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    Category: Economics

    • Trump and Neoliberalism

      What does the Trump election mean for neoliberalism as a doctrine?  Adam Kotsko over at An und für sich has some interesting thoughts on the matter; what follows is intended as a constructive engagement.  As I posted last week, I think Trump’s victory is inseparable from what Foucault calls state racism, and the appointment of…

    • The 2016 Election and Racism, Soft and Structural

      Foucault famously proposed that biopolitics – the power to foster life, or allow it to die – tended to produce its own outside in the form of state racism: not only might life be allowed to die, but there might be those who must die, literally or metaphorically, so an inside “we” could live. That…

    • Regimes of Accumulation

      In a new paper, Maximilian Fochler conducted a series of structured interviews with scientists to make an STS point: when we think of capitalism as a system that depends on “accumulation,” there are many different kinds of things that one can accumulate, many of them non-financial.  I think Fochler makes an important point, but I…

    • Fairness vs. Welfare: What if people like fairness?

      I’m currently teaching an ethics and public policy course, and for this week we read Kaplow and Shavell’s Fairness vs. Welfare (actually, we read the first 70 pages of the NBER paper that became the much bigger book). Their central claim is that to pick fairness as the dominant principle in policy-making is by definition…

    • Gary Becker’s Deus ex Machina on Health Behaviors

      By Gordon Hull As Melinda Cooper notes (recall here), one of the reasons Gary Becker – as opposed to other neoliberal theorists – was interesting to Foucault because of his emphasis on microeconomics, particularly the quotidian institutions through which micropower functions, such as the family.  At the same time, Becker’s human capital theory has become…

    • Vatter on Foucault on Hayek

      A while ago, Daniel Zamora’s (re)publication of a series of essays designed to say that Foucault ended up embracing neoliberalism caused quite a stir in the blogosphere.  As one of those invited to contribute to a forum in An und für sich), I argued that Foucault saw both that neoliberalism realized the need to create…

    • Cloud Computing and the Extension of the Price Mechanism

      by Gordon Hull Cloud computing – where users keep their data (and often their applications) online – poses significant theoretical and regulatory problems.  Many of these concern jurisdiction: it’s very hard to even know at a given moment where data is kept, and it’s often unclear (in the case of privacy, for example), which jurisdiction’s…

    • Ferguson: Next Steps

      After reading some discussion at the Daily Nous about the Ferguson situation (also addressed in this post by Leigh Johnson), it struck me that it might be helpful to open a forum dedicated to discussing steps for improvement and change. Some ideas for improvement and change may reasonably focus on specific issues at the intersection of race, law,…

    • Using Medicaid to Produce Homo Economicus

      I am increasingly convinced that any Foucauldian effort to understand neoliberalism needs to focus on it as a strategy of subjectification (more specifically, it’s the strategy of subjectification specific to contemporary biopower, and it says that the truth of the human being is as homo economicus).  One reason I think this is that one finds…

    • Social Policy and Explanations: Within- and Between-Population Variation

      In a post last month for Demos, Matt Bruenig argued that if one in fact cares about childhood poverty, a recent conservative position promoting marriage as a means of reducing childhood poverty rates is as cruel as it is misguided (http://www.demos.org/blog/4/14/14/single-mother-child-poverty-myth). In a nutshell, Bruenig notes that countries with low childhood poverty rates have not…