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Category Archive: Economics

Consumerism again - May 31, 2007
Heath and Potter find Thorstein Veblen's critique of consumerism much more persuasive, "far more penetrating than any of the theories developed in the 20th century." Veblen argued that while poor societies devote every increase in production to meeting basic needs,...

Consumerism - May 31, 2007
In their book, Nation of Rebels, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter explain why the Marxian critique of the consumer society as a product of "generalized overproduction" doesn't work: "There is no such thing as generalized overproduction. Never was, never has...

Marxism - January 18, 2007
In his chapter on the Bolshevik Revolution, Rosenstock-Huessy spends a number of pages digressing about Marx and Marxism. The following notes summarize his treatment of Marxism. Marx, Rosenstock-Huessy begins, is the culmination of the protest against the "order of things"...

Work and teaching - January 02, 2007
Discussing the separation of workplace and home, Rosenstock-Huessy makes the striking observation that this divide separates labor from a man's "right to teach, once the supreme value of a master's earthly life."...

VISA World - November 11, 2006
Dee Hock, founder and CEO of VISA Corporation, describes the rise and size of the company: "In 1968 the VISA community was no more than a set of beliefs and a vague concept. In 1970 it was born. Today, twenty-nine...

Global corporations - November 11, 2006
Peter Drucker notes that "the distinction between parent and daughter [companies] is increasingly blurring. In the transnational company, design is done anyplace within the system. Major pharmaceutical companies now have research laboratories in five or six countries, in the United...

Iconomics - November 07, 2006
The reviewer of Ernest Sterberg's 1999 Economy of Icons in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology summarizes some main points from this latter-day Thorstein Veblen: "The thesis of this controversial book is that 'enterprises make their way in the...

Bakhtin the capitalist - September 28, 2006
Stallybrass and White critize Bakhtin for conceptualizing the fair purely as a place of communal celebration, ignoring the commercial activities of the fair: "In developing this concept, Bakhtin succumbs to that separation of the festive and the commercial which is...

Elegant dress - September 27, 2006
In his Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen notes that it is good if it shows that "the wearer can afford to consumer freely and uneconomically," but beyond that should "make plain to all observers that the wearer is...

Rational Actors - September 12, 2006
Featherstone claims that economics has generally focused on the production rather than the consumption side of things, perhaps because of "the assumption that consumption was unproblematic because it was based upon the concept of rational individuals buying goods to maximize...

Roofless factory - July 17, 2006
The "roofless factory" of some contemporary capitalist theory and practice reverses one of the basic drives of modern economic life. Bringing all workers into a single location under a single roof was one of the main features of the early...

Estate Tax - May 28, 2006
Peter Beinart offers one contradictory, one misleading, and one astonishing argument in favor of the estate tax on the "super rich" (TNR, May 15). The contradictory argument first: He quotes from Teddy Roosevelt to the effect that the wealthy owe...

Consumerism - February 23, 2006
Consumerism is a popular category of analysis, but what exactly does it mean? How is consumerism or the consumer society different from anything else? Haven't every economies had producers and consumers? In his The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of...

Age - February 09, 2006
Sennett again: "The number of men aged fifty-five to sixty-four at work in the United States has dropped from nearly 80 percent in 1970 to 65 percent in 1990." Trends are similar in Western Europe. Older workers are often downsized,...

Economy of ingratitude - February 09, 2006
To return to one of my recent obsessions: The flexible economy described by Sennett seems inimical to the cultivation of gratitude, one of the key components or grounds of loyalty. Employers have various sorts of incentives (stock prices, meeting market...

Flextime - February 09, 2006
Sennett claims that the apparent decentralization of power in flexible organizations is only apparent. In fact, power remains concentrated in the hands of top level managers, often enhanced by the surveillance capabilities of contemporary technologies. The actual practice of flextime...

Downsizing - February 09, 2006
Sennett summarizes a study from the early 1990s done by the American Management Association, which found that "repeated downsizings produce 'lower profits and declining worker productivity.'" The study found "less than half the companies achieved their experience reduction goals; fewer...

Cultural Contradictions of Flexible Capitalism - February 09, 2006
As Richard Sennett points out in his stimulating book, The Corrosion of Character, Marx was not the first to suggest that the factory system was dehumanizing and alienating. Nor was Daniel Bell first to spot the effects of capitalism on...

Non-monetary value - September 29, 2005
Georg Simmel wrote, "Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity...

Economics of abundance? - May 27, 2005
George Gilder suggests in Telecosm that economists study scarcity rather than abundance because the former is measurable, and the latter approaches infinity (and hence zero price): "The economists' focus on scarcity stems from the fact that shortages are measurable and...

Hayek - April 19, 2004
Francis Fukuyama reviews Bruce Caldwell's new biography of Hayek in the Spring 2004 issue of The Wilson Quarterly. According to Caldwell, Hayek's argument against a managed economy was basically an epistemological one: "There are limits to rationality, and what any...

Culture and Development - March 03, 2004
Deepak Lal holds the James S. Coleman Professorship of International Development Studies at UCLA, and has produced a fascinating cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural study of the relation of culture and development, Unintended Consequences (Oxford, 1998). Many of his arguments are unpersuasive,...

The Weber Thesis - February 11, 2004
Years ago, I read David Landes's Prometheus Unbound for a class in economic history, and I can still remember the fascination I experienced at his descriptions of the steel industry (though details are sadly forgotten). In his recent Wealth and...

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