Capital as Will and Imagination

Capital as Will and Imagination PDF Author: Mark D. Metzler
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080146790X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Joseph Schumpeter’s conceptions of entrepreneurship, innovation, and creative destruction have been hugely influential. He pioneered the study of economic development and of technological paradigm shifts and was a forerunner of the emerging field of evolutionary economics. He is not thought of as a theorist of credit-supercharged high-speed growth, but this is what he became in postwar Japan. As Mark Metzler shows in Capital as Will and Imagination, economists and planners in postwar Japan seized upon Schumpeter’s ideas and put them directly to work. The inflationary creation of credit, as theorized by Schumpeter, was a vital but mostly unrecognized aspect of the successful stabilization of Japanese capitalism after World War II and was integral to Japan’s postwar success. It also helps to explain Japan’s bubble, and the global bubbles that have followed it. The heterodox analysis presented in Capital as Will and Imagination goes beyond the economic history of postwar Japan; it opens up a new view of the core circuits of modern capital in general.

Capital as Will and Imagination

Capital as Will and Imagination PDF Author: Mark D. Metzler
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080146790X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Joseph Schumpeter’s conceptions of entrepreneurship, innovation, and creative destruction have been hugely influential. He pioneered the study of economic development and of technological paradigm shifts and was a forerunner of the emerging field of evolutionary economics. He is not thought of as a theorist of credit-supercharged high-speed growth, but this is what he became in postwar Japan. As Mark Metzler shows in Capital as Will and Imagination, economists and planners in postwar Japan seized upon Schumpeter’s ideas and put them directly to work. The inflationary creation of credit, as theorized by Schumpeter, was a vital but mostly unrecognized aspect of the successful stabilization of Japanese capitalism after World War II and was integral to Japan’s postwar success. It also helps to explain Japan’s bubble, and the global bubbles that have followed it. The heterodox analysis presented in Capital as Will and Imagination goes beyond the economic history of postwar Japan; it opens up a new view of the core circuits of modern capital in general.

Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power

Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power PDF Author: Max Haiven
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1780329555
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Today, when it seems like everything has been privatized, when austerity is too often seen as an economic or political problem that can be solved through better policy, and when the idea of moral values has been commandeered by the right, how can we re-imagine the forces used as weapons against community, solidarity, ecology and life itself? In this stirring call to arms, Max Haiven argues that capitalism has colonized how we all imagine and express what is valuable. Looking at the decline of the public sphere, the corporatization of education, the privatization of creativity, and the power of finance capital in opposition to the power of the imagination and the growth of contemporary social movements, Haiven provides a powerful argument for creating an anti-capitalist commons. Capitalism is not in crisis, it is the crisis, and moving beyond it is the only key to survival. Crucial reading for all those questioning the imposition of austerity and hoping for a fairer future beyond it.

Capital Moves

Capital Moves PDF Author: Jefferson Cowie
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1565846591
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Globalization is the lead story of the new century, but its roots reach back nearly one hundred years, to major corporations' quest for stable, inexpensive, and pliant sources of labor. Before the largest companies moved beyond national boundaries, they crossed state lines, abandoning the industrial centers of the Eastern Seaboard for impoverished rural communities in the Midwest and South. In their wake they left the decaying urban landscapes and unemployment rates that became hallmarks of late twentieth-century America. This is the story that Jefferson Cowie, in "a stunningly important work of historical imagination and rediscovery" (Nelson Lichtenstein), tells through the lens of a single American corporation, RCA. Capital Moves takes us through the interconnected histories of Camden, New Jersey; Bloomington, Indiana; Memphis, Tennessee; and Juárez, Mexico--four cities radically transformed by America's leading manufacturer of records and radio sets. In a sweeping narrative of economic upheaval and class conflict, Cowie weaves together the rich detail of local history with the national--and ultimately international--story of economic and social change.

