My name is Mike and on this public blog I have decided to use the name of MikeS. I am currently enrolled in the LCC Social Science program, but I am a “perpetual student” and have been taking courses in all sorts of subjects for many years. My main emphasis has been upon the social sciences, but I’ve also studied the natural sciences a bit. In economics I suppose I’m at the level of a strong sophomore or a beginning junior year student, so this class is a good fit for me. However, in sociology, I have more than a master’s degree worth of training, research, and teaching experience. I’ve been in a professional career for many years, which makes the simultaneous completion of a full PhD quite difficult, but these days I’m mainly studying for purposes of enlightenment, rather than profit, so I’m not super-worried about lacking the highest credential.
My overarching interests are in macro-sociology. But I have also developed some “impractical” ideas about what sociology should be. I believe that sociological theory and theory in other social science disciplines should fully inform each other – they should strive to converge, as all available research helps to inform them all. But theoretical improvements are not easy to accomplish, or to demonstrate to others. My impression is that the vast majority of social scientists necessarily have a few fairly narrow areas of interest in which they do research, and that they have much cruder “working models” about all the social institutions, complexity, and contexts that surround their own special knowledge areas, and this is where they get into trouble. Rather than working collaboratively enough across disciplinary boundaries (and intra-disciplinary divides), most specialists necessarily trust in the soundness of fairly weak and limited theoretical foundations – either ones which have been inherited from the classics in the field (and somewhat revised by key people over time), or in the form of recent “trends” which are supposed to be unprecedented and “revolutionary” but are soon supplanted with new and similarly ephemeral trends within the “publish or perish” environment. Somewhat free from the pressures of a purely academic career, during my spare time I continue to study, take classes, and do research, in search of a better way to understand our social world(s).
In this course, there are a number of things I hope to learn more about. I delayed posting my introductory message a while so that I could put together a pretty long list of these topics, as follows:
1. I see online that a course in Comparative Economic Systems used to focus mainly on the contrast between “Western” market-based economies and “Eastern” Soviet-bloc command economies. I definitely want to know this core traditional material – at least the key concepts, in overview….
2. As an older student who still has clear memories of the Cold War, and remembers Bill Clinton’s intriguing idea about how the end of the Cold War should be able to bring about a “peace dividend” (in which less of the country’s spending needs to go toward the military while more can stay either in more profitable private sectors or in constructive social programs, infrastructure maintenance and improvement, etc.), I would like to learn more about whether this concept of a “peace dividend” has empirical support, and perhaps helps to explain the relatively decent state of the U.S. economy during the “Clinton boom years” (even though their extent and significance can easily be exaggerated).
3. I am interested in learning about any methodological techniques available specifically (i.e. customized) to do research in comparative economics. What are the handiest (and most valid or empirically verifiable) ways to “classify” different economies, which then allow for the most salient structural comparisons around the world and over time? Does it still make sense to think predominantly in terms of “economies” (at a national level), or do globalization trends mean that comparative economics has become more like an exercise in (geographic) location theory or comparative economic policy (i.e. a subfield of comparative politics)? Except for insular exceptions like North Korea, is “the economy” of all states still independent enough for old comparative concepts to retain their value, or is cross-national or transnational interdependence now at a level that requires a new approach, or a new paradigm?
4. What are the economic impacts of warfare? I suppose this is related to my question about the “peace dividend,” but although that was coming out of a Cold War context in which military budgets were a predominant concern, I’m also interested in the direct impacts of warfare upon a state’s economy. For example, how to examine the actual impact of WWI and the subsequent Versailles Treaty upon Germany, which was so important in the rise of the Nazi movement and Hitler’s ability to become dictator. What about the impacts of Nazi occupation upon countries like France and Poland and Yugoslavia? What about the economic impacts of the war upon the United Kingdom and the United States, the USSR, and Germany itself? Can we measure tangible economic benefits to Sweden and Switzerland for remaining neutral during the war? One of the key questions that puzzles me is how various states that were devastated by war can still remain the wealthiest countries in the world – either the extent of devastation was exaggerated, or the economic capacity is far more rooted in the culture, organization, human capital, and trade/network relations of a country and its people rather than in mere physical “things” like factories, infrastructure, and even agricultural capacity. How do some of these devastated countries recover so quickly from scorched Earth policies, military occupation, and genocidal war atrocities?
