"In particular, social scientists are trained to think of markets and government as fundamentally distinct."
Very interesting. I was wondering for a long time, why mainstream thought in the US is worried about big government but not about big business. Maybe the view that considers "markets and government as fundamentally distinct" is part of the explanation.
For an observer who is not a social scientist like myself it seems obvious that corporate power and government power in the US are closely aligned.
Its near 90 years since retired USMC major general Smedley Butler blew the whistle on a wealthy businessmens' plot to overthrow the FDR government. An actual plot that the editors at the NYT blew off as a nothingburger at the time. Butler went on to write and speak about the manner in which he and the marines he led had been used as muscle in controlling nascent democratic movements in the carribean 'banana republics'. I don't think he'd get a membership at their exclusive clubs nowadays.
I grew up in the 1950’s in a small town in northern Illinois too. Looking back it seems idyllic and like Iris Dement’s song. Although there was a Peyton Place element too. But we kids were free-range and innocent.
Dixon. Which certainly had its Peyton Place stories just below the surface. There were two dairy operations in town, several butcher operations and produce that was both local and shipped in. A shoe factory, other manufacturing, and yeah, the ability for even an awkward kid like me to bicycle all over town until curfew. I suspect the Peyton Place aspects still exist there, but far less sustainability and resilience, with greater dependence on food from more than 1,000 miles away. Same where I live now, in the Illinois Quad Cities.
I think the political economy we are now in is, as Farrell aptly describes here, is vastly different in the, ehm, vastness of the scope of control than when I grew up in a near-idyllic Iris Dement sort of 'Our Town' in northern Illinois.
Totally agreed and there's no need to limit this to the US. Nation states developed alongside corporations since their inception. Tax revenue from corporations was always integral to the state and monopoly rights were integral to corporations early on (and in some forms today). Not to mention the role of state military force in securing mineral rights and raw materials for corporations, and the need corporations have for a state-backed currency and enforcement of property rights to create a market.
The book, The Origin of Capitalism gives a thorough overview of this history. I used to lack the knowledge to describe/understand this connection, so i totally understand how people believe the false separation.
Yeah, when the discipline of History adopted the methodologies of the social sciences in the 1960s-1980s there was also a prejudice against the parts of the discipline that dealt with individuals and their agency. When I told my advisor in the 1990s that we was interested in intellectual history, they vetoed that idea because “nobody does that anymore.” Which was sort of true, the trend was towards discourse, the institutions that sustained intellectual life, etc.
Academic History (at least in the anglophone academy) also jettisoned a longstanding genre of history writing and analysis, the biography. American historians got to where they really hated on Doris Kearns Goodwin, but boy did the Abraham Lincoln bios sell! It would be a good idea for academics to make room for biographies in History again.
"The two are really beginning to blend into each other, and that's something that I think that neither economists nor political scientists, nor really anybody who I know has really begun to get a handle on"
Very interesting again. I would like to understand better why you think that the blending of business and government is a new phenomenon, or, rather, what about this surely very old phenomenon is new now.
I am currently reading the book by Peter Irons "A People's History of the Supreme Court". This is a book which shows in detail how the blending of business and government has shaped (aspects of) US history.
Between the aggregate of all individuals and the great man theory is class theory, something that economics (and much of social science) has abandoned or sidelined. The great post-war compression somewhat suppressed class effects, but they have come back in fall force as economic inequality grew.
I don't think our situation is without precedent. There are strong analogies with the gilded age. But if anything, today's' oligopoly barons are much likely to directly exercise political power rather than manipulate it from behind the scenes. The old model is more like Thiel working through his proxy, JD Vance. Musk's model is just to become directly involved in politics.
There is a version of the plot of the Neuromancer, where the super-rich withdraw in order to hold the rest of society to ransom: Its called Atlas Shrugged and is the libertarian ur-myth for silicon valley.
As we are seeing now it is not really libertarian at all, but a kind of neo-feudalism, in which political power is completely privatized in the hands of the economic/technological oligarchs, with a veneer of political union provided by a weak and manipulable king.
What is the connection between Neuromancer and Atlas Shrugged?
