Re: Penl'rs book on finance
You're probably thinking of Transforming the US Financial System, edited by Gary Dymski, Gerald Epstein, and Robert Pollin, published by ME Sharpe for the Economic Policy Institute. My book. I gotta finish it first. Doug Doug Henwood [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Left Business Observer 212-874-4020 (voice) 212-874-3137 (fax) On Thu, 2 Jun 1994, R. Anders Schneiderman wrote: A few months ago, someone posted a blurb on a book written by several progressive economists on U.S. finance. Does anyone remember the cite? Thanks, Anders Schneiderman UCB Sociology P.S. Doug, when's your book coming out?
Re: pomo (again)
In my humble experience, decentered constituted experience is excellent grilled with a side salad of arugula/radicchio/romaine properly dressed of course. Penny Ciancanelli Manchester UK
Pen-ers book on finance
Yes, Gil Skillman has the right citation for our book "Transforming the U.S. Financial System." By the way Anders, I did respond to your note to me of a few days ago; apparently you didn't get the message. As long as I'm in a self-promotion mode, I'll mention another book along similar themes that I co-edited with Gary Dymski, that came out about a month ago with U. of Michigan Press. It is much more of an academic volume--as well as a festschrift in honor of Prof. Hyman Minsky--but for those of you out there who may be interested, here is the lowdown: The book is "New Perspectives in Monetary Macroeconomics: Explorations in the Tradition of Hyman P. Minsky." The contents are as follows: 1. Introduction by Gary Dymski and Robert Pollin. I. Theoretical Papers 2. "Financial Fragility: Is an Etiology at Hand?" by Lance Taylor. 3. "Complex Dynamics in a Simple Macroeconomic Model with Financing Constraints," Domenico Delli Gatti, Mauro Gallegati and Laura Gardini. 4. "Asymmetric Information, Uncertainty, and Financial Structure: 'New' versus 'Post' Keynesian Microfoundations," by Gary Dymski. 5. "Are Keynesian Uncertainty and Macrotheory Compatible? Conventional Decision Making, Institutional Structures, and Conditional Stability in Keynesian Macromodels," by James Crotty. II. Empirical Papers in International Economics 6. "Minskian Fragility in the International Financial System," by H. Peter Gray and Jean M. Gray. 7. "Debt Crisis Adjustment in Latin America: Have the Hardships Been Necessary?" by David Felix. III. Empirical Papers on Advanced Economies 8. "Financial Fragility and the Great Depression: New Evidence on Credit Growth in the 1920s," by Dorene Isenberg. 9. "A Political Economy Model of Comparative Central Banking," by Gerald Epstein. 10. "Saving, Finance and Interest Rates: An Empirical Consideration of some Basic Keynesian Propositions," by Robert Pollin and Craig Justice. IV. Exploring Analytic Interconnections. 11. "Minsky, Keynes, and Sraffa: Investment and the Long Period," by Edward Nell. 12. "Joseph Schumpeter: A Frustrated 'Creditist'" by James Earley. 13. "Marx, Minsky, and Monetary Economics," by Arie Arnon. V. A Framework for New Macro-Policy Approaches 14. "The Costs and Benefits of Financial Instability: Big Government Capitalism and the Minsky Paradox," by Robert Pollin and Gary Dymski. I would be of course happy to answer any questions anyone has about the book while you are in the process of writing out your check to purchase it. -- Bob Pollin
Re: Prices of computers
What if price competition is a motive force behind innovation? --Alan G. Isaac On Thu, 2 Jun 1994 17:44:53 -0700 Paul Cockshott said: Whilst prices of home computers has not drastically changed, the price of a computer capbable of performing a specific organisational task in industry has certainly undergone a drastic fall. ... This sort of price decline is historically unprecedented, and although the labour theory of value provides an adequate account of why the price has fallen when the labour content fell, the Babbage/Marx/Braverman analysis of the labour process is unable to account for how the labour content can have been so dramatically reduced. To focus on price competition is to pick on a trivial question in comparison.
Re: abolish grades?
I was not surprised at the content of Harry's intervention but would also have liked to have had (tense anyone?) a more taylor-made (hmm) reply to the pen-l debate. To wit: What is going on now with the students in our various schools that shapes the reported practices and self observations many of us are going through during the exam and paper ritual? One of the reasons for my intervention was to shake up the policy mavens with detailed accounting prescriptions for how to do something which patently makes no emotional (and I would argue) little functional sense. Plumbers always find comfort in discussions with other plumbers about the latest duct tape for repairing leaks but they also find time for reflection on the effects of speed up in house construction on the quality of the pipes and on the effects of the fiscal crisis on the sewage capacity in the newer suburbs. Moreover they also know that no matter how good the materials, finding all the hidden leaks is more important than repairing the one you can see. Learning is a private, sujective activity. Teaching is a social one. The divergence between what I thought I taught and what my students reveal they know is clearest when I read what they have written on their exams or papers. Were we, I ask, in the same room at the same time? Did he/she hear what I think I said? In an ongoing dialogue with the students, remedying those gaps is possible to the extent that the number of students is small and none of them are afraid. The true character of this sham solidarity is exposed with grading or any other symbolic method of "quality" control. Increasingly my students are four square in favour of fear and quality control. Nutured on dreams of competitive success and tormented by the fear that their mediocrity will be discovered, they want a fair game THEY WILL WIN. So we gather, in the lecture room, me pressured to get with the knowledge power program of apologizing in style; they pressured to find out the rules of my game and how to win. Do I object to a certain conceptual framework? They think, does she want me to repeat that rubbish? Why does she sound ironical? Why does she call on that berk? Does sucking up to her "work?" And as well, more dreamy eyed innocents, inquisitive, too naive to cut their questions to the lecturer's cloth finding a question to run with for many years. Such dreams as those fall on barren soil in today's universities, don't they? Not always and not necessarily. The personal intervenes; we like and get along with some of these people and not with others. Education occurs in spite of the institution through the dialogue we have the time, energy and interest to engage in. Unlike Harry, I don't have a specific program on grading at universities even though I am largely in sympathy with the overall perspective he takes on the issue.The reason I don't is that I am not sure what makes sense at the practical level of organizing against the daily incursions of crackpot realism into academic study. Maybe it does make sense to forward a demand that stimulates strong discussion (and surely the proposal to abolish grades would have that effect, although on pen-l it seems to have had the opposite effect, e.g. silence...and how should that silence be understood?) I do think that our own lack of organization and our own refusual to use the organizations we have at hand (AAUP, URPE AEA, etc) to mount discussion and debate on this crucial issue leaves us with only our private policies which, with all the bad conscience at our leisure we can fine tune. I do think, and on this there could be important debate, that it is absolutely the case that the "quality control" agenda, the management by proxy and all the rest are in line with the political agenda of the right to impose work in every increasing quantities at all levels of the social division of labour and that the effect of this is to cultivate differences and reproduce existing differentiations of power so that our collective power is weak and growing weaker. Back to work Penny Ciancanelli Manchester UK - End forwarded message - End forwarded message