5. I am also wondering about a variation on the previous topic: Why do we hear so much talk about “economic crises” and “collapsing economies” and yet we barely see any dent in the GDP of so many of these places. For example, Greece has been facing real challenges, but how much of these are truly economic, and how many are “merely” political? When I look for a substantial fall in Greece’s annual GDP figures, I don’t really see that much of one, and I assume a place like Greece would report its information pretty accurately, due to massive EU interest and oversight. By contrast, for places like Venezuela, I keep hearing lots of rhetoric about their supposed economic collapse, without seeing any of it reflected in their production figures. Does collapse “merely” mean a political budget crisis, or the activation of some IMF penalty, or a period of hyperinflation that somehow doesn’t affect GDP much (when expressed in constant dollars)? I would like to make sense of these claims. (On a different note, I already tend to wave away the left-wing rhetoric which pervasively refers to economic crises in a Marxian sense – to me, the ordinary business cycle should not be called a crisis. And yet there are some interesting questions still about how bad things might get, should the 2007-2008 collapse not have halted but continued to have cascaded into another Great Depression. I have become increasingly skeptical about the very notion of “long-wave” cycles, as well, but am still interested in what others might have to say about these key topics of concern from the left.) I suppose some of these ideas of crisis may be a perspective from the right, since they are often applied to states like Venezuela whose governments are being criticized for their economic tampering. It’s something I feel like I need to learn a lot more about, because in many ways these questions are vital to macrosociological (and geopolitical and macroeconomic) questions, concerns and theories.
6. I am extremely interested in historically comparative approaches. In recent years (thanks to the obituary page in The Economist for telling me about this researcher) I have learned about the work of Angus Maddison to estimate and track development trends throughout history, in today’s quantitative economic terms such as per capita GDP. I bought the most recent book of his I could find, and am wondering whether it would be appropriate to use as my key book for the final project in this course: https://www.amazon.com/Contours-World-Economy-1-2030-Macro-Economic/dp/0199227209/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
But more generally, I would want to understand the fundamentals of economics in “pre-capitalist” states and empires. How can we analyze and understand the economies of ancient agricultural kingdoms, or the classical empires which included slave classes? Do we have a concise economic description of the differences between medieval European states and modern ones? Do we have a good economic model of how mercantilism operated? I also want to learn more about capitalisms, plural. In sociology, I often hear people eager to blame practically every social problem on “capitalism,” but it took me a while to realize that most economists themselves don’t seem to be using that term, “capitalism.” It seems that the systemic concept which so many sociologists want to take for granted as a fundamental social construction is itself historically a critically charged, loaded term, usually taking much more for granted when used than it actually explains. Surely “capitalism” in the late 1800s, when the world was dominated by explicitly colonial powers, doesn’t function in the same way as “capitalism” today, no matter how much question-begging takes place through the use of such frameworks as “neocolonialism,” “dependency theory,” “world-systems theory,” etc. Most of those politically charged critical frameworks never seem to emphasize the important problems that (a) most of their comparisons are between current actual systems and some abstracted hypothetical utopian system, in comparison with which any reality will always be considered faulty, and that (b) the costs of changing the system may be very much higher than the costs of tolerating the system’s current inequalities and imperfections (indeed, as our Declaration of Independence might have called them, “sufferable” evils which may nevertheless be “tolerable”). All of these things are pressing, vital, urgent questions for me. Comparisons are vital to social science, and so we need a defensible, grounded method for making such comparisons, and valid comparisons might have to entail a “web” of interrelated phenomena, events, and institutions, such that comparative economics is not neatly separable from comparative politics or comparative cultures. And to me, comparisons necessarily must include historical comparisons, not just geographical comparisons at a single moment in time. To my knowledge, most economists don’t have any use for notions such as “neo-colonialism,” and I suspect that the reason is deeper than merely the limits of their training or an unflinching ideological dedication to capitalism. If we have a way to economically model or at least clearly describe the explicitly colonial systems of the past, then clear distinctions can be made between those past conditions and the current era. In the process, various politically charged rhetoric can be better assessed for its kernels of truth (the similarities between both systems which could cause both of them to be termed as “colonial”) as well as its shortcomings (e.g. would South America have been any better off if completely colonized by the Incan Empire rather than by the Spanish? Is today’s “slavery” any worse than the slavery of the past? Is the “oppression” of capitalism or “American global hegemony” really worth overthrowing at the cost of massive warfare and anarchy, with no specific real-world alternatives which are known to be better? [look at the results of the “Arab Spring”])
