There's one way in which crypto is useful. It gives us new ways to explain why neoclassical economics is broken, and why we need to return to a political economy approach to studying resource allocation, financial flows, and the effects of different styles of economic regulation.
(1/?)
Oh, look! Another thrilling #history #lesson on how #socialism and the free market are basically frenemies with benefits. đ€đ Let's plow through pages of pseudo-intellectual drivel to discover that, shockingly, the market still exists! đđž
https://lucasvance.github.io/2100/history/ #freeMarket #politicalEconomy #marketTrends #intellectualDebate #HackerNews #ngated
Nate Bowling @natebowling on this utter economic clusterfuck that threatens to ruin us all
"what weâre living throughâunprecedented wealth consolidation driven by monopoly capitalism and the rise of a K-shaped economy where half the country canât afford daily lifeâis functionally the French Revolution in reverse...This is a path we were set on during the Reagan/Thatcher Trans-Atlantic consensus and one I donât think weâll emerge from until we can solve the aforementioned class solidarity gap"
#inequality #politicalEconomy #usPol #whereAreWeAtMa?
https://buttondown.com/natebowling/archive/affordability-this-math-aint-mathing
Systems sound perfect in theory â reality decides their success.
#EconomicReality #IdeologyVsReality #NewsPerspective #PoliticalEconomy #RealWorldFacts #FactTalk #DailyInsight #BalancedView #CriticalThinking #EconomyTalk #RealityCheck #DeepThoughts #MindsetShift #HumanSystems #TrendingViews #NewsPage #GlobalEconomy #WordsThatMatter #ThoughtOfTheDay #WakeUpCall
"Prices have been rising across the economy in ways that are both visible and opaque. There are short-term drivers of inflation due to President Trumpâs mismanagement of the economy. But the deeper drivers result from the degradation of capitalism.
For example, the lethal combination of digital technology and tech monopolies picks your pocket in countless ways. Instead of technical advances leading to greater convenience and lower cost, as they logically should, they create strategies for opportunistic price hikes.
When Amazon uses its deep knowledge of consumer preferences to rig markets and undermine competitors, higher prices are passed along. When HP makes it illegal or impossible for consumers to use cheaper non-HP cartridges in their printers, it can charge exorbitant prices. If you are prohibited from repairing your own car or your own iPhone, or as a farmer, prohibited from saving seed for next yearâs planting, that invites monopoly profits built on higher prices. Costs rise because the rules are rigged.
It isnât just the increasing cost of health insurance, but the tax on your time when a health system of byzantine complexity requires you to waste hours to get a simple referral or get a claim paid. Middlemen and algorithms, both in the business of denying claims, are a direct cost to the system and a source of rising out-of-pocket prices to patients. If insurance doesnât pay, you do. These middlemen also function as a drain on doctor time and thus a tax on doctorsâ incomes, as well as a debasement of medical services
In this special issue of the Prospect, we take stock of several hidden drivers of rising costs. David Dayen explores all the ways that technology allows sellers of any product that uses the internet to take advantage of surveillance capitalism to personalize prices and charge more than the market price..."
https://prospect.org/2025/12/01/sources-of-americas-hidden-inflation/
#USA #Rentism #Inflation #Economy #PoliticalEconomy #Monopolies #Antitrust #Oligopolies #IP #Competition
"Economics amounts to a science of the relationship of the economic things amongst themselves; for the science of economic matter the unemployed represent an economic zero lacking both in productive contribution and effective demand. That is, for economic thought the essence of economics is not the satisfaction of individual human needs. Rather, the essence of economics is economic nature, which it presumes to be valid because of itself. Yet, it does not tell us what it is. Economics ascribes subjective power to economic things and argues that the movements of economic quantities express value preferences, which reveal a rationality of economic action that expresses itself by price movements, which manifest a dynamic of competition that âis supposed to keep the whole process alive and even cause it to progress, as if it were moved by an âinvisible handââ (Adorno, 2000: 67). As if by magic, the invisible hand of the market is supposed to transform private vices into public virtues taking care of âboth the beggar and the kingâ (Adorno, 1990: 251). For the sake of economic insight into the social laws that govern the reproduction of society, it translates quantities of âcapitalâ into algebra and, on the condition of undistorted competition in undivided markets, assigns the power of economic regulation to some omnipotent invisible hand that tells the social individuals what to buy, where to invest, and how to achieve optimum factor efficiency of its human capital."
