Neoliberalism eviscerated the value-sharing ethos of the post-war Golden Age (1945-73), seeking to maintain social cohesion in civil society by ‘managing the discontent of the losers’. This involved reconciling working households to the realities of the neoliberal labour market by means of coercion, distraction, and debt accumulation — the latter serving to limit the growth of consumption inequality in the face of burgeoning income inequality. The global financial crisis (GFC) and Great Recession undermined the process of household debt accumulation, creating a crisis of neoliberal accumulation.

Key to the institutional renewal required to address this crisis will be managing the discontent of the losers inherited from the neoliberal era. One possibility is Authoritarian Neoliberalism, based on increasingly illiberal amplification of the ‘coerce and distract’ elements inherited from the Neoliberal Boom (1990-2007). The only viable alternative is Social Capitalism. This involves a renewal of social democracy that manages the discontent of the losers at its source, by creating inclusive and sustainable growth that both reduces the need and desire for illiberalism in the sphere of civil society.

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Setterfield, M. (2024). Managing the Discontent of the Losers Redux: A Future of Authoritarian Neoliberalism or Social Capitalism? The New School for Social Research, Working Paper 01/2024.

Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4687740

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In response to climate change projections, scientists and concerned citizens are increasingly calling for changes in personal consumption. However, these calls ignore the true relationship between production and consumption and the ongoing propagation of the ideology of overconsumption. In this article, we draw from the work of Herbert Marcuse and Guy Debord to explain the ideology of overconsumption and its implications for addressing global climate change.

We illustrate how production drives consumption, how advertising promotes false needs and excess, how these power relations are concealed, and how they undermine social and ecological well-being. Specific to climate change, continued widespread support for increasing levels of production and economic growth will undermine efforts to reduce carbon emissions and limit global warming. Given the relationships between production and carbon emissions, effective mitigation efforts will require significant systemic changes in work, production, consumption, advertising, and social norms.

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What is the carbon footprint of capital and how are emissions associated with asset ownership distributed across the population? This research paper presents new estimates on the inequality in individual carbon footprints across wealth groups in the US, Germany and France. The authors introduce a novel framework to measure individual carbon footprints, which extends beyond the traditional consumption-based approach. The key novelty is to include in the carbon footprint of individuals not only emissions linked to consumption and personal lifestyle, but also the emissions associated with asset ownership (such as real estate, equities or pension assets).

The wealthiest 10% emitted nearly 38 tonnes of CO2-equivalent (tCO2e, or tonnes) per capita and per year on average in France, 50 tonnes in Germany and 102 tonnes in the US, when ownership emissions are fully taken into account. Instead, when only their consumption emissions are tracked, the footprint of the wealthiest 10% of the population is of 16 tonnes in France, 18 tonnes in Germany, and 52 tonnes in the US (still 26 times higher than the Paris Climate Agreement’s target of 2 tons per capita).

The top 10% account for a majority (70-85%) of emissions related to capital ownership. In fact, inequality in wealth-related emissions appears to be higher than wealth inequality in general, because the wealthiest own assets more carbon intensive than the middle and the poorer segments of society.

Carbon taxes on consumption typically fall disproportionately on the low-income, low-emitter groups. On the contrary, a carbon tax on the carbon content of assets or of investments, would mainly fall on wealthy emitters.

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Chancel, L., & Rehm, Y. (2023). The Carbon Footprint of Capital. World Inequality Lab (WIL) Working Paper 2023/26. World Inequality Database.

World Inequality Lab is a joint effort of the Paris School of Economics and the University of Berkeley, California.

https://wid.world/news-article/the-carbon-footprint-of-capital/

The latest phase of capitalist development brought a series of critical processes to the foreground, drastically reshaping economic and social conditions of reproduction, social strata of identity and class, as well as the planetary biosphere and its climate. Serious vulnerabilities and contradictions have emerged around the core institutions of capitalist development, the state, the market and the money form of capital, heading to questions about post-capitalist futures. The relevance of such a perspective is given by capital’s systemic crisis, i.e. a polycrisis concerning the evolutionary variation and transformation of technology, nature and work, as mediated by capital.

This paper considers the role of heterodox economics in opening new perspectives, the question of scalability of socio-economic order, the heritage of the “socialist calculation debate” and its ongoing relevance for discussions on “post-capitalism” today and finally the potentials of computational simulation and agent-based modelling for the development of more just and sustainable socio-economic structures. Faced with the contemporary polycrisis, we can no longer afford “capitalist realism”.
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Pahl, H., et al. (2023). Envisioning post-capitalist utopias via simulation: Theory, critique and models. Review of Evolutionary Political Economy, 4, 445–465.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s43253-023-00112-y

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For well over a century, radicals have debated whether systemic change might come through reform or revolution. Strategists — particularly within the socialist tradition — have disagreed on whether gradual steps might incrementally bring about a new society, or whether a sharp break with the existing political and economic order is required.

