Inflection Point: Purpose :: by Dylan Riley
2021-02-01 :: If a podcast had a launch manifesto, this would be it...
2021-02-01 :: If a podcast had a launch manifesto, this would be it...
Inflection Point is a podcast about a very big question: What comes next?
As the name of the podcast would suggest, our show presupposes that we live in a time of transition. For decades, there was, roughly, a thing you could call a global economic order. During the Cold War, of course, there were, broadly speaking, two orders: the one aligned with Soviet-led communism, and the one aligned with U.S.-led capitalism. Back then, that form of capitalism was roughly comparable to today’s European social democratic capitalism: high taxes, a big welfare state, lots of regulation over corporations. Then, as the Cold War receded, that form of capitalism was dismantled and replaced with a rawer, purer kind — one that eschewed restrictions on corporate behavior and shrank the role of the state. Call it market fundamentalism, or neoliberalism.
Since the 2008 financial meltdown, however, neoliberalism has been in crisis. We’ve seen that in the discrediting of free trade as a bipartisan policy objective, in the rising opposition to Wall Street across the political spectrum, in the distrust of elites, in the ascent of Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right.
That doesn’t mean neoliberalism is gone for good, or even that it won’t be ascendant again. On the other hand, it might not. It could be replaced by a different economic order, or myriad economic orders, be they socialist upheavals or right wing ethno-nationalist regimes or something else entirely. That’s the question behind this podcast: what comes next?
What comes next?
For one, if we are to survive as a planet, we need to turn "carbon pricing" from a prompt for squabbles about "green washing" and into a technical term which some of us would describe a the natural numeraire in the carbon economy, that maximizes avoided CO2, minimizes atmospheric CO2.
THe problem for the student of political economy is to understand the incidence of the change in the dollar/TAC exchange rate from zero to infinite in nothing flat, and the various policy instruments (hello managed exchange rates!) to ease the transition.
Forests management (see the innovations in California, using the prototype of the North Yuba watershed, with both a Federal and a State carbon bank to finance the shift to TAC optimization) is one starting point.
Alas, being in California, in a benighted region infested with mountain folk who talk different, this innovation is studiously ignored by the University of California, which as an institution has not been happy with its experience with the cranky mountain folk.
Happily, the local freak with the most bodacious version of the CalArky dialect found the Etnnic Studies component of the ancient PEIS syllabus extremely useful for building an alliance among the local Indian entities and the loggers, to get work done in a way that works for everybody---and grows the expected value of the forests bank (in Tonnes Avoided CO2) in a most attractive and efficient fashion.
Frankly, you all should be having me back to Moses Hall to catch you up on some actual real political economy WORK.
We now have unionized loggers in the Northern Sierra, for the first time since the IWW heyday. IBEW this time. The Loyalton boys like Forests Union as a name, but then we always did like our acronyms. FU!
When is UCANR going to address its spectacular face-plant in Loyalton? Hmm? Need some more lessons in Practical Political Economy?
I got my bear-poking stick right here. Have a jab?
Why is Glenda Humiston still the University of California's Vice President of Natural Resources after calling the elected, appointed, and business elite of Sierra County "stupid.? Hmm?
Go Bears. Go on bear, Go. Git. (Slaps bear on nose, followed by a jab in the behind).
I learned bear jabbing as the first president of Berkeley's Political Economy Students Association, back before you were born, when I organized the frat boys and sorority sisters into a demonstration in Moses Hall, demanding equal rights for group major students to take Econ and PoliSci classes. Provost Park urged me to keep up the good work, that the University will screw up every time (my words!) without some jabbing.
I kind of want to apply the Tyson Critique (of worker-managed communism in Yugoslavia under Tito) to the University, but that might embearass [sic] my favorite teacher.
Good luck on the podcast. I read transcripts, but I do not like putting University content behind paywalls. Seems like some rent-grabbing to me.