https://isr.press/Bonefeld_Negative_Dialectics/index.html
#CriticalTheory #NegativeDialetics #Economics #Pseudoscience #PoliticalEconomy
"Adorno is usually caricatured as some ivory tower mandarin ruminating on abstruse aesthetic questions, so why would a group of angry communist workers recommend reading him? Because Adorno undertook a critique of capitalist society without âaffirmative traits,â that refuses to make its peace with the wrong world and become âa piece of politicsâ and âthe prey of power.â Adornoâs thought is far from âsolipsistic and reality-distant,â as it is often portrayed, but rather is rooted in an understanding of Marxâs critique of political economy that is superior in many ways to that of his contemporaries.
While so many other Marxists thought there was something âprogressiveâ or even âsocialistâ about state-organized wage labor, itâs Adorno who recognizes that âexchange is still the key to societyâ â that the sale of labor-power, that âobjective abstractionâ in which we exchange âthe same for the same and simultaneously the same for the not-sameâ conceals and reproduces âthe entirety of class relations.â âThe total movement of societyâ is âantagonistic from the outset,â and âsociety remains class struggleâ â and for him, this is a wholly negative category, just as it is for workers. Being a productive laborer is not a piece of luck, but a curse, and we appreciate Adorno because heâll admit what we know from experience."
https://isr.press/Adorno_on_Society/index.html
#Capitalism #Marxism #CriticalTheory #WageSlavery #LaborPower #PoliticalEconomy
"Q: India still has ambitions of becoming a global manufacturing hub. Governments have tried to push it for two decadesâPrime Minister Narendra Modi launched âMake in Indiaâ in 2014. Yet India has failed. It missed both waves of manufacturing diversification out of China; those investments went to South East Asia instead. Why does India repeatedly fail to industrialise?
A: I think, ultimately, that has to do with the political economy. Your business elites do not want serious industrialisation. The business elites are either in the financial sector or, even if they are in the industrial sector, they still have very strong links with financial capital which doesnât like industrialisation because, for them, the most important thing is the rate of return.
In the short run, if you want to develop a serious industrial base, you need to go through a period when finance is repressed. Because if shareholders keep asking for money [in the form of return on investment], companies would not have the money to invest.
(...)
You need to invest in worker skills, infrastructure, and research and development (R&D). I looked up the latest data on R&D in India, and as a proportion of GDP, it is barely 0.6 per cent, compared to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) average of 3 per cent, and South Koreaâs 5.2 per cent.
I am afraid that there is no serious attempt to develop manufacturing in India. Yes, earlier India built manufacturing industries, but there was no ambition to join the global economy. And later, [the government and companies] did say that they want to develop manufacturing, but they did not do anything serious because they did not want to forego their short-term interests in order to have a more dynamic, industrially driven economy."
#India #Financialization #Industrialization #PoliticalEconomy
"To address this problem, Amin called for a process of delinking, which for him contains two key elements:
1) Delink from exploitation by the imperial core. Southern states should end dependence on imports from the core, and end dependence on imperial capital and core currencies, in order to build economic sovereignty and mitigate unequal exchange. Note that Amin was not calling for autarky or isolation; on the contrary, he actively encouraged South-South cooperation and trade as a tactic for overcoming imperial dependencies.