Capital is Dead

Capital is Dead PDF Author: McKenzie Wark
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788735323
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
It's not capitalism, it's not neoliberalism - what if it's something worse? In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that information has empowered a new kind of ruling class. Through the ownership and control of information, this emergent class dominates not only labour but capital as traditionally understood as well. And it’s not just tech companies like Amazon and Google. Even Walmart and Nike can now dominate the entire production chain through the ownership of not much more than brands, patents, copyrights, and logistical systems. While techno-utopian apologists still celebrate these innovations as an improvement on capitalism, for workers—and the planet—it’s worse. The new ruling class uses the powers of information to route around any obstacle labor and social movements put up. So how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyze this new world, but ways to change it. Drawing on the writings of a surprising range of classic and contemporary theorists, Wark offers an illuminating overview of the contemporary condition and the emerging class forces that control—and contest—it.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Capital in the Twenty-First Century PDF Author: Thomas Piketty
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674979850
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 817

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Book Description
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

The Radical Imagination

The Radical Imagination PDF Author: Doctor Alex Khasnabish
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1780329040
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
The idea of the imagination is as evocative as it is elusive. Not only does the imagination allow us to project ourselves beyond our own immediate space and time, it also allows us to envision the future, as individuals and as collectives. The radical imagination, then, is that spark of difference, desire and discontent that can be fanned into the flames of social change. Yet what precisely is the imagination and what might make it ‘radical’? How can it be fostered and cultivated? How can it be studied and what are the possibilities and risks of doing so? This book seeks to answer these questions at a crucial time. As we enter into a new cycle of struggles marked by a worldwide crisis of social reproduction, scholar-activists Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish explore the processes and possibilities for cultivating the radical imagination in dark times. A lively and crucial intervention in radical politics, social research and social change, and the collective visions and cultures that inspire them.

Currencies of Imagination

Currencies of Imagination PDF Author: Ivan V. Small
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501716891
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
In Vietnam, international remittances from the Vietnamese diaspora are quantitatively significant and contribute important economic inputs. Yet beyond capital transfer, these diasporic remittance economies offer insight into an unfolding transformation of Vietnamese society through the extension of imaginations and ontological possibilities that accompany them. Currencies of Imagination examines the complex role of remittances as money and as gifts that flow across, and mediate between, transnational kinship networks dispersed by exile and migration. Long distance international gift exchanges and channels in a neoliberal political economy juxtapose the increasing cross-border mobility of remittance financial flows against the relative confines of state bounded bodies. In this contradiction Ivan V. Small reveals a creative space for emergent imaginaries that disrupt local structures and scales of desire, labor and expectation. Furthermore, the particular characteristics of remittance channels and mediums in a global economy, including transnational mobility and exchangeable value, affect and reflect the relations, aspirations, and orientations of the exchange participants. Small traces a genealogy of how this phenomenon has shifted through changing remittance forms and transfer infrastructures, from material and black market to formal bank and money services. Transformations in the affective and institutional relations among givers, receivers, and remittance facilitators accompany each of these shifts, illustrating that the socio-cultural work of remittances extends far beyond the formal economic realm they are usually consigned to.

The Code of Capital

The Code of Capital PDF Author: Katharina Pistor
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691208603
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
"Capital is the defining feature of modern economies, yet most people have no idea where it actually comes from. What is it, exactly, that transforms mere wealth into an asset that automatically creates more wealth? The Code of Capital explains how capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, and why this little-known fact is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else. In this revealing book, Katharina Pistor argues that the law selectively "codes" certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. With the right legal coding, any object, claim, or idea can be turned into capital - and lawyers are the keepers of the code. Pistor describes how they pick and choose among different legal systems and legal devices for the ones that best serve their clients' needs, and how techniques that were first perfected centuries ago to code landholdings as capital are being used today to code stocks, bonds, ideas, and even expectations--assets that exist only in law. A powerful new way of thinking about one of the most pernicious problems of our time, The Code of Capital explores the different ways that debt, complex financial products, and other assets are coded to give financial advantage to their holders. This provocative book paints a troubling portrait of the pervasive global nature of the code, the people who shape it, and the governments that enforce it."--Provided by publisher.

Amos and the Cosmic Imagination

Amos and the Cosmic Imagination PDF Author: James R. Linville
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351162985
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Said to contain the words of the earliest of the biblical prophets (8th century BCE), the book of Amos is reinterpreted by the author in light of new and sometimes controversial historical approaches to the Bible. Amos is read as the literary product of the Persian-era community in Judah. Its representations of divine-human communication are investigated in the context of the ancient writers' own role as transmitters and shapers of religious traditions. Amos's extraordinary poetry expresses mythical conceptions of divine manifestation and a process of destruction and recreation of the cosmos which reveals that behind the appearances of the natural world is a heavenly, cosmic temple.

The Positive Theory of Capital

The Positive Theory of Capital PDF Author: Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
ISBN: 1610163648
Category : Capital
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description