"not really libertarian at all, but a kind of neo-feudalism". It is often said that the internal contradictions of socialism lead to dictatorship. Maybe this has a mirror image: The internal contradictions of libertarianism lead to a neo-feudal mafia state?
This piece tied together several loose ends for me in this unraveling rag that used to be my rug of Boomer assumptions. Thank you.
So, I’m pretty much like Every-Boomer who's kinda 'made it': BA in Int’l Relations and MPA from the land-grant university, Northern Illinois Uni in DeKalb, retired after thirty years as small-town administrator in NW Illinois and E Iowa, father of two grown sons and failing 3rd chair tenor from a decent Episcopal church choir. However;
I keep seeing the strands of accelerating oligarchy and ascendance of the power of Money, but without the lenses you’ve just provided here. “Large scale public opposition doesn’t stop them”. And yes, I’ve joined the local demonstrations. I have been encouraged at the numbers and good-hearted intentions of those who are present. I have said to a few folks, though, “They don’t care. The people who are getting away with this mayhem do not care that we’re on the streets”; and get a sort-of shrug and expressed belief that a couple thousand people in the street, even in thousands of communities, gets a collective smirk and eye-roll from the folks willing to pony up the dues for a ‘club’ in Marjorie Post’s former Florida mansion. Why is that?
A year ago, recovering from heart surgery, I read Gary Stevenson’s 2024 book, “The Trading Game: A Confession”. Stevenson became the top trader at Citibank’s London currency exchange by betting that the economy, post-2008 crash, was NOT going to improve despite quantitative easing and generally flooding the economy with cash, and that it in fact would worsen life for most of us. And why? I should’ve seen this, having issued millions in responsible municipal and enterprise fund debt, but didn’t. It is this, at a point in Gary’s story of having his own cognitive dissonance as a human being shove him right over an existential cliff, with his growing awareness of this: “...that’s why they weren’t spending any money. And I did something unusual in the study of economics: I went out and asked people if they’d suffered ‘an exogenous shock’ to their savings and spending patterns. Why they weren’t spending money.. ‘Cuz they were losing their homes… So if they were losing their homes, and that every government in the world were bankrupt, and ‘were losing their homes’ and assets and going into debt; ...and you realize, that the hundreds of billions of Pounds being poured into the economy aren’t really helping people. So, I wondered where are all the assets going, and who’s on the other side of the debt? And I looked to the right of me, and I looked to the left of me, and I realized I was surrounded by millionaires (traders). It was us, wasn’t it. We were the balance. We were the boys who’d be richer than our fathers. We were the ones on the other side of the Italian government’s debt, of Asa’s mum’s mortgage… It wasn’t confidence. It was cancer.” (YouTube, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jwCLwi_N70 ) (This hour-long presentation at Richardton College, Cambridge, still has the power to bring me to tears. His citing of 'the widow's mite' has blown open my notion of what is worship...)
We are making ourselves beholden to the holders of capital*. We are helping them do it with our tireless efforts to avoid FOMO, to get the next ‘good buy’, to make the big killing in ‘The Market’, to buy a vacay ‘experience’ befitting our lofty status as, well, never mind what we are becoming.
The Man has, as you put it, “...accumulated not just economic wealth, but the power to control platforms, to shape a lot of the actual day-to-day existence of our lives.” So, try this at a get-together of the well-intentioned, planning a protest: ask who’s able to give up handing control of their communications and finances and interactions, of their consumerist ‘experience’, and suggest that until we pitch our devices of control into the nearest woodchipper, and change our lives, The Man will win. The ‘Economy’ will win. The Machine will win. And we – us, ourselves will continue to feed that Machine until it fulfills the warning of a cranky Welsh Anglican priest, R. S. Thomas, from a hundred years ago, “...The villages were as flies, to be sucked empty. God secreted a tear. ‘Enough, enough’, he commanded. But The Machine looked at him, and went on singing.”
Your work here has upended my sabbath day writings, in a good way. Thanks for this most insightful assessment. Tomorrow I will continue at my improved woodshed project. I have two cords of free-fall oak and ash to cut, split and stack. Winter’s coming.
Tim Long. Just up the Hill from Lock 15.
*other writers have given this another name. A spirit-name: Mammon.