2) Delink from the capitalist law of value. Under capitalism, production is organised around whatever is most profitable to capital (largely, foreign capital). In the South, capital prefers to exploit cheap labour in global supply chains than to invest in technological innovation and industrial upgrading. This inhibits development. Southern governments must overcome this and align production to a new law of value: human needs and national development.
How can delinking be achieved in the 21st century? Some basic principles include the following:
A first step is to reduce imports from the core. This can be achieved by reducing unnecessary imports (luxury goods, etc), while substituting necessary imports where possible with domestic production, or through South-South trade, ideally using swap lines to trade goods outside the US dollar or Euro. Taking this step reduces pressure for exports to the core (and reduces the need for core currencies), and therefore reduces exposure to unequal exchange.
These options are increasingly available to Southern countries now because of China."
https://jasonhickel.substack.com/p/what-is-delinking
#Delinking #PoliticalEconomy #Imperialism #Capitalism #LawOfValue #EconomicSovereignty #Monopolies
"The global race to develop advanced AI has entered a newphase marked by staggering investments, rapid technical breakthroughs, and intensifying geopolitical competition. The United States now controls approximately 75% of global AI compute capacity, China 15%, and the EU 5%. This concentration of compute, alongside concentrations of AI development talent, data, and AI model ownership suggests that mid-sized economies likely face insurmountable barriers to independent frontier AI development.
At the same time, economic, cultural, and security infrastructures are coming to rely ever more on frontier models. States that are unable to develop their own frontier models or access the computing hardware required to train them will have to choose between dependency and weakness:
- Dependency: if states adopt U.S. or Chinese AI systems, these frontier AI states can then exploit their privileged position in ways that harm dependent states, for example through data theft, service restrictions, selectively withholding frontier capabilities, embedding values in foundation models, and unfavorable terms of trade.
- Weakness: if, on the other hand, states limit their adoption of frontier systems to avoid dependency, frontier AI states may achieve breakthrough capabilitiesâin economic productivity, in scientific discovery, in military operationsâthat create widening gaps in economic and military capabilities.
Yet, mid-sized economies are also AI bridge powers, possessing substantial AI development capabilities and resources that, if combined, would allow them to challenge the status quo. By working together and strategically choosing their AI development approaches, AI bridge powers can develop competitive frontier models:
First, pooled computing infrastructure can support frontier-scale development..."
https://aigi.ox.ac.uk/publications/a-blueprint-for-multinational-advanced-ai-development/
#AI #EU #USA #China #AIDevelopment #PoliticalEconomy #Geopolitics
âSorry, sorryâ: El Poder de las Papas Fritas
La columna de El Mercurio, âSorry, sorryâ: El Poder de las Papas Fritas, aborda una profunda crĂtica Ă©tica y polĂtica a la gestiĂłn actual, la cual, segĂșn Alfredo Sfeir-Younis y en lĂnea con su obra sobre la consciencia y los derechos humanos, utiliza soluciones superficiales ("papas fritas" o premios de consuelo) para evadir la transformaciĂłn estructural. La columna critica la miopĂa electoral que prioriza debates transitorios (seguridad, empleo) en lugar de abordar la esencia de la vida y el bienestar humano: la sustentabilidad del desarrollo y la equidad, las cuales son tratadas como un tema sectorial y no como un pilar ineludible. Sfeir-Younis advierte que esta falta de honestidad intelectual, ejemplificada en la polĂtica y los negocios, tendrĂĄ un costo histĂłrico para las generaciones futuras, y llama a reorganizar las posiciones alrededor de un modelo Ă©tico de bienestar humano, social y natural sustentable en todas sus dimensiones.
