This Life: faith, work, and free time The blurbs on the first few pages of Martin Hägglund’s This Life are so surprisingly accurate that it would be hard to describe the book with an original superlative. “Monumental!” “Powerful!” “Important!” “Electrifying!” “Profound, thoughtful, compelling, and insightful!” Those blurbs were not idle puffery. All that is left for me to […]
Mr. Etcetera The subtitle of T. R. Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population advertised its inclusion of “remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers.” In volume I of Capital, Marx did not mention William Godwin’s name. One might say, rather, that Marx studiously avoided mentioning Godwin. He did, however, engage in a […]
A Free Market is Always Full of Cheap Ideas I may have scoffed in the past at the notion of “the marketplace of ideas” but I am coming around to think that maybe it’s not such a bad metaphor. Back in the days of primitive economy, families, clans, tribes produced and consumed their own subsistence. […]
Whole Lotka Shakin’ Goin’ On In a 1967 festschrift for Maurice Dobb, Richard Goodwin published an influential paper, “A Growth Cycle” on the “class struggle” model of cycles in economic growth. I only became aware of this famous paper because it had occurred to me that the dynamics of relative surplus population, necessary labour time, […]
Disposable time as a common-pool resource IX — Disposable time as a model for environmental governance Not only could disposable time be regarded as a common-pool resource similar to other common-pool resources, but it could stand as the single most far-reaching and democratically vital model of a common-pool resource. Donald Stabile alluded to something in […]
Disposable time as a common-pool resource VIII — An ecological subject In “Foundations for Environmental Political Economy,” John Dryzek explored the prospects of an environmentalist economic subject, “Homo ecologicus,” as an alternative to the traditional rational actor or economic man. Dryzek criticized previous efforts at positing an ethical, environmentalist subject, saying they were flawed by […]
Disposable time as a common-pool resource VII — Common-pool property rights Two key features of Ostrom’s analysis: the distinguishing of a spectrum of separable property rights rather than monolithic “ownership” and the use of a grid that classifies goods according to how difficult it is to restrict access to them and the extent to which […]
Disposable time as a common-pool resource V — Social costs and common-pool resources The basic idea behind common-pool resources also has a venerable place in the history of classical political economy and neoclassical economic thought. In the second edition of his Principles of Political Economy, Henry Sidgwick observed that “private enterprise may sometimes be socially uneconomical […]
Disposable time as a common-pool resource VI — Withholding labour Superficially, it might seem that the individual worker can deny access to an employer offering unsuitable terms. But it is here we need to factor in that peculiarity of labour-power noted by the silk weaver, William Longson, that a day’s labour not sold on the […]
Disposable time as a common pool resource IV — disposable time as a common pool resource In his Grundrisse, Marx identified surplus labour time as a form of disposable time. That is to say that, under capitalism, it is labour time at the disposal of capital. “The whole development of wealth,” Marx wrote, “rests on the […]