Abstract The world urgently needs fresh thinking about political economy. Existing paradigms have largely run their course and failed to address lingering problems. The unprecedented changes since the Industrial Revolution have created serious challenges, even as living standards have improved in societies around the world. Some emerging interdisciplinary projects help address these challenges, but further progress will become harder as societies increasingly struggle to reconcile clashing goals. Scholars and policy-makers will be best positioned to draw actionable inferences from data and history and to make lasting contributions if they focus on the importance of policy experimentation and localized knowledge, systematic thinking about multiple timeframes, responding to the needs of people still living in crushing poverty, and humility about what any single intellectual or policy paradigm can accomplish.
{"title":"Reimagining Political Economy Without “Yanking on a Thread before It's Ready”","authors":"Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar","doi":"10.1162/daed_a_01957","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01957","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The world urgently needs fresh thinking about political economy. Existing paradigms have largely run their course and failed to address lingering problems. The unprecedented changes since the Industrial Revolution have created serious challenges, even as living standards have improved in societies around the world. Some emerging interdisciplinary projects help address these challenges, but further progress will become harder as societies increasingly struggle to reconcile clashing goals. Scholars and policy-makers will be best positioned to draw actionable inferences from data and history and to make lasting contributions if they focus on the importance of policy experimentation and localized knowledge, systematic thinking about multiple timeframes, responding to the needs of people still living in crushing poverty, and humility about what any single intellectual or policy paradigm can accomplish.","PeriodicalId":47980,"journal":{"name":"Daedalus","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49487771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Algorithms reflect how power is arranged within our society while also producing power dynamics themselves. Algorithmic systems configure power by engaging in network-making, thereby shaping society and entrenching existing logics into infrastructure. To understand the moral economy of high-tech modernism, we must explore how algorithmic systems contribute to ongoing social, political, and economic structuring. This essay reflects on the importance of algorithmic systems’ positions within our political, economic, and social arrangements.
{"title":"The Structuring Work of Algorithms","authors":"D. Boyd","doi":"10.1162/daed_a_01983","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01983","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Algorithms reflect how power is arranged within our society while also producing power dynamics themselves. Algorithmic systems configure power by engaging in network-making, thereby shaping society and entrenching existing logics into infrastructure. To understand the moral economy of high-tech modernism, we must explore how algorithmic systems contribute to ongoing social, political, and economic structuring. This essay reflects on the importance of algorithmic systems’ positions within our political, economic, and social arrangements.","PeriodicalId":47980,"journal":{"name":"Daedalus","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47671807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Markets must be made biophilic: that is, compatible with life flourishing on Earth. To do so, we must abandon prevailing notions of market efficiency and reconceive markets as social evolutionary systems embedded in nature. Such a reconception enables us to see that constraining markets within biophysical boundaries would not result in zero-sum trade-offs with the economy, but instead would drive market evolution to new forms of prosperity.
{"title":"Biophilic Markets","authors":"Eric D. Beinhocker","doi":"10.1162/daed_a_01965","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01965","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Markets must be made biophilic: that is, compatible with life flourishing on Earth. To do so, we must abandon prevailing notions of market efficiency and reconceive markets as social evolutionary systems embedded in nature. Such a reconception enables us to see that constraining markets within biophysical boundaries would not result in zero-sum trade-offs with the economy, but instead would drive market evolution to new forms of prosperity.","PeriodicalId":47980,"journal":{"name":"Daedalus","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43514261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
R. Locke, Benjamin Armstrong, Samantha Schaab-Rozbicki, Geordie Young
Abstract In recent decades, the global economy has become increasingly structured around supply chains that connect firms within and across national borders, a reliance that has been the subject of controversy in light of disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to these disruptions, firms have adapted in various ways to maintain their level of production. In this essay, we describe two approaches companies pursued during the pandemic: the “sweating” strategy in which firms shifted costs onto the worker, and the “securing” strategy in which firms chose instead to invest resources into supporting their workforce. In doing so, we argue that the companies’ respective approaches in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic reflected their long-standing management models. Furthermore, we suggest that the insights gained from examining these approaches may provide a novel perspective on how to reimagine the current political economy.
