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Friday, August 3, 2012

RE THE GLOBAL CLASS WAR BOOK Faux faux science economics

He gives a fairly accurate and useful account so far. 

One or two places I would quibble with him about, eg p 87,
"Globalization per se is not a product of political ideology. The gradual expansion of world markets is a natural consequence of evolving technology, communications, and business organization in search of efficiencies of scale."

He gives examples, both before and after p 87,  of ways in which it has been largely a question of greater and greater globalization as in fact the product of political ideology set up by institutions, notably those first developed, as he acknowledges, by Keynes, p. 88, one of his heroes, nonetheless, for Keynes' continuing reaffirmation of nationalism. 

(I share an affirmation of nationalism, but Keynes per se , so to speak, is not my paradigm for it.). 

Further, pace Faux, globalization is as little a natural process as are the notions, in management, of a product life cycle, or of so-called mature industries, eg manufacturing, or mature products, moving off shore, to make room for 'service economies', and symbolic analyst entrepreneurs (Faux' passage on how this played out is wonderful p.72-74), in 'post industrial societies'.

As he says, re Robert Reich's symbolic analysts paradigm, MNCs overcame this would-be geekocracy by turning these 'knowledge workers' once again into 'plug-and-play' pieces....p. 74. 

As I have remarked elsewhere here, the economics field, (as Randall Collins also might perhaps remark, a pseudo discipline specialization,) had been a doomsday machine for the West.

Ironically, Faux' work contains numerous good examples of faux science in economics, in spite of his stubborn reverence for Keynes. 

One might all along very well have been a trade, commercial, and military, nationalist, 
without the pseudo discipline of economics, which always was ill suited to underpinning it.

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