think of the Ukrainian […]
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix In The Growth of Hierarchy and the Death of the Free Market, I argued that economic development involves killing the free market. What was the evidence? As energy use increases, so does the relative number of managers. This growth of managers, I argued, indicates that […]
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Let’s talk sustainability. Unless you’re an anti-science crank, you probably agree that we’ve got a problem with carbon emissions. We need to drastically cut emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change. On this we should all agree. The question that’s open for debate is how to […]
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Yesterday I was reminded of what got me interested in economics. I’ll preface this by saying that I make my living as a substitute teacher in Toronto. It’s not glamorous, but it pays the bills. It gives me time to do research from outside academia. […]
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix Do you believe in free markets? Do you think that unfettered competition is the best way to organize society? If so, this post is intended to shake your faith. No, I’m not going to argue that free markets are bad. Instead, I’m going to show […]
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix In this post, I’m going to return to the relation between energy and institution size. When we left off last time (in Groping in the Dark), I had described my struggle to understand how the size of firms and governments changes with energy use. It […]
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix In this post we’re going to take a journey into the world of power-law distributions. Power laws pop up again and again in my research. But I’ve never taken the time to discuss what makes them so weird. This post will be a little ‘power-law […]
The Autocatalytic Sprawl of Pseudorational Mastery ULF MARTIN May 2019 Abstract According to Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler (2009), capital is not an economic quantity, but a mode of power. Their fundamental thesis could be summarized as follows: capital is power quantified in monetary terms. But what do we do when we quantify? What is […]
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix In the opening post of this blog, I described my ‘top-down’ approach to studying society. This means studying groups of people without trying to reduce everything to the actions of individuals. It’s not that I think individual actions are unimportant. Of course they are important. […]
Originally published on Economics from the Top Down Blair Fix There is an exciting side of blogging that I want to explore here. Blogging can tell the story behind research. This is something you don’t get in journals. Most scientific articles obey a formula that goes like this: Here is the question I asked. Here […]
Articles Capital as Power in the 21st Century A Conversation Michael Hudson, Jonathan Nitzan, Tim Di Muzio, and Blair Fix February 2025 Manuscripts Don’t Burn Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan September 2023 The Capital as Power Approach An Invited-then-Rejected Interview with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan September 2023 The Business […]
Peer Review The Review of Capital as Power practices double-blind peer review. Neither the author nor the referees are known to one another. Each manuscript is reviewed by two referees. If the reviewers disagree, we may consult a third referee. Reviewers should focus on constructive commentary that will help authors strengthen their article. We ask […]
Submission Guidelines To submit an article, please email your manuscript to blairfix@fastmail.com with the subject ‘RECASP submission’. Manuscripts should be sent as a PDF file. Anonymous Peer Review The Review of Capital as Power practices double-blind peer review. To facilitate review, please send two versions of your manuscript: Version 1: includes author information (including a […]
Advisory Board Editor Blair Fix Toronto, Canada Founding Editor Tim Di Muzio University of Wollongong, Australia Board
Review of Capital as Power The Review of Capital as Power (RECASP) is a non-disciplinary, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the study of capital and capitalism. The journal invites contributions that engage with the idea of ‘capital as power’ – namely, the notion that capital is a symbolic quantification of organized power, and that capitalism as […]
Capital as Power This site explores the idea of ‘capital as power’, a radical approach to political economy that conceives ‘capital’ as a symbolic quantification of power. Our goal is to foster debate about received wisdom in political economy. As such, we conceive capital-as-power research as non-disciplinary. Contributions from any scientific background are welcome. Our […]