{"title":"Supply Chains & Working Conditions During the Long Pandemic: Lessons for a New Moral Political Economy?","authors":"R. Locke, Benjamin Armstrong, Samantha Schaab-Rozbicki, Geordie Young","doi":"10.1162/daed_a_01970","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01970","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In recent decades, the global economy has become increasingly structured around supply chains that connect firms within and across national borders, a reliance that has been the subject of controversy in light of disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to these disruptions, firms have adapted in various ways to maintain their level of production. In this essay, we describe two approaches companies pursued during the pandemic: the “sweating” strategy in which firms shifted costs onto the worker, and the “securing” strategy in which firms chose instead to invest resources into supporting their workforce. In doing so, we argue that the companies’ respective approaches in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic reflected their long-standing management models. Furthermore, we suggest that the insights gained from examining these approaches may provide a novel perspective on how to reimagine the current political economy.","PeriodicalId":47980,"journal":{"name":"Daedalus","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42367901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Building on Debra Satz's argument that we can design our way out of noxious markets, this essay shifts toward questions of process, paying particular attention to the constraints posed when noxious markets generate supportive political constituencies. Using the case of U.S. housing policy, I make two claims. First, even intentional efforts at using market design to harness the capacities Satz identifies can produce cross-cutting effects, strengthening democracies on some dimensions and weakening them on others. Second, noxious markets can generate supportive constituencies that may undermine reform efforts. Ultimately, a moral housing market requires political supports that can help to broaden communities of fate, build political capacities of those who are persistently underrepresented in local deliberations, and encourage participants to reflect on the consequences of market design.
{"title":"How Should We Govern Housing Markets in a Moral Political Economy?","authors":"Chloe N. Thurston","doi":"10.1162/daed_a_01978","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01978","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Building on Debra Satz's argument that we can design our way out of noxious markets, this essay shifts toward questions of process, paying particular attention to the constraints posed when noxious markets generate supportive political constituencies. Using the case of U.S. housing policy, I make two claims. First, even intentional efforts at using market design to harness the capacities Satz identifies can produce cross-cutting effects, strengthening democracies on some dimensions and weakening them on others. Second, noxious markets can generate supportive constituencies that may undermine reform efforts. Ultimately, a moral housing market requires political supports that can help to broaden communities of fate, build political capacities of those who are persistently underrepresented in local deliberations, and encourage participants to reflect on the consequences of market design.","PeriodicalId":47980,"journal":{"name":"Daedalus","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49057848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Grieve Chelwa, Darrick Hamilton, and Avi Green offer a vision of stratification economics in which social identities interact with multiple forms of domination to reproduce inequality over time. Afar cry from the individualism inherent in traditional economic theory, Chelwa, Hamilton, and Green illustrate how the market-choice moorings of neoliberalism - intentionally or not-have weakened efforts to challenge structural racism and argue that a strategy of “inclusive economic rights” offers a way both to understand difference and embrace commonality. Since, as Marx noted, “the task is not just to understand the world but to change it,” I stress how social movements can build the power to make such rights real and forge the intersectional bridges to make mutuality our new economic anchor.1
{"title":"Neoliberal Fragility: Why It's So Hard for (Some) Economists to Talk about Racism","authors":"M. Pastor","doi":"10.1162/daed_a_01975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01975","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Grieve Chelwa, Darrick Hamilton, and Avi Green offer a vision of stratification economics in which social identities interact with multiple forms of domination to reproduce inequality over time. Afar cry from the individualism inherent in traditional economic theory, Chelwa, Hamilton, and Green illustrate how the market-choice moorings of neoliberalism - intentionally or not-have weakened efforts to challenge structural racism and argue that a strategy of “inclusive economic rights” offers a way both to understand difference and embrace commonality. Since, as Marx noted, “the task is not just to understand the world but to change it,” I stress how social movements can build the power to make such rights real and forge the intersectional bridges to make mutuality our new economic anchor.1","PeriodicalId":47980,"journal":{"name":"Daedalus","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48555359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Government has become something that happens to us in service of the economy rather than a vehicle driven by us to realize what we can achieve together. To save the planet and live meaningful lives, we need to start seeing one another not as competitors but as collaborators working toward shared interests. In this essay, I propose a framework for human social flourishing to foster a public policy that rebuilds our connections and care for one another. It is based on four pillars-dignity, community, beauty, and sustainability-and emphasizes not just inclusiveness but participation, and highlights the importance of policy-making at the local level in the rebuilding of prosocial norms.
{"title":"Governance for Human Social Flourishing","authors":"J. Bednar","doi":"10.1162/daed_a_01958","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01958","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Government has become something that happens to us in service of the economy rather than a vehicle driven by us to realize what we can achieve together. To save the planet and live meaningful lives, we need to start seeing one another not as competitors but as collaborators working toward shared interests. In this essay, I propose a framework for human social flourishing to foster a public policy that rebuilds our connections and care for one another. It is based on four pillars-dignity, community, beauty, and sustainability-and emphasizes not just inclusiveness but participation, and highlights the importance of policy-making at the local level in the rebuilding of prosocial norms.","PeriodicalId":47980,"journal":{"name":"Daedalus","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48663337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Caring for the young and the old, the fragile and the ill, is central to human thriving, and has played a fundamental role in human evolution. Yet care has been largely invisible in political economy and it does not fit the prevailing philosophical, political, and economic frameworks. Care typically emerges in the context of close personal relationships, and it is not well suited to either utilitarian or Kantian accounts of morality, or to “social contract” accounts of cooperation. Markets and states both have difficulty providing and supporting care, and as a result, care is overlooked and undervalued. I sketch alternative ways of thinking about the morality and politics of care and present alternative policies that could help support carers and those they care for.