I see that you mention Gary Stephenson. One thing I like about him is that he clearly says that it is not (only) absolute wealth but (also) relative wealth that matters.
One observation I would like to add is the following. Human attention is a scarce resource. The fight for human attention (advertising, lobbying, etc) is a zero sum game, in particular in times where our attention is already saturated through social media and increasing use of screens and AI.
To put it simply: Relative wealth determines to what people pay attention to.
Thanks, Alexander, for the note, and your validating observation about 'attention' and relative wealth. I think Stevenson is veritably a prophet of the info we don't want to hear. And, in my daily traverse of the Big River's waterfront bike trail here, common is the person embedded in The Web, either with ear buds or just walking, following the little dark rectangle grafted to their hand and not seeing the Mississippi, or barge traffic, or their neighbors out and about. Quite remarkable.
One of the reasons I landed in the Illinois Quad Cities - a pretty well-developed bicycle trails and street utilization, probably thanks to all the Belgian and Italian immigrants who brought cycling with them. I agree about Gary Stevenson being so very effective, and largely avoided by large media. I saw him completely take a smart panel show apart with his questions and responses, but I don't know of anyone else with his insight. Maybe the English comedian Jonathon Pie. I've read Thomas Piketty's On Capital, Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary and Karl Polanyi's assessment of the post WW II economy. Paul Kingsnorth on the impact of AI and social media.
I just recently read Polanyi The Great Transformation. Is that what you refer to or sth else? I know Piketty. I will check out McGilchrist and Kingsnorth, dont know about them.
It was The Great Transformation. I kept running into as a citation from other writers on political economics. McGilchrist is an Oxford scholar of philosophy and Johns Hopkins MD on brain function. Taoist in approach. Master and His Emissary is exhaustive in its research of brain function: left hemisphere just grabs and goes after, right hemisphere more reflective and of the larger view. The brain does not function well with undue influence of the left hemisphere. 450 pges of history, study and anecdotes, medical analysis, 100+ pages of endnotes. I read it a second time to absorb the points. A big point: empires have all expired when they've become 'successful' at taking territory and stuff, and stop considering a more holistic view of living with earth. Kingsnorth is English, the sort of guy who chained himself to road machinery back in the 80s and 90s, and has found himself following a path into Eastern Orthodoxy and away from The Machine. I'm suspect of folks who lean on religiousity - he, however, has moved into a more solid footing of it over the past five years I've followed his writing, and finds the recent push to 'master' AI to be a dark and dangerous thing. His substack: The Abbey of Misrule. Lives in Ireland. Most interesting book is The Wake, a story of a farmer in the time of William the Conqueror, written in something very like Anglo-Saxon. You can find conversations between Kingsnorth and McGilchrist on the web. Both are charming, engaging, and intelligent.
This has the great possiblity of a number of bumper-sticker length phrases / questions to challenge the entitled assumptions of the folks who do not 'know their knots'. Excellent.
A crypto-crisis hopefully will not have the wider-spread effects that the Great Recession crisis had but it will happen, probably under the Trump Administration.
"today’s political economy is hard to grasp for social scientists who think about markets and mass politics."
Just started reading Grace Blakeley's 'Vulture Capitalism'. I think she has a good grasp of the dynamics of the current late-stage capitalist system and the limitations of conventional macroeconomics.
“it really becomes increasingly difficult to tell … where the business interests of powerful and connected companies end, and where the national interest of the United States begins”
Central American countries that had popular, elected governments overthrown to install US-backed right wing dictatorships friendly to US sugar and fruit companies over the last century might dispute the idea that this is something novel.
One way to fight this, is to ensure that everybody is cared for, by establishing first principles of social organization that stand co-equal to market principles.
Well, I for one, who studied in the “social sciences faculty” focusing on economics and international politics/relations as my majors never once thought economics — and for that matter business or commerce — was mutually exclusive from all things politics including geopolitics. Nor did I think religion and politics or sports and economics snd politics were mutually exclusive. But back to your post, Henry Farrell:
The vast wealth accumulation of tge bourgeoisie and others isn’t new but the rate of their accumulation might be as recent as the 1990s, I think, at roughly the same time as Marxist and neoMarxist political economists started publishing their research on the rise of the middle class and the business-capitalist class with links to the state, and state capital. My own work is on East and Southeast Asia including China. Some of my colleagues say the phenomenal rise in the accumulation of the wealthy is the result of “globalization”. Perhaps but I am a globalization thesis skeptic. I think a better way to try to understand that accumulation is via the internationalization of capital in its early stages, before the craziness of capital’s transmationalization, including of course finance in the mid to late 1990s.
