Macroeconomist Philip Pilkington examines the similarities between the economics of Brezhnev’s late-soviet economy and Biden’s version of the same downward spiral.
This makes a nice bookend to the outstanding article by Pilkington and Kyeyune in the current American Affairs, "Geening the Void: Climate Change and political Legitimacy," which takes a deeper dive into the devices by which the party-state uses fiscal policy to shore up its legitimacy. That legitimacy has become deeply entwined with green "energy Lysenkoism" (the term is Emmet Penney's), which might be viewed as the displacement of practical considerations (stuff like grid capacity) by a moral economy, the point of which is to draw a boundary between Party-allied actors and everyone else. Which then becomes the basis for extracting wealth from the real economy and transferring it to the Party. The Brezhnev-era USSR parallel runs quite deep. Kudos to Mr. Pilkington.
I was one of the first critics to use zombie to describe a deadened version of Modernism that appeared in the New York art scene around 2010. I linked it to the zombie economy. If I recall the economy was being juiced by zero interest rates. https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2013/12/zombie-artthe-lingering-life-of.html
It would be great if someone here at the Postliberal Order would respond/provide a critique of President Milei of Argentina’s speech at the WEF 2024, he actually raises some similar concerns but in a much more radical way.
Very interesting. I wonder how much $$$ flying around the private sector is spent on goods and services that used to be provided for free? Daycare was rare as recently as the 1980s , but nowadays almost everyone I know with kids is spending 2k per month per child. Uber is valued over 100 billion, but when I was in college, we just gave our friends rides. I’m no economist, but it seems that ‘industries’ such as these are fundamentally rent-seeking entities making hundreds of billions off what was once free.
This makes a nice bookend to the outstanding article by Pilkington and Kyeyune in the current American Affairs, "Geening the Void: Climate Change and political Legitimacy," which takes a deeper dive into the devices by which the party-state uses fiscal policy to shore up its legitimacy. That legitimacy has become deeply entwined with green "energy Lysenkoism" (the term is Emmet Penney's), which might be viewed as the displacement of practical considerations (stuff like grid capacity) by a moral economy, the point of which is to draw a boundary between Party-allied actors and everyone else. Which then becomes the basis for extracting wealth from the real economy and transferring it to the Party. The Brezhnev-era USSR parallel runs quite deep. Kudos to Mr. Pilkington.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/11/greening-the-void-climate-change-and-political-legitimacy/
I was one of the first critics to use zombie to describe a deadened version of Modernism that appeared in the New York art scene around 2010. I linked it to the zombie economy. If I recall the economy was being juiced by zero interest rates. https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2013/12/zombie-artthe-lingering-life-of.html
It would be great if someone here at the Postliberal Order would respond/provide a critique of President Milei of Argentina’s speech at the WEF 2024, he actually raises some similar concerns but in a much more radical way.
Very interesting. I wonder how much $$$ flying around the private sector is spent on goods and services that used to be provided for free? Daycare was rare as recently as the 1980s , but nowadays almost everyone I know with kids is spending 2k per month per child. Uber is valued over 100 billion, but when I was in college, we just gave our friends rides. I’m no economist, but it seems that ‘industries’ such as these are fundamentally rent-seeking entities making hundreds of billions off what was once free.
Photo captions?