For our book club at OEF we’re reading the book Smart Cities (2013) by Anthony Townsend. I just finished the Audible audio book and wanted to get my notes down in writing before they slip away. The book covers the deployment of digital technology for managing and understanding the city. There are a two main … Continue reading Smart Cities (2013)
Books
by Ben Clift* Political economy has long taken a keen interest in the politics of economic ideas, but considerably less attention has been paid to the politics of economic method. Method gets neglected as the technical realm within which, it is assumed economic ideas, once established, are implemented in straightforward fashion. In fact, economic method […]
Quinn Slobodian’s new book, Crack-Up Capitalism is an original and striking analysis of a weird apparent disjuncture. Libertarians and classical liberals famously claim to be opposed to state power. So why do some of them resort to it so readily? In his previous book, The Globalists, Quinn argued that globalization was poorly understood. It wasn’t […]
In The Family (now also a Netflix series), journalist and author Jeff Sharlet wrote about...
Milton Friedman – one of the scholastic protagonists and machinists of Neoliberalism – wrote in the preface to the 1982 edition of Capitalism and Freedom, tutoring his disciples: “There is enormous inertia — a tyranny of the status quo — in private and especially governmental arrangements. Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces […]
Fifteen years after the Lehman Brothers collapse and following the failures of Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic Bank, Signature Bank, as well as the forced acquisition of Credit Suisse, banks are back in the headlines. Daniel Beunza and Pierre-Christian Fink assembled an excellent panel of sociologists and social scientists, studying banks, regulation and finance, to […]
My organization, the Open Earth Foundation, started a kind of book club a few months ago. For the first event, we read through the IPCC’s 6th report on climate change. We enjoyed the conversation so much, we decided to continue the practice monthly. We missed a month, so I picked a book that I thought … Continue reading Speed and Scale
I’ve just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s great, fun novel, Red Team Blues, and I’ve been thinking about how well it exemplifies one of the strengths of good science fiction. Back when we ran our seminar on Francis Spufford’s novel, Red Plenty, there was a back-and-forth between Francis and Felix Gilman. As Francis described it post-hoc, […]
— Blessed Be the Name of the Market? On the intellectual origins of market society and how the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith became an icon of American capitalism. A recorded conversation between Glory M. Liu, Jacob Soll, and Brad DeLong. The discussion builds on Liu’s new book Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became […]
by Oleksandr Svitych* We are living in the times of the populist nationalist challenge to the liberal order. This challenge comes in many forms, including reactionary and progressive ones – from Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France to Jobbik in Hungary, to Manuel López Obrador’s MORENA in Mexico and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in […]