I have more to say on this topic but not in this short space or time. I enjoyed your substack piece (made me think again) as well as discussion recently with Paul Krugman (he’s always enlightening).
Karen Hao talks about how the USA is using AI (artificial intelligence technology companies) in the same way that the British Empire used the British East India company to build its colonies and become the Empire upon which the sun never set.
I think I've always thought of this, first, as the rich being oblivious to the real suffering of poverty. Great 19th c industrialists saying they were totally unaware of the working class living conditions Engels described. But the rich's own super villain craziness is what stands out now. Techno-feudalist monarchy modeled after Snow Crash or some other Scifi. The delusions of grandeur, the endlessly tyrannical ambitions. It's a winning spectacle on social media, to be sure. But it remains to be seen if their dystopic techno-futurist AI bs can effectively manage the economy. And should a significant downturn come to pass Big Tech will blame this on Trump's stupid Tariff war, with plenty reason to, but it should not be forgotten that Big Tech and all of Wall Street were all in for the tax-cuts-for-the-rich-and-austerity-for-everyone-else BBB bill. Musk's third party promise is for even more austerity. It's stunning the plutocratic smash-n-grab of the whole Trump era and all predicated on popular support for violent crackdown politics against poor immigrants, minorities, women, protesters, liberals, anybody turned off by the sadistic bigotry of conservatives.
"In particular, social scientists are trained to think of markets and government as fundamentally distinct."
Very interesting. I was wondering for a long time, why mainstream thought in the US is worried about big government but not about big business. Maybe the view that considers "markets and government as fundamentally distinct" is part of the explanation.
For an observer who is not a social scientist like myself it seems obvious that corporate power and government power in the US are closely aligned.
Its near 90 years since retired USMC major general Smedley Butler blew the whistle on a wealthy businessmens' plot to overthrow the FDR government. An actual plot that the editors at the NYT blew off as a nothingburger at the time. Butler went on to write and speak about the manner in which he and the marines he led had been used as muscle in controlling nascent democratic movements in the carribean 'banana republics'. I don't think he'd get a membership at their exclusive clubs nowadays.
I grew up in the 1950’s in a small town in northern Illinois too. Looking back it seems idyllic and like Iris Dement’s song. Although there was a Peyton Place element too. But we kids were free-range and innocent.
Dixon. Which certainly had its Peyton Place stories just below the surface. There were two dairy operations in town, several butcher operations and produce that was both local and shipped in. A shoe factory, other manufacturing, and yeah, the ability for even an awkward kid like me to bicycle all over town until curfew. I suspect the Peyton Place aspects still exist there, but far less sustainability and resilience, with greater dependence on food from more than 1,000 miles away. Same where I live now, in the Illinois Quad Cities.
Yes; and,
I think the political economy we are now in is, as Farrell aptly describes here, is vastly different in the, ehm, vastness of the scope of control than when I grew up in a near-idyllic Iris Dement sort of 'Our Town' in northern Illinois.
To your point, its near 90
Totally agreed and there's no need to limit this to the US. Nation states developed alongside corporations since their inception. Tax revenue from corporations was always integral to the state and monopoly rights were integral to corporations early on (and in some forms today). Not to mention the role of state military force in securing mineral rights and raw materials for corporations, and the need corporations have for a state-backed currency and enforcement of property rights to create a market.
The book, The Origin of Capitalism gives a thorough overview of this history. I used to lack the knowledge to describe/understand this connection, so i totally understand how people believe the false separation.
Yeah, when the discipline of History adopted the methodologies of the social sciences in the 1960s-1980s there was also a prejudice against the parts of the discipline that dealt with individuals and their agency. When I told my advisor in the 1990s that we was interested in intellectual history, they vetoed that idea because “nobody does that anymore.” Which was sort of true, the trend was towards discourse, the institutions that sustained intellectual life, etc.