{"title":"Caregiving in Philosophy, Biology & Political Economy","authors":"A. Gopnik","doi":"10.1162/daed_a_01961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01961","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Caring for the young and the old, the fragile and the ill, is central to human thriving, and has played a fundamental role in human evolution. Yet care has been largely invisible in political economy and it does not fit the prevailing philosophical, political, and economic frameworks. Care typically emerges in the context of close personal relationships, and it is not well suited to either utilitarian or Kantian accounts of morality, or to “social contract” accounts of cooperation. Markets and states both have difficulty providing and supporting care, and as a result, care is overlooked and undervalued. I sketch alternative ways of thinking about the morality and politics of care and present alternative policies that could help support carers and those they care for.","PeriodicalId":47980,"journal":{"name":"Daedalus","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42782905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract While people in and around the tech industry debate whether algorithms are political at all, social scientists take the politics as a given, asking instead how this politics unfolds: how algorithms concretely govern. What we call “high-tech modernism”- the application of machine learning algorithms to organize our social, economic, and political life-has a dual logic. On the one hand, like traditional bureaucracy, it is an engine of classification, even if it categorizes people and things very differently. On the other, like the market, it provides a means of self-adjusting allocation, though its feedback loops work differently from the price system. Perhaps the most important consequence of high-tech modernism for the contemporary moral political economy is how it weaves hierarchy and data-gathering into the warp and woof of everyday life, replacing visible feedback loops with invisible ones, and suggesting that highly mediated outcomes are in fact the unmediated expression of people's own true wishes.
{"title":"The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism","authors":"H. Farrell, M. Fourcade","doi":"10.1162/daed_a_01982","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01982","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract While people in and around the tech industry debate whether algorithms are political at all, social scientists take the politics as a given, asking instead how this politics unfolds: how algorithms concretely govern. What we call “high-tech modernism”- the application of machine learning algorithms to organize our social, economic, and political life-has a dual logic. On the one hand, like traditional bureaucracy, it is an engine of classification, even if it categorizes people and things very differently. On the other, like the market, it provides a means of self-adjusting allocation, though its feedback loops work differently from the price system. Perhaps the most important consequence of high-tech modernism for the contemporary moral political economy is how it weaves hierarchy and data-gathering into the warp and woof of everyday life, replacing visible feedback loops with invisible ones, and suggesting that highly mediated outcomes are in fact the unmediated expression of people's own true wishes.","PeriodicalId":47980,"journal":{"name":"Daedalus","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41819418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Richard Locke, Ben Armstrong, Samantha Schaab-Rozbicki, and Geordie Young speculate that COVID-related challenges might lead firms to shift their assumptions about workers in ways that open up new political-economic possibilities, with benefits for workers in safety, compensation, and voice. I am skeptical about the idea of such COVID-induced learning. Drawing on an analysis of the costs of high turnover in the electronics supply chain, however, I argue that more generous assumptions about workers appear to have operational benefits. Understanding those operational benefits might lead firms to be less resistant to demands from workers for the kinds of jobs that Locke and his coauthors celebrate.
Richard Locke、Ben Armstrong、Samantha Schaab-Rozbicki和Geordie Young推测,与covid相关的挑战可能会导致公司改变对工人的假设,从而开辟新的政治经济可能性,在安全、补偿和发言权方面为工人带来好处。我对这种新冠病毒诱导学习的想法持怀疑态度。然而,根据对电子产品供应链中高流动率成本的分析,我认为,对工人更慷慨的假设似乎对运营有利。了解这些运营上的好处,可能会让公司对工人对洛克和他的合著者所赞美的那种工作的要求不那么抵触。
{"title":"Doing Well by Doing Right","authors":"Joshua Cohen","doi":"10.1162/daed_a_01971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01971","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Richard Locke, Ben Armstrong, Samantha Schaab-Rozbicki, and Geordie Young speculate that COVID-related challenges might lead firms to shift their assumptions about workers in ways that open up new political-economic possibilities, with benefits for workers in safety, compensation, and voice. I am skeptical about the idea of such COVID-induced learning. Drawing on an analysis of the costs of high turnover in the electronics supply chain, however, I argue that more generous assumptions about workers appear to have operational benefits. Understanding those operational benefits might lead firms to be less resistant to demands from workers for the kinds of jobs that Locke and his coauthors celebrate.","PeriodicalId":47980,"journal":{"name":"Daedalus","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48198908","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}