đ https://www.neljorsa.com/sorry-sorry-el-poder-de-las-papas-fritas/
#EthicalLeadership #SustainableDevelopment #PoliticalEconomy #SystemicChange #ConsciousDecisionMaking #SocialEquity
Martin Sorrell on the prospect of regulating AI
"companies and individual figures like Elon Musk are simply too rich and influential for governments to meaningfully bring down a regulatory hammer...At some point, weâll have a $10 trillion company. To put that into perspective, other than the United States and China, a $10 trillion company would effectively be the third-biggest [economy in the world]. Theyâre nation-states. The ability of governments to control them, I think, has become limitedâ
#oligarchy #politicalEconomy #capitalism
https://fortune.com/2025/10/30/martin-sorrell-says-ai-has-already-missed-the-oppenheimer-moment/
"Why are the targets for reducing emissions not being met or now even agreed? The answer is money. Despite the harm, the worldâs governments provided $956bn in direct fossil fuel subsidies in 2023."
Michael Roberts: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2025/11/23/cop-30-its-no-joke/
#climateChange #capitalism #economics #macroEconomy #oilAndGas #fossilFuels #climatePolicies #climatePolitics #transition #energyTransition #creditGuidance #money #moneyCreation #banks #banking #finance #GHG #CO2 #carbon #climateBreakdown #politicalEconomy
"A nation doesn't have to balance its books. In fact, you can almost say with certainty that the worst thing a nation can do is balance its books, because there wouldn't be enough money to go around, and that's pretty serious."
#RichardMurphy, 2025
https://shows.acast.com/bold-politics-with-zack-polanski/episodes/68f7f3528125b849f840aa4a
Paul Krugman warns: Is crypto's collapse tied to political shifts? He argues crypto's rise was fueled by political backing, especially from Donald Trump, and its current crash reflects Trumpâs waning influence. Discover the full implications: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/reminder-crypto-is-a-trump-trade #CryptoCrash #PoliticalEconomy
My new #OpenAccess article is OUT
âThe #PoliticalEconomy of #Web3 #Platformizationâ #Digital
https://doi.org/10.3390/digital5040062
@ethereum @ethereumfoundation #MakerDAO #Uniswap #UniswapFND #mastodon #Celo #GrassrootsEconomics #gooddollar
Substack is a Greenhouse
Easton Greenhouse in the Uk, Creative Commons Source: Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.Since 2017, the blogging platform Substack has been running the playbook âborrow lots of money, and spend it to pay people to post on your site, causing it to grow and your site to seem big and important.â The web boom of the 2000s was funded by Google which needed to give people reasons to make Google searches, see Google ads, and be surveilled by Google Analytics. In 2021 Substack spent $3 in advances to bloggers for every $1 they earned from those blogs. In the past this has always ended in tears, and the people who run and fund the site have shady ideas and ugly politics. You can find many people talking about specific Substack bloggers, their ideas, and whether Substack should host them.1 Not as many people talk about how the site as a whole is weird in a way which feels normal to wealthy and influential people in New York City and Southern California.
Who Writes Top Substack Blogs?
Substack has a leaderboard and 29 official categories. Afficionados tell each other that picking a category with less competition helps your blog grow. I had a look at the ten highest-earning Substack blogs in two different categories as of 9 October 2025.2 Its difficult to quickly learn about who runs these accounts because Substack does not encourage bloggers to share an autobiography on the site (the âaboutâ section is usually brief and about the blog). When they have websites, Substackers often do not list their nationality, education, or place or residence. However, I can usually get a general sense of an authorâs background.
The History Category is as follows:
The top 20 include Kamil Kazani (a Tatar from Russia who tells American officials that Russia is about to break up and release nations like the Tatars from the Prison of Nations) and Dan Jones of the Hardcore History podcast. Three of the top ten have written about World War II. Worsley seems to be the only out woman in the top 20 although some of the team at The Culturist could be women.
The Culture Category has more of a balance between genders:
The next 10 include Old Media figures like feminist conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf and social media people like hereditarian Marxist Freddie deBoer. Looking at these high-earning bloggers is a very good way to get a feel for the site and the sort of things that it rewards, and stepping away from controversies about specific individuals or topics.