Academic History (at least in the anglophone academy) also jettisoned a longstanding genre of history writing and analysis, the biography. American historians got to where they really hated on Doris Kearns Goodwin, but boy did the Abraham Lincoln bios sell! It would be a good idea for academics to make room for biographies in History again.
MuskRat's interference with Ukraine is one of the most appalling acts that will define his legacy. It fits neatly with his Seig Heil salute.
"The two are really beginning to blend into each other, and that's something that I think that neither economists nor political scientists, nor really anybody who I know has really begun to get a handle on"
Very interesting again. I would like to understand better why you think that the blending of business and government is a new phenomenon, or, rather, what about this surely very old phenomenon is new now.
I am currently reading the book by Peter Irons "A People's History of the Supreme Court". This is a book which shows in detail how the blending of business and government has shaped (aspects of) US history.
A couple of comments:
Between the aggregate of all individuals and the great man theory is class theory, something that economics (and much of social science) has abandoned or sidelined. The great post-war compression somewhat suppressed class effects, but they have come back in fall force as economic inequality grew.
I don't think our situation is without precedent. There are strong analogies with the gilded age. But if anything, today's' oligopoly barons are much likely to directly exercise political power rather than manipulate it from behind the scenes. The old model is more like Thiel working through his proxy, JD Vance. Musk's model is just to become directly involved in politics.
There is a version of the plot of the Neuromancer, where the super-rich withdraw in order to hold the rest of society to ransom: Its called Atlas Shrugged and is the libertarian ur-myth for silicon valley.
As we are seeing now it is not really libertarian at all, but a kind of neo-feudalism, in which political power is completely privatized in the hands of the economic/technological oligarchs, with a veneer of political union provided by a weak and manipulable king.
What is the connection between Neuromancer and Atlas Shrugged?
"not really libertarian at all, but a kind of neo-feudalism". It is often said that the internal contradictions of socialism lead to dictatorship. Maybe this has a mirror image: The internal contradictions of libertarianism lead to a neo-feudal mafia state?
Would it be wrong to see Musk as a proxy of Thiel?
HOLY hegemonic enSHITtification, Mr. Farrell.
This piece tied together several loose ends for me in this unraveling rag that used to be my rug of Boomer assumptions. Thank you.
So, I’m pretty much like Every-Boomer who's kinda 'made it': BA in Int’l Relations and MPA from the land-grant university, Northern Illinois Uni in DeKalb, retired after thirty years as small-town administrator in NW Illinois and E Iowa, father of two grown sons and failing 3rd chair tenor from a decent Episcopal church choir. However;
I keep seeing the strands of accelerating oligarchy and ascendance of the power of Money, but without the lenses you’ve just provided here. “Large scale public opposition doesn’t stop them”. And yes, I’ve joined the local demonstrations. I have been encouraged at the numbers and good-hearted intentions of those who are present. I have said to a few folks, though, “They don’t care. The people who are getting away with this mayhem do not care that we’re on the streets”; and get a sort-of shrug and expressed belief that a couple thousand people in the street, even in thousands of communities, gets a collective smirk and eye-roll from the folks willing to pony up the dues for a ‘club’ in Marjorie Post’s former Florida mansion. Why is that?
A year ago, recovering from heart surgery, I read Gary Stevenson’s 2024 book, “The Trading Game: A Confession”. Stevenson became the top trader at Citibank’s London currency exchange by betting that the economy, post-2008 crash, was NOT going to improve despite quantitative easing and generally flooding the economy with cash, and that it in fact would worsen life for most of us. And why? I should’ve seen this, having issued millions in responsible municipal and enterprise fund debt, but didn’t. It is this, at a point in Gary’s story of having his own cognitive dissonance as a human being shove him right over an existential cliff, with his growing awareness of this: “...that’s why they weren’t spending any money. And I did something unusual in the study of economics: I went out and asked people if they’d suffered ‘an exogenous shock’ to their savings and spending patterns. Why they weren’t spending money.. ‘Cuz they were losing their homes… So if they were losing their homes, and that every government in the world were bankrupt, and ‘were losing their homes’ and assets and going into debt; ...and you realize, that the hundreds of billions of Pounds being poured into the economy aren’t really helping people. So, I wondered where are all the assets going, and who’s on the other side of the debt? And I looked to the right of me, and I looked to the left of me, and I realized I was surrounded by millionaires (traders). It was us, wasn’t it. We were the balance. We were the boys who’d be richer than our fathers. We were the ones on the other side of the Italian government’s debt, of Asa’s mum’s mortgage… It wasn’t confidence. It was cancer.” (YouTube, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jwCLwi_N70 ) (This hour-long presentation at Richardton College, Cambridge, still has the power to bring me to tears. His citing of 'the widow's mite' has blown open my notion of what is worship...)