During the New Left of the 1960s, Austrian-French theorist André Gorz attempted to move beyond this binary and present another option. Gorz proposed that through the use of “non-reformist reforms,” social movements could both make immediate gains and build strength for a wider struggle, eventually culminating in revolutionary change. A certain type of reform, in other words, could herald greater transformations to come.

Public libraries and parks as beloved spaces which people use on a voluntary basis have an incredible potential to be the ultimate learning grounds for convivencia, the capability for co-existence. Social scientific research shows that more robust civic communities enhance the performance of democratic institutions. By building the capabilities of staff and visitors to feel at ease with friction, convivencia-led policies enhance the city’s overall quality of life.

Meritocracy refers to the idea of a social system in which people achieve their social position, economic rewards and success based on their ability, talent and hard work. Cheerleaders for meritocracy tend to contrast it with social structures in which distinction and prestige are hoarded by an elite few – usually ‘feudal society’. But critics of those who claim that we already live in a meritocracy argue that the playing field is not level, that unrestrained capitalism makes it less so, and that the claim is useful to the already privileged to disguise these facts and to justify and extend their wealth and power.

From Benjamin Franklin to Henry Ford, the rich and powerful have long exploited the press to promote their interests. The American Revolution was the first of many episodes from U.S. history in which the press – and the popular formats and channels through which news is communicated to the public – was used to spread disinformation and legitimize falsehoods. The similarities between past and present are numerous: from politicians producing fake newspapers to outmaneuver their rivals, to reporters lying about their location in order to produce “local”(ish) content, to billionaires buying news outlets to create their personal propaganda organs. Today, such behavior undermines the notion that journalism is an integral part of a healthy democratic society – compounding already daunting challenges facing every media organization and further eroding public trust in their work..

This article critiques the concept legitimacy, particularly as it is employed in territorial claims. Examining the entangled history of rights, private property, and territorial sovereignty, I attempt to dismantle the validity of legitimacy’s logic. Most immediately, this examination of territorial claims speaks to the ongoing crisis in Palestine but has vivid parallels in indigenous discourse as well.

Arguments over legitimacy only foment endlessly arbitrary contestations over primacy, which reify Eurocolonial notions of territorial possession. The argument presented within is that decolonization is not a matter of extending sovereignty to subjugated and marginalized populations. Rather, decolonization demands the elimination of sovereignty altogether, particularly the exclusive rights of exploitation that are granted autonomous sovereigns.

Because of the graciousness of Jim Dator and the World Futures Studies Federation I was fortunate to have spent over a decade in close contact with Johan Galtung.  He spent much of the 1980s in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, running seminars at the University. I was working for the Hawai‘i Judiciary then as a futurist, and in 1987, Galtung became my advisor for my doctoral dissertation.

His skill, given he was a speaker of at least ten languages, was his ability to take complex ideas and communicate them in ways that the reader, the listener, could easily understand. When I first heard him speak on his structural theory of imperialism, I immediately understood why the poor – those in the periphery – related more to the elite, the center within their own regions, instead of with the periphery, and the periphery of the periphery, the downtrodden globally.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter stated that analysis must be preceded by a pre-analytical cognitive act that he called “vision,” in order for analysis to have something to analyze. Visions can be clarified by parables. A parable, of course, is a little story that teaches a big lesson that opens ones eyes. Parables do not have to be historically true stories, but the ones here considered are.

It is evident that the institutions and policies of an ecological economy in a full world, will require a much more solid ethical foundation than that prevailing today. Economics must rethink its reduction of objective value to subjective preference, and ecology must rethink its reduction of objective value to purposeless neo-Darwinist materialism. To combat the force of growthism by appeal to subjective preference and/or materialist determinism will be futile. Political economy began as a part of Moral Philosophy. Ecological economics requires returning to that historical starting point and re-thinking economics in the light of ecology, philosophy, and religion. It also requires the foundation of a pre-analytic vision of the economy as a subsystem of a finite sustaining biosphere subject to the laws of thermodynamics and ecology. In terms of policy, it means that qualitative improvement (development) must replace quantitative increase (growth) as the path of progress.

