David Simon

David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

market values from relationships to transactions and societal rot

On Panitch & Gindin and American decline by Doug Henwood

And now onto the psychological realm. I’ve been thinking lately about what we might call the neoliberal self. Gone seems to be the classically bourgeois executive ego, a relatively stable, if sometimes anal-retentive structure to guide the subject through life. In its place is a much more fragmented thing, adaptable to a world of unstable employment and volatile financial markets—but unable to think seriously about long-term things like social cohesion or, god save us, climate change. 

The material basis of this transformation looks to be the replacement of the relationship by the transaction, to steal the language of corporate governance. Workers are told to run their lives like little entrepreneurs, moving from one ill-paying short-term job to another, or maybe holding two or three at a time. And at the top of the society, we see the erosion of the planning function, and any rationality beyond the most crudely instrumental. It’s been a long time since I read Polanyi, but this seems to me a perspective on the social rot produced by market-regulated societies, from the macro level of investment down to the socially shaped psychology of how we think and feel. I don’t see how the imperium can long survive this sort of pervasive rot.

Economics, class and conservative ideology

Don't Mention the War by Seth Ackerman & Mike Beggs

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Kotryna Zukauskaite

Kotryna Zukauskaite

Graeber and zombie Marxism

Robert Kuttner reviews Graeber in the NYRB.

review of a new book on Marx.

Zombie Marx

MIKE BEGGS: "ON THE POINT AT ISSUE, [DELONG] WAS RIGHT": YET MORE FAMA'S FALLACY FRESHMAN MACROECONOMIC MISTAKES WEBLOGGING by DeLong

I see that today, in the Journal of Australian Political Economy, Mike Beggs has taken his 2011 Jacobin essay up to the top of the Temple of Huitzilpochtil, ripped its heart out with an obsidian knife, and left it dead on the ground. The most important paragraph--and my favorite paragraph--is missing. The paragraph reads, as Beggs evaluates my critique of David Harvey's word-salad:

[O]n the point at issue, [whether boosting government spending would boost employment, DeLong] was right – it is a question of interest rates, not of the number of bonds that can be sold. When Harvey went on to clarify his argument, it was only with some casual empiricism of his own. He noted that he was hardly the only one to be making the argument that East Asian central banks could stop collecting US Treasuries, so that “the track of long-term treasury interest rates may go the way of the housing market data in just a couple of years (if not months).” This was an argument you could read in mainstream business pages; there was nothing particularly Marxist about it. Now that we are more than a couple of years down the track, DeLong still looks right: the yields on long-term Treasury bonds are, as I write in July 2011, about the same as they were in February 2009, when the exchange took place. The limits to stimulus have been political, not financial.

Public choice = Marxism by John Quiggin

Can an exploitation movie be a great movie? with Tasha Robinson and Scott Tobias