We are making ourselves beholden to the holders of capital*. We are helping them do it with our tireless efforts to avoid FOMO, to get the next ‘good buy’, to make the big killing in ‘The Market’, to buy a vacay ‘experience’ befitting our lofty status as, well, never mind what we are becoming.
The Man has, as you put it, “...accumulated not just economic wealth, but the power to control platforms, to shape a lot of the actual day-to-day existence of our lives.” So, try this at a get-together of the well-intentioned, planning a protest: ask who’s able to give up handing control of their communications and finances and interactions, of their consumerist ‘experience’, and suggest that until we pitch our devices of control into the nearest woodchipper, and change our lives, The Man will win. The ‘Economy’ will win. The Machine will win. And we – us, ourselves will continue to feed that Machine until it fulfills the warning of a cranky Welsh Anglican priest, R. S. Thomas, from a hundred years ago, “...The villages were as flies, to be sucked empty. God secreted a tear. ‘Enough, enough’, he commanded. But The Machine looked at him, and went on singing.”
Your work here has upended my sabbath day writings, in a good way. Thanks for this most insightful assessment. Tomorrow I will continue at my improved woodshed project. I have two cords of free-fall oak and ash to cut, split and stack. Winter’s coming.
Tim Long. Just up the Hill from Lock 15.
*other writers have given this another name. A spirit-name: Mammon.
I see that you mention Gary Stephenson. One thing I like about him is that he clearly says that it is not (only) absolute wealth but (also) relative wealth that matters.
One observation I would like to add is the following. Human attention is a scarce resource. The fight for human attention (advertising, lobbying, etc) is a zero sum game, in particular in times where our attention is already saturated through social media and increasing use of screens and AI.
To put it simply: Relative wealth determines to what people pay attention to.
Thanks, Alexander, for the note, and your validating observation about 'attention' and relative wealth. I think Stevenson is veritably a prophet of the info we don't want to hear. And, in my daily traverse of the Big River's waterfront bike trail here, common is the person embedded in The Web, either with ear buds or just walking, following the little dark rectangle grafted to their hand and not seeing the Mississippi, or barge traffic, or their neighbors out and about. Quite remarkable.
Great to hear that you can take your bike to a ride in beautiful nature ... sth most people cannot do anymore.
I guess what makes Stevenson so remarkable is that he is the only (?) public intellectual who speaks from a working class point of view.
I put a (?) after only ... maybe you know some others?
One of the reasons I landed in the Illinois Quad Cities - a pretty well-developed bicycle trails and street utilization, probably thanks to all the Belgian and Italian immigrants who brought cycling with them. I agree about Gary Stevenson being so very effective, and largely avoided by large media. I saw him completely take a smart panel show apart with his questions and responses, but I don't know of anyone else with his insight. Maybe the English comedian Jonathon Pie. I've read Thomas Piketty's On Capital, Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary and Karl Polanyi's assessment of the post WW II economy. Paul Kingsnorth on the impact of AI and social media.
I just recently read Polanyi The Great Transformation. Is that what you refer to or sth else? I know Piketty. I will check out McGilchrist and Kingsnorth, dont know about them.