Universal basic income (UBI) has captured the attention of many progressives over the past several years. Simply put, it’s the idea that every citizen should receive an unconditional transfer of money on a regular basis, ideally sufficient to meet their basic needs. Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel argues that while providing people with cash payments has benefits, guaranteed employment and public services are a better option for transforming our economy.

More than a decade ago, critical ecopedagogue Richard Kahn expressed his fears and hopes regarding Education for sustainable development (ESD). He feared that ESD would be short lived and marginalized and would develop an instrumental pedagogy of one-sided transmission of knowledge, yet hoped for ESD to encompass three types of “ecoliteracies”: technical/functional, cultural and critical.

After an assessment of current ESD, as reported by UNESCO, this paper concludes that his two first fears were unfounded, while his hopes regarding ESD’s pedagogical content were largely not met. To better understand the result, Luc Boltanski’s and Éve Chiapello’s analysis of “the new spirit of capitalism” is mobilized. According to it, current capitalism integrates “artistic critique” on e.g., lack of autonomy and creativity with greater ease than “social critique” with respect to e.g., poverty and inequality. This might explain what ecoliteracies that are integrated into ESD.

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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00958964.2022.2070102

It may be hard to imagine how bullshit, or being strategically indifferent to the veracity of one’s assertions, might ever be morally permissible. Yet to categorically denounce it is to find oneself burdened with defending the impossibility of justifiable bullshit, the indefeasibility of truthfulness and the inculpability of inveterate bullshitters.

A much more tenable position is to expand one’s notion of bullshit to include unintentional indifference to veracity while also characterizing bullshit (whether strategic or unintentional) as wrong only when it constitutes negligence. Once bullshit is redefined in this fashion it becomes apparent that its preponderance in contemporary society is the work not of those who bullshit intentionally, but of those who uncritically consume and transmit the bullshit of others. Any attempt to disrupt the spread of negligent bullshit thus does well to consider our epistemic obligations not only as perceived experts, but as listeners. It is in this respect that the early Indian Buddhist critique of testimony proves quite helpful in reducing gullibility and, thereby, the likelihood of unintentional, yet negligent, bullshit.

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In this urgent decade when American democracy faces the challenge of decarbonizing the U.S. electric grid and assuring that the economic benefits of our energy transition are equitably shared, many solar energy researchers and activists are searching for new ways to partner with the civic sector. Instead of treating energy users as passive customers, experts understand the importance of engaging community as active decision-makers, beneficiaries, and communicators for a just energy transition. Distributed solar technology offers more democratic potential than small savings on individuals’ electric bills. Energy experts working on the Solar Commons community solar model at the University of Minnesota are piloting demonstration projects with community partners in Arizona and Minnesota. These solar commons aggregate savings through power purchase agreements that create 25-year peer-governed revenue streams to support mutual aid and reparative justice work in neighborhoods.

This article describes a Solar Commons research project in Arizona, with a conversation among the public artists who partnered with the legal research team to co-create communication and peer governance tools that will allow DIY Solar Commons to iterate throughout the US as a new institution in our civic sector. Images of the Solar Commons public art demonstrate how the artists helped expand the vision of solar energy from the iconic individual solar panel to a technology embedded in community justice and in a complex human-more-than-human environment.

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Milun, K., et al. (2021). The Role of Public Art in Solar Commons Institution-Building: Community Voices from an Essential Partnership among Artists, Community Solar Researchers, and Activists. Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, 8(2), Article 7.

https://doi.org/10.24926/ijps.v8i2.4492

This study examines “tunneling” practices through which health care providers covertly extract profit by making inflated payments for goods and services to commonly-owned related parties. While incentives to tunnel exist across sectors, health care providers may find it uniquely advantageous to do so. Masking profits as costs, thereby obscuring true profitability, may dissuade regulators from imposing stricter quality standards and encourage public payers to increase reimbursement rates. Likewise, tunneling effectively “shields” assets from malpractice liability risk, by moving them off the firm’s balance sheet. Using uniquely detailed financial data on the nursing home industry, we apply a difference-in-differences approach to study how firms’ stated costs change when they start transacting with a related party, allowing us to infer by how much these payments are inflated. We find evidence of widespread tunneling through inflated rents and management fees paid to related parties. Extrapolating these markups to all firms’ related party transactions, our estimates suggest that in 2019, 63% of nursing home profits were hidden and tunneled to related parties through inflated transfer prices.

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Gandhi, A., & Olenski, A. (2024). Tunneling and Hidden Profits in Health Care. Working Paper 32258. National Bureau of Economic Research.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w32258