The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. — Hunter S. Thompson meme 1 Browse the internet long enough and you’ll eventually run across Hunter S. Thompson’s meme about the music industry. The meme is actually a misquote, but it’s still a fair representation of what the music business is like.
Around the world, rich countries are celebrating as their COVID numbers fall. Their success is no mystery — it’s because of a massive rollout of COVID vaccines. While we should celebrate the development of these vaccines, their deployment highlights the tyrannies of capitalism. Most of the basic research for COVID vaccines was funded by the public. Yet their manufacture is controlled by Big Pharma.
There’s something mysterious about finance. The symbols are arcane. The math is complex. The practitioners are impressively educated. And the stakes are high. All of this gives finance the veneer of higher truth — as if quants are uncovering a reality not accessible to the rest of us. In a sense they are. But the ‘reality’ is not what you think. When you look at stock-market numbers, they do point to a truth about the world.
Greetings readers. It’s been an interesting month for me, what with Toronto dealing with an explosive 3rd wave of COVID, and me trying to get work done while my 5-year-old daughter does ‘school’ from home. Life has been, shall we say, interesting. Then, two weeks ago my appendix decided it was time to rupture. That put me in the hospital for a few days, and then home in bed for a few more. I’m now almost fully recovered.
Today I’m trying a different type of post — one that’s not a deep dive, but instead, a rapid-fire summary of an important topic. My inspiration comes from Cory Doctorow, a sci-fi author who runs an old-fashioned links blog that he syndicates across the internet. (At last count, it’s on pluralistic.net, Twitter, Mastodon, and Medium). I read Doctorow’s blog daily, as he writes consistently excellent commentary on political economy.
Some exciting personal news. In July, I will be starting a postdoctoral fellowship at York University. I’ll be studying the hierarchical origins of income inequality. Some of you might be asking — what’s a ‘postdoc’? Well, it’s a position that universities invented in the 1970s to give PhD graduates a job while they waited for professorial positions.
They say that Americans love two things: freedom … and guns. The trouble with guns is obvious. The trouble with freedom is more subtle, and boils down to doublespeak. When a good old boy defends his ‘freedom’, there’s a good chance he has a hidden agenda. He doesn’t want freedom for everyone.
As some of you may know, I recently became the editor of the Review of Capital as Power (RECASP), a journal that publishes research on the power underpinnings of capitalism. Each year, RECASP hosts an essay competition. I’m proud to announce that the winner of this year’s prize is Jesús Suaste Cherizola. 1 His prize-winning paper is called From Commodities to Assets: Capital as Power and the Ontology of Finance.
On Tuesday, I gave a talk to the University of Texas Energy Symposium about how societies become more hierarchical as they develop. Thank-you to Carey King for the invitation to speak. King, by the way, is the author of the excellent book The Economic Superorganism (which I recently reviewed). Below is the lecture recording on my end. You can watch the live-stream version here.
Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762 In his epic 18th-century treatise Discourse on Inequality , Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that inequality is an ill of civilization, created by private property. If you roll back the clock on civilization, he claimed, you should also roll back inequality. Rousseau was probably both right and wrong.
A few months ago, I went down a rabbit hole analyzing word frequency in economics textbooks. Henry Leveson-Gower, editor of The Mint Magazine , thought the results were interesting and asked me to write up a short piece. The Mint article is now up, and is called ‘Power: don’t mention it’. What follows is my original manuscript. If you’ve ever taken Economics 101, then you’re familiar with its jargon.