It was The Great Transformation. I kept running into as a citation from other writers on political economics. McGilchrist is an Oxford scholar of philosophy and Johns Hopkins MD on brain function. Taoist in approach. Master and His Emissary is exhaustive in its research of brain function: left hemisphere just grabs and goes after, right hemisphere more reflective and of the larger view. The brain does not function well with undue influence of the left hemisphere. 450 pges of history, study and anecdotes, medical analysis, 100+ pages of endnotes. I read it a second time to absorb the points. A big point: empires have all expired when they've become 'successful' at taking territory and stuff, and stop considering a more holistic view of living with earth. Kingsnorth is English, the sort of guy who chained himself to road machinery back in the 80s and 90s, and has found himself following a path into Eastern Orthodoxy and away from The Machine. I'm suspect of folks who lean on religiousity - he, however, has moved into a more solid footing of it over the past five years I've followed his writing, and finds the recent push to 'master' AI to be a dark and dangerous thing. His substack: The Abbey of Misrule. Lives in Ireland. Most interesting book is The Wake, a story of a farmer in the time of William the Conqueror, written in something very like Anglo-Saxon. You can find conversations between Kingsnorth and McGilchrist on the web. Both are charming, engaging, and intelligent.
It’s nuts that Biden didn’t nationalize Starlink the moment that happened
Those who don’t tie their own shoes cannot understand the lives of those of us who do.
This has the great possiblity of a number of bumper-sticker length phrases / questions to challenge the entitled assumptions of the folks who do not 'know their knots'. Excellent.
A crypto-crisis hopefully will not have the wider-spread effects that the Great Recession crisis had but it will happen, probably under the Trump Administration.
"today’s political economy is hard to grasp for social scientists who think about markets and mass politics."
Just started reading Grace Blakeley's 'Vulture Capitalism'. I think she has a good grasp of the dynamics of the current late-stage capitalist system and the limitations of conventional macroeconomics.
“it really becomes increasingly difficult to tell … where the business interests of powerful and connected companies end, and where the national interest of the United States begins”
Central American countries that had popular, elected governments overthrown to install US-backed right wing dictatorships friendly to US sugar and fruit companies over the last century might dispute the idea that this is something novel.
What makes you think there's going to be some kind of crash?
One way to fight this, is to ensure that everybody is cared for, by establishing first principles of social organization that stand co-equal to market principles.
Well, I for one, who studied in the “social sciences faculty” focusing on economics and international politics/relations as my majors never once thought economics — and for that matter business or commerce — was mutually exclusive from all things politics including geopolitics. Nor did I think religion and politics or sports and economics snd politics were mutually exclusive. But back to your post, Henry Farrell:
The vast wealth accumulation of tge bourgeoisie and others isn’t new but the rate of their accumulation might be as recent as the 1990s, I think, at roughly the same time as Marxist and neoMarxist political economists started publishing their research on the rise of the middle class and the business-capitalist class with links to the state, and state capital. My own work is on East and Southeast Asia including China. Some of my colleagues say the phenomenal rise in the accumulation of the wealthy is the result of “globalization”. Perhaps but I am a globalization thesis skeptic. I think a better way to try to understand that accumulation is via the internationalization of capital in its early stages, before the craziness of capital’s transmationalization, including of course finance in the mid to late 1990s.
I have more to say on this topic but not in this short space or time. I enjoyed your substack piece (made me think again) as well as discussion recently with Paul Krugman (he’s always enlightening).
Keep writing, both of you! And thank you.
Karen Hao talks about how the USA is using AI (artificial intelligence technology companies) in the same way that the British Empire used the British East India company to build its colonies and become the Empire upon which the sun never set.
Seems pretty apropos to me.
I think I've always thought of this, first, as the rich being oblivious to the real suffering of poverty. Great 19th c industrialists saying they were totally unaware of the working class living conditions Engels described. But the rich's own super villain craziness is what stands out now. Techno-feudalist monarchy modeled after Snow Crash or some other Scifi. The delusions of grandeur, the endlessly tyrannical ambitions. It's a winning spectacle on social media, to be sure. But it remains to be seen if their dystopic techno-futurist AI bs can effectively manage the economy. And should a significant downturn come to pass Big Tech will blame this on Trump's stupid Tariff war, with plenty reason to, but it should not be forgotten that Big Tech and all of Wall Street were all in for the tax-cuts-for-the-rich-and-austerity-for-everyone-else BBB bill. Musk's third party promise is for even more austerity. It's stunning the plutocratic smash-n-grab of the whole Trump era and all predicated on popular support for violent crackdown politics against poor immigrants, minorities, women, protesters, liberals, anybody turned off by the sadistic bigotry of conservatives.