7. It feels vital to me to have a better understanding of corruption. Also of underground economies and illegitimate sectors involving drugs, prostitution, etc. which supposedly have a lot of money flowing through them, especially since their importance varies geographically. Do these sectors mean that high-crime inner-city neighborhoods are actually wealthier than the official statistics otherwise show? Are less-developed countries which have large amounts of drug production actually much wealthier than their official statistics claim? Similarly, an ability to understand and measure (or compare) informal economies would seem to be vital for understanding pre-modern societies and eras, in addition to its current relevance for various less-developed states today. Getting back to my original topic, corruption is apparently a vital component to define “crony capitalism” (or to distinguish it from other forms of capitalism). So an understanding of the economic nature and impacts of corruption, not just its political nature, seems important, and tied with illegitimate enterprises and economic sectors that are especially important to some of the most problematic countries today (e.g. nuclear proliferation in the middle east, global terrorist networks, support between “rogue states” such as North Korea and these others. Immanual Wallerstein’s “world system” framework offers a crude but highly general concept of “anti-systemic movements,” but the term is one that can accommodate so much that is isn’t especially useful – an “if it’s everything then perhaps it’s nothing” quality that I have found in multiple key concepts [e.g. “hegemony,” below] from left-wing theory that I’d like to find more grounded and defensible and precise theoretical substitutes for).
8. I’d like a better understanding of the term “political economy.” My impression is that originally it might have just been a distinction of scale, referring to government and state-level phenomena (i.e. “political”) as distinct from household-level production (“domestic economy?”). But that it also became a buzzword among contemporary leftist theorists, not just as a way of reminding people that politics and economics mutually shape each other, but seeming more in the vein of the usual “power elite” theories in which we are supposed to automatically rail against the very existence of powerful players who are both rich and influential, even if and when a politico-economic system such as ours is working comparatively well. Some claim that it only appears to work well in the rich countries, because we’re geographically segregated from the exploited masses of the truly poor, but the economic figures I’ve found and analyzed provide evidence against this claim. Therefore I need to learn more about alternative macro-level theories which better fit the data. Even the crude modernization theory (i.e. Rostow’s airplane analogy) seems to fit the data of recent decades better than the elaborate Marxian theories I’ve seen (and named above). This topic also ties in with a need to understand “crises” and the economics of past systems (slave-based, empires, colonial systems), and with the next topic…
9. I’m always interested in any considerations regarding economic development, as this is obviously tied into several of my previous topics (and relates to other types of development: technological, organizational, political, cultural [i.e. accumulated knowledge, human capital, improvements in education, health, etc.; sometimes termed as “human development”]).
10. Understanding contemporary states and the contemporary world necessarily means an understanding of the connective networks between state (or smaller-scale) “economies,” so in connection with my previous point about globalization and interdependence, the more information you can include in this course about international economics, international trade, international finance, etc. the better! 🙂 (Substitute transnational for international within these terms, wherever appropriate.)
11. I took one high-level course in environmental economics during the 1990s, but today with the much better knowledge available about the state of global climate change, it would seem appropriate for people to begin adding something that might be called “geoenvironmental economics” into the curriculum. If we are able to start accurately valuing the full costs of various types of energy, food, etc. then I think this would be the likeliest way to achieve real changes in controlling the amount of “carbon output” (i.e. greenhouse gas emissions, etc.) into the ecosphere. To the extent that comparative economics overlaps with global economics (or globalization economics, or international economics), I believe that some consideration needs to be included in those subfields to the evident physical limits we are facing (unless some rapid technological innovations or “miracles” provide us with an as-yet unavailable “quick fix” to restore the carbon balance to a more secure state. It’s a complicated topic that goes into geology, climatology, etc. – so I’ll limit the amount of detail I include in this initial post. Please inquire if you want me to elaborate on any specific subtopic here.)