Substack is for Americans
I think its clear that the people who make lots of money on Substack are overwhelmingly Americans. Nine out of ten of the top-earning writers in both categories are either Americans or from rich English-speaking countries like the UK (and many of those have worked in the USA). It especially helps if those writers appeal to the chattering class in New York City and LA, or the West Coast surveillance and propaganda industry (people inside that industry sometimes call it tech). The Age of Invention blog by trained historian Anton Howes is great, but he is British writing about technological progress and economic growth in 16th-18th century Europe. Those make great conversation starters at a house party in Oakland whereas many aspects of history do not. The most exotic writer in English Wikipediaâs page on Substack is Salman Rushdie, born in pre-partition India, educated at Rugby and Cambridge, and migrated to New York City in 2000.
Most of these successful bloggers donât bother to state their nationality, any more than a Roman in the fourth century CE thought of himself as having a nation (nations were for pagans and barbarians, being Christian and Roman was the right and proper state of mankind). Discouraging writers from sharing information about themselves discourages diversity, because if you need information to orient yourself, and that information is hard to find, you are likely to go somewhere else rather than work hard to understand what you are reading. We have all met people who like social media and respond to anything unfamiliar with a burst of sexual, ethnic, gender, and class stereotypes because that is easy and connecting with strangers as individuals is hard.4
The two high-earning Substack bloggers outside the Anglosphere do not even have English Wikipedia pages. That suggests to me that their audiences are in Lithuania and Italy not global, and that being famous on the Italian or Lithuanian Internet did not make English-speakers acknowledge their existence. As a historian and a craft worker and a fencer I was trained to take the best ideas from around the world, not the ideas that happen to be taught locally in my native language. Clearly, not everyone was trained the same way.
Brown people can make money on Substack. But it really helps if they have British or US citizenship and write about things that white Britons and Americans like to talk about such as race relations. I think that a Sikh talking about the Sikh diaspora and the Khalistani movement and the Indian governmentâs pressure on Sikhs would have a hard time making money on the site, because that is not something that professional sharers of opinion in New York City are used to sounding informed about.
Out of 29 categories, Substack has just three on politics: US, Health, and International. That would fly in a provincial newspaper like the Globe and Mail, but would look odd in The Economist. The world is so much bigger and more diverse than a handful of privileged people in three or four cities in the USA and UK!
Even the political controversies are controversies that a certain type of American likes to talk about in public. The Libertarian movement is very visible on American social media, even though it struggles to elect a dogcatcher, and the Green movement is less visible, even though it elects legislators and helps form governments on both sides of the Atlantic. Those legislators and governments are not in the USA, and the people who became fascinated by Libertarianism as young men are. Many Americans are fascinated with pseudoscience about race and IQ from a hundred years ago, so you can find people arguing about those ideas on Substack too.5 Even Substackâs proudly stated stance on free speech only makes sense within American thinking on that subject, and most of the critics accept that framing and respond with another perspective within the American tradition. That is not helpful if you want to find the best way of thinking about speech, but its helpful if you are Americans fighting over a microphone which some influential Americans listen to.
Some cyclamen flowers on the ancestral estates. We did not plant them, and neither did the neighbours, so they were probably deposited in the droppings of birds, deer, or raccoons.This Is Not Natural
There are all kinds of reasons why around 60% of donations in crowdfunding come from North America and almost all of the rest from Europe or East Asia.6 The United States still dominates the Internet, social media, and global finance. However, 60% American with many foreign influences is not 90% American with a few Brits and Canadians. One study of other social media noticed that Italian soccer commentator âFabrizio Romano is mentioned by respondents in almost every country in our survey including South Africa, Kenya, Norway, and the United States.â7 How does a site become more American than Stack Overflow or Kickstarter?
