Cartoon of the day

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Map of the day

source

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Travel and conference days

The next few days are travel and conference days. No posting, then, until I return. . .

Protest of the day

 

Thousands of Bangladeshi garment factory workers have protested in the capital, Dhaka, over the death of about 200 workers in a garment-manufacturing building collapse.

Update

The death toll in the Rana Plaza has risen to at least 238 and many others remain unaccounted for. More than 1,000 of the 2,500 workers were injured, with many of them still trapped.

Labor activists combed the wreckage on Wednesday afternoon and discovered labels and production records suggesting that the factories were producing garments for major European and American brands. Labels were discovered for the Spanish brand Mango, and for the low-cost British chain Primark.

Activists said the factories also had produced clothing for Walmart, the Dutch retailer C & A, Benetton and Cato Fashions, according to customs records, factory Web sites and documents discovered in the collapsed building.

Magic numbers and iron laws

 

Mainstream economists often complain the public doesn’t listen to them. The rest of should complain that, sometimes, as in the case of Reinhart-Rogoff, members of the public (including Harvard colleague Niall Ferguson, at the 1m20s mark) actually do. . .

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

“Offbeat” economics department—really?!

 

Given the awful track record of the economics departments at Harvard and elsewhere, it’s a bit strange that the economics department at the University of Massachussetts Amherst is referred to as “offbeat” [ht: ke].

Not to mention the fact that the fundamental errors in the now-infamous Reinhart-Rogoff study were first identified by Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at UMass.

It used to be called a radical economics department. In more recent times, it’s often referred to as heterodox economics. Yet, even after the “radical package” was hired back in 1973, the department only ever included a minority of nonmainstream economists. (In the video above, Don Katzner, Sam Bowles, and the late Stephen Resnick discuss some of that history. Matthews’s article also includes links to two other sources: Katzner’s book and a 2007 Nation piece by Chris Hayes.)

But that’s how it is in economics, even now five years into the Second Great Depression, which of course was precipitated by following the policies advocated by mainstream economists: having even a smattering of non-believers is enough to identify the department as something out of the ordinary—whether radical, heterodox, or simply offbeat.

After neoliberalism?

The founding editors of the British journal Soundings—Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin—have published an online manifesto in which they argue for disrupting the current neoliberal common sense and challenging the assumptions that organize our twenty-first-century political discourse.

Three ideas are, in my view, particularly important. First, “mainstream political debate simply does not recognise the depth of this crisis, nor the consequent need for radical rethinking.” That indictment is accurate not only for the current political debate but also for mainstream political and economic thought, both liberal and conservative—although there are plenty of intellectuals who are willing to take the “pay to play” in the sandbox of neoliberalism.

Second, neoliberalism has never succeeded in conquering everything. It is, instead, a project, an attempt—not always or everywhere successful—to colonize the world.

It operated within, and created, a world of great diversity and unevenness. Its early – classic – laboratory was Chile, but the rise of South East Asian tigers was, critically, a state-aided development (by no means the official neoliberal recipe). And in spite of the Western triumphalism of 1989, Russia also retains its specificities – a hybrid of oligarchic and state capitalism combined with authoritarianism. China, too, struggles to define a different model; it currently combines centralised party control with openness to foreign investment, and acute internal geographical dislocations and widespread social conflict with break-neck rates of growth and the lifting of hundreds of millions out of poverty. Indeed, conflict has erupted in many parts of the world where the neoliberal orthodoxy has been adopted. India, so frequently lauded for its embrace of the market consensus, exhibits both extraordinary rifts between the new elites and the impoverished, and multiple and persistent conflicts over its current economic strategy. Other major sites of conflict have been the water and gas wars in Bolivia, and the struggle of ‘the poors’ in Thailand. The emerging articulations of progressive governments and grassroots social movements in Latin America are, in varying ways and in varying degrees, responses to the impact of previous neoliberal policies. The alter-globalisation movement has been vocal. This has not been a simple victory.

Third, the shift in economic and social power since the 1970s has not been driven by a simple logic or single motor.

The economic is critical; but it cannot determine everything – even ‘in the last instance’, as Althusser famously argued. Any given conjuncture represents, rather, the fusion ‘into a ruptural unity’ of an ensemble of economic, social, political and ideological factors where ‘dissimilar currents … heterogeneous class interests … contrary political and social strivings’ fuse. What has come together in the current neoliberal conjuncture includes class and other social interests, new institutional arrangements, the exercise of excessive influence by private corporations over democratic processes, political developments such as the recruitment of New Labour to the neoliberal consensus, the effects of legitimising ideologies and a quasi-religious belief in the ‘hidden hand’, and the self- propelling virtues of ‘the market’.

So, there we have it: a neoliberal order in crisis that simply cannot be grasped or contained by mainstream political and economic thought, which has only ever involved an incomplete and always-contested attempt to remake the world, and which represents the contradictory fusion of economic and non-economic processes and events.

That’s a very good start. I look forward to reading the next installments of the Kilburn Manifesto.