12. What are the limits found in the economic data that we have available to make comparisons? This relates back to my earlier references to economic “crises” that barely show up in GDP figures. If we can’t fully trust the macroeconomic data from Venezuela, China, etc. then do we have ways to “adjust” their official figures to correct them? If so, how? This also connects with my interest in Angus Maddison – I haven’t yet had a chance to read any of his stuff, so I’m wondering *how* (i.e. by what methods) he went about estimating comparative *historical* data across so many centuries. Did he do a good job? Did others do a better job? Or is the entire notion of estimating and comparing a few summary statistics (such as PCGDP) fundamentally flawed? This also ties in with my interest in development – I’ve taken courses in development from the perspectives of sociology/anthropology and geography (Peter Dicken’s “Global Shift” is, so far, one of my favorite sources on the topic, despite some errors or shortcomings present within its details) and , to a lesser extent, political science, but I really need to learn more about the *economics* of development. I have some upper-level textbooks on the subject, but need more familiarity with background prerequisites (such as comparative economic systems and intermediate micro- and macro-) before I can tackle those texts comfortably.
13. Since I’ve already been exposed to a ton of “critical perspectives” because of my background in sociology, I am extremely interested in any and all defensible perspectives that are not specifically “critical.” For example (from a sociological perspective), Max Weber accepted the reality of numerous types of conflict, but didn’t get all caught up in political activism like Marx had. Marx is therefore termed a “critical-conflict” theorist while Weber is termed an “uncritical-conflict” theorist. My problem isn’t stemming from an idea that conflict is too uncomfortable to consider, or some notion that the world or the U.S. is perfect as it is (which would be an “uncritical order” perspective which sounds too simplistic to be defensible) – my concern is being as scientifically grounded and defensible in my understanding as possible – a goal that leads me more to accept and make use of positions such as “no, the United States isn’t perfect, but then nothing is, and if we compare it to all other states around the world and over time, it has a number of good points that need to be recognized, despite the fact that we can easily find some sort of fault with any social reality that actually exists.” In this general terminology, I am following a framework presented by Harold Kerbo to describe general theoretical models of socioeconomic stratification, as in https://www.amazon.com/Social-Stratification-Inequality-Harold-Kerbo/dp/007811165X : I think this text is quite good even though he claims to favor conflict theories – the devil is always in the details, as they say! 🙂 )
14. Finally, with respect to the idea of hegemony within a global order, I am interested in exploring the very question of hegemony. I don’t claim that the idea of hegemony is useless, although I do think that it’s been overstated to the point of absurdity by some leftists who keep extending the ideas of the Frankfurt school far beyond what I consider defensible. Rather, I have been toying with the idea that, okay, each region throughout history has tended to have one or more dominant players, and in a now-global framework, we see the same thing writ large, and that while Britain seemed to previously have the predominant role (i.e. particularly during the era of naked colonialism just over a century ago), and then there were challengers and the U.S.-USSR dominated the Cold War era and then gave way to US dominance, the question must be raised – is this “hegemony” really as bad as various leftists try to claim? Some persons seem not to recognize that natural hierarchies are probably inevitable (e.g. as described by Robert Michels’ “Iron Law of Oligarchy”), and if there is something unwelcome or “evil” about U.S. hegemony, what realistic alternative hegemon would do a better job? China? I don’t think so! Not until they can get their own internal system into better shape. Why should the U.S. give up its hegemonic position, as various leftist critics around the world seem to suggest? History suggests to me instead that as long as it does a relatively good job in its role at the top of the global economic and power hierarchy then it should stay there (indeed, one could argue *has* stayed there) precisely because the status quo is almost certainly better than any viable alternatives which are currently available (except probably that of incremental progressivism of some type). The United States has shown a capacity to adapt economically and politically and culturally to various challenges, and if it (or its economic elites) happens to benefit a bit disproportionately from its substantial expenditures (e.g. military, monetary) then isn’t that benefit just its rightful due for the valuable role it plays? I state it this way because I think it’s an extremely important topic that needs to be better explored and debated, rather than because I believe that this is a set of completely “objective” scientifically “proven” statements. (After all, some groups in the world will doubtlessly be left out of any remote changes of power “at the top.”) I think that the very idea of hegemony is a vital question for comparative social science, and that the question deserves better than just the critical, hand-wringing treatment that it tends to receive from the left. (Even though there is a kernel of truth underlying leftist criticisms that must never be completely ignored or discounted.)
And there we are: I’ve laid out my dream agenda (one topic per week) somehow to be covered in the remaining weeks of our semester! 🙂 🙂 🙂
Mike