I grew up in online communities which were gently tended like a garden. The founders usually had a plan, but something always died away, something always grew better than expected, and the birds or the raccoons always left a little gift with some strange seeds. Again and again, companies opened an online community and found that it refused to be a marketing arm for the owner and nothing but a marketing arm: people had arguments and new enthusiasms and someone had to keep the peace.8 My blogroll is very international, as is my Mastodon feed.9 The history of the open web is full of stories like âso Linguistics sent me to Asian Studies, and it turns out that our blogging platform is being used for opposition organizing in Thailand!â or âalthough we Japanese think of Mastodon as our site, it was actually invented by a German using a protocol designed by an American: who knew!â Armour scholars often find that someone on the Russian service VKontakt has shared a helpful photo. If a community is built around an interest or the affordances of a tool, it will spread across nations and cultures, because people around the world are interested in crochet or cat pictures or Bollywood films, and people around the world find Pandoc useful for converting files between formats. Even Wikipedia for all its faults is multinational and the different nations communicate with one another because often an English Wikipedia article is translated from the French or a Swiss Wikipedian can add some details about Erich von DĂ€niken which have not yet appeared in English-language media.
Substack is more like a greenhouse where orderly racks of plants are tended with fertilizer and pesticide. It was founded by a handful of SoCal surveillance and propaganda workers, funded by SoCal people, and recruits specific types of writers. It has specific strategies like not seeking out sports writers because another site is preferred by sports writers in the USA.10 As yet the community does not seem to have broken free from the company and its Five-Year Plans. The plants in a greenhouse are there because the owner wanted them to be there and gave them everything they needed to thrive.
The trouble with greenhouses is that they need maintaining and plants canât grow inside them forever. Its easy to look powerful if you are flooded with resources and donât have to compete against anything you are not expecting. Substack recently borrowed even more money from a few very rich people, and if they had failed, I donât think the site would have survived in its present form. (The non-profit platform Ghost, on the other hand, borrowed $300,000 on Kickstarter in 2013 and became self-sustaining a year later).11 One reason why I ignored an offer from Substack is that I donât trust the site and any rewards it can offer to last.
It is absolutely possible to ignore the controversies and the long-term future and write my sort of thing on Substack. Joumana Medlejâs Carwansaray blog is full of curiosity, practical knowledge, and aesthetic pleasure (she is Lebanese but lives in Oxford and has received resources from a variety of British and US institutions). But if you are trying to decide how to think about the site, try rolling around the idea that it reflects the range of ideas which fashionable people talk about in San Francisco or New York City. It has Nazis and hucksters and people with odd ideas about gender because a cocktail party in those cities has Nazis and hucksters and people with odd ideas about gender. Those ideas and people brought our civilization to the brink of destruction, and they are not going to help us build a better one from the ruins.
Isidore of Seville had his bishopric in Spain, but I just have a few fruit trees and a humble day job. If you can, please support this site.
(scheduled 10 October 2025; based on a Mastodon thread)
Edit 2025-11-02: linked Cultutist author Evan Amato
Edit 2025-11-03: formatted some links in footnotes, polished a phrase
#mediaCriticism #metaBlogging #modern #politicalEconomy #socialMedia #stateOfTheWeb
My article âThe #PoliticalEconomy of #Web3 Platformization: Innovation Systems, Reaching the Moon, Governing the Ghettoâ has been accepted in the #journal #Digital
It examines how Web3 gov actually worksâwhy technical #decentralization alone doesnât ensure democracy. Institutions matter
"Economics, Graeber noted, begins with a fable. The claim is that there were once isolated individuals trading goats for grain. Then money evolved to simplify that exchange, after which states and banks came later. This story, told in some way in almost every economics textbook, is almost entirely untrue.
Instead, in every known society, people first organised economic life through relationships of credit and trust. âI owe youâ came before âI pay you.â Money began as memory and not as a metal coin.
Graeber's anthropology restored the social dimension that economics had erased: people do not trade because they are selfish, but because they live together."
