Join 📚Jof’S Book Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Jophin's read, .
__By the late 1980s, OECD economists had come to recognize that, given slower economic growth rates, firms were unlikely to invest sufficiently to increase the capital stock in line with what was required to generate new high-productivity, high-wage jobs. It therefore seemed “inescapable” that “a reasonably rapid growth of employment would require the creation of many jobs which use a **below-average amount of capital** to support them, and for which—in consequence—the supportable real wage would be correspondingly modest.”__ Looking to the United States, where unemployment rates fell because “the average real wage of the new jobs” was held “below the average real wage of existing jobs,” the OECD began to advocate this perverse job- creation strategy everywhere. OECD economists could never have foreseen that the period of economic stagnation would last this long. However, they should have predicted the socially dislocating effects that would follow from this policy.
Automation and the Future of Work
Aaron Benanav
Even when defended in more welfarist terms, these schemes are often framed as correcting market failings; i.e. smoothing out the rough edges of a society basically committed to organising things along the lines of private competitors in a market system. Classic academic works wrestle with how to square the incongruent elements of the above story, especially where individual right and common good come [apart](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1829633). What sort of speech can count in as part of reasonable public discourse versus what is [disqualifying](https://www.jstor.org/stable/27009633?refreqid=excelsior:bbd19964fc0291cdca6a773bdad7beff)? These are our debates, this is the stuff of our political sphere; we are essentially arguing about where to set the dials of the liberal machine, where exactly the public/private line goes, who exactly gets the benefits of liberal citizenship. __The dominance of liberalism consists not in our self-conception, but in the structuring of our entire political lives.__
Why I Am Not a Liberal
sootyempiric.blogspot.com
The importance of understanding social and economic processes as having their own internal dynamics cannot be overstated, for it recognizes that there are dialectical logics of development at play within these relationships, that influential external processes abound, and that social and economic systems have their own life and are made up of the lives of individual humans (themselves the subject of their own unfolding internal processes).
A Marxist Education
Wayne Au
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