i just stumbled across this article and found it to be really quite interesting.
i'll bite this as a teaser
Quote:
Abstract:
This is the first in a series of short articles we plan to write on the current crisis. Our aim in this series is threefold: to outline some of the important contours of the crisis; to situate these patterns in historical context; and to reflect on their possible causes and implications.
Since the crisis is still ongoing, such analysis can only be cursory and suggestive. But it is nonetheless useful to put our preliminary research and thoughts in writing. By spelling out what we do know (or think we know) about the crisis, we can better identify what we don’t know and need to ask.
This paper sets the stage for the series. It outlines the conventional wisdom about the cause of crisis; it describes the chronology of events; and it contrasts the pattern and magnitude of the current downturn with those of earlier episodes. The overall picture painted by this analysis is highly stylized: crises appear to come and go with remarkable regularity, their oscillations are fairly similar and they share the same order of magnitude. The whole process seems almost “automatic,” and automaticity is reassuring: it suggests that the current crisis has run much of its course and that doom and gloom will soon give way to a new upswing.
But what if this automaticity is a mirage?
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the full article is here:
Contours of Crisis
i'm doing it this way in part because there are graphics in the article that help clarify it, so head to the link...
the demonstration is pretty well encapsulated in the abstract--with the question that concludes it the central point.
another way of stating it is: we are in the main seduced by the illusion of objectivity that we impute to number and that of regularity which we impute to cycle-like behaviors. consequently, the current economic crisis is understood as finance-driven, and as understandable in the context of repetitive cycles. so there's nothing particularly significant about this one beyond it's severity.
i haven't bought this line from the outset, and many of the threads i've put up about the ideological/economic crisis have been geared around seeing in it the outlines of a basic political--and (though less clearly imaged as a function of the way infotainment operates, shaped by the same illusions concerning number and "objectivity" as is demolished in the article)--social transformation.
this article tries to push through the illusions noted above and ends with this argument:
Quote:
Financial Cycles and the Reordering of Society
It is easy to fall for the aesthetic gyrations of the stock market. Their stylized cycles make them look natural. They “revert to mean,” as Francis Galton would have it. They oscillate within fairly clear boundaries. Their ups and downs seem almost automatic (at least in retrospect). Their regularities are so neat many are tempted to forget David Hume and extrapolate the past into the future.
And here lies the problem. The long-term cycles of the stock market, no matter how stylized and regular they seem, are not self-generating. They don’t just happen on their own. Each cycle has a reason, and that reason is deeply social and historically unique.
Note that, during the twentieth century, every oscillation from a bear to a bull market was accompanied by a systemic societal transformation:
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The crisis of 1905–1920 marked the closing of the American Frontier, the shift from robber-baron capitalism to large-scale business enterprise and the beginning of synchronized finance.
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The crisis of 1928–1948 signaled the end of “unregulated” capitalism and the emergence of large governments and the welfare-warfare state.
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The crisis of 1968–1981 marked the closing of the Keynesian era, the resumption of worldwide capital flow and the onset of neoliberal globalization.
Furthermore, none of these transformations were “in the cards.” Most observers in the 1900s didn’t expect managerial capitalism to take hold; few in the 1920s anticipated the welfare-warfare state; and not too many in the 1960s predicted neoliberal regulation. All three transformations involved a complex set of conflicts, their trajectories were all fuzzy, and their outcomes were all but impossible to anticipate.
In other words, underneath the seemingly repetitive long-term patterns of the market lies an open-ended and inherently unpredictable reordering of the entire political economy. Although past bear markets have always given way to long bull runs, these transitions were never automatic. Each and every one of them reflected a profound transformation of the underlying social structure. And in our view, this correspondence still holds. In order for the current crisis to end and a new upswing to begin, something very big has to happen: the social structure must change.
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but it makes more sense in context, so do read the article if you have the time.
the question is what you make of both parts of it---the attack on the reliance on number, on repetition and cycles in the stock market as a coherent indicator of activity beyond the stock market on the one hand, and the claim that what we're seeing is more comprehensible in terms of a longer-term **social-historical** pattern which seems to align significant economic crisis with basic social and political transformation.
if this last assessment is correct, it seems safe to say that we are really not being served at all by the dominant media apparatus, which seems incapable of structuring information about such change in ways that fits its factoid-based minimal time-frame oriented mode of presentation...
but what do you make of this?
it seems a basic challenge to how alot of folk think about what's happening around us.