Re: <nettime> Nobel laureate in economics aged 102 endorses the human economy...

[Newmedia@aol.com]

Brian:
 
> Well, in the US from about 1980 onward, the information
> age  offered a very high return on private finance and a steady
> stream of  purchasers for govt bonds.
 
Of course it did!  Finance is, after all, just "pushing paper" around  
(i.e. decidedly "post-industrial") and selling those bonds was the necessary  
corollary to Wal-Mart becoming the FRIENDSHIP store for Chinese  
industrialization -- given that the US economy had shifted from production to  
consumption by this time.
 
Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher had very little to do with any of this -- but, 
 if you must "overlay" reality with *ideological* triggers like this, go 
right  ahead! <g>
 
I have no interest in "dis-entangling" the technology from the  
political-science but I do have an interest in avoiding CONSPIRACY theories that  put 
decisions in the hands of people who didn't make them and attributing  
"plans" to people who didn't have them.  
 
Alas, the only way to avoid that sort of thinking, other than an  
over-abundance of caution, seems to be actually know (some of) the people  involved.  
And my 20+ year career on Wall Street gave me the opportunity to  meet many 
of them.  For better-and-worse, I don't have to imagine how Bill  Gates or 
George Soros thinks.
 
> In addition to the technological innovation school of 
> Freeman, Louca, Perez, etc I would suggest you look into
> the "Social Structures of Accumulation" theorists who 
> provide exactly what Perez calls for but does not produce, 
> namely an understanding of the institutional frameworks in 
> which the long waves of technological development unfold.
 
>From what I can tell, the SSA folks have little to say about what  happened 
*institutionally* after the 1973 inflection -- which, as you know, was  
roughly the beginning of the CURRENT *digital* techno-economic paradigm.  
 
The founding work seems to have been published in 1978 (i.e. too early) and 
 it doesn't seem to comprehend how things like the Trilateral Commission 
were an  expression of elite power *weakness* not strength.
 
While Victor Lippitt tries to wrestle with some of this in his 2006 "Social 
 Structure of Accumulation Theory," he seems to trip over these problems 
and end  up with an "over-determined" and "anti-essentialist" conclusion.  
 
>From what I can tell, he's right -- even if he (and the others?) mistakenly 
 put the beginning of the "current" SSA around 1995 (an error that seems to 
 inflict many who try to piggyback on the Kondratiev Wave people, who, in  
turn, have little to do with Kondratiev) -- that this theory doesn't work 
very  well when there really aren't any NEW institutions involved.
 
_http://economics.ucr.edu/seminars/fall06/ped/VictorLippit10-20-06.pdf_ 
(http://economics.ucr.edu/seminars/fall06/ped/VictorLippit10-20-06.pdf) 
 
So, the "post-war" SSA "collapsed" in the 1970s but there were no *new*  
institutions?  HUH?  Same old "globalist" WTO and same old Federal  Reserve?
 
This strikes me as an example of what I was talking about -- putting  
IDEOLOGY ahead of *understanding* which leads to theories that don't make much  
sense.
 
Please show me that I'm wrong (really)!!
 
Mark Stahlman
Brooklyn NY


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