Joseph Eugene Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001), and is the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists") and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.From Truth Out:
Read More: HereThe Ideological Crisis of Western Capitalism
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Just a few years ago, a powerful ideology – the belief in free and unfettered markets – brought the world to the brink of ruin. Even in its hey-day, from the early 1980’s until 2007, American-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest in the richest country of the world. Indeed, over the course of this ideology’s 30-year ascendance, most Americans saw their incomes decline or stagnate year after year.
Moreover, output growth in the United States was not economically sustainable. With so much of US national income going to so few, growth could continue only through consumption financed by a mounting pile of debt. I was among those who hoped that, somehow, the financial crisis would teach Americans (and others) a lesson about the need for greater equality, stronger regulation, and a better balance between the market and government. Alas, that has not been the case. On the contrary, a resurgence of right-wing economics, driven, as always, by ideology and special interests, once again threatens the global economy – or at least the economies of Europe and America, where these ideas continue to flourish.
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always hard to say how much of behavior is driven by ideology, things tend to be much more complex/messy than that allows for. when it comes to ethics/politics I'm more interested in who is doing what to whom and how:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/440/game-changer
-dmf
@dmf - I get that, but I think it is also very important to know 'why' people are doing whatever to whomever. We need to learn about the stories people tell themselves and others - and perpetuated by institutions, magazines, TV, etc - when they act in the world. Our schemas, frames and ideological commitments guide our reasonings thus determining action and reaction.
I’m with Zizek (and Geertz and Marx and Foucult) on this one: without interrogating the webs of significance and symbolic ecologies within which we maneuver our ignorances will remain subconscious. Only be making our insanities/ideologies/beliefs explicit will we be able to affectively “tinker” with their/our character.
ps, this might be of interest:
http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/07/london-critical-theory-school-friday-debate-i/
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137789065/why-prosecutors-dont-go-after-wall-street
http://www.ted.com/talks/naomi_klein_addicted_to_risk.html
@Dirk - The why I'm looking for here would not be capitalized. In order to understand complex processes (assemblages) such as “politics” we need to respect the levels of organization. The “why” that interests me on the level of human decisions and ideology can be approached by investigating the stories people tell themselves. At the level of self-narrative we can discern value hierarchies, habitual schemas, capacities for reflexivity, ego-dramas, identity, interpersonal skills, etc that play into psychopolitical decision-making, belief and rhetoric at the level of individuals - but then extended to insights at the levels of families, communities, regions, and states. Lakoffesque frame analysis (cf. Goffman) is an important perspective in this sense, since there are always cognitive and linguistic biases at work in human social systems.
We may never know Why in a cosmic sense, although I argue there are immanent traces that disclose patterns of “meaning”, but there are local (such as person to person) causal factors that must be considered.
And I agree that psychological and cognitive factors are not exactly like gravity and computer codes but they re “forces” of nature nonetheless. We are relational self-organizing beings who don’t just abide the flow of causality but actively enter into it as well. In fact humans are causal assemblages (affective proceadures, processual units) in their own right filtering, refracting and redirecting causal forces according to our onto-specific constitutions. This is the core of OOO; all real entities are irreducible - they are particular causal agents.
And I do think we can “crack” or trace human structurality/developmental trajectories – at least partially. We can understand the complex material, formal and situational properties of assemblages enough to predict, or at least work with (accommodate, enhance, etc., etc,) them. We can partially plumb ‘the depths’, as it were, of our kludgey natures and individual manifestations.
But of course we are still more than this. Existenz can’t be tracked - and because we live in a fundamentally relational cosmos all certainties are conditional and truth-full only insofar as they generate affects, resistances and openings for practical life.
m, I'm not a metaphysician and so am also focused on the level of human-being-in-the-world, on what we do. When I talk to someone about an event, say a trauma but could be anything, over time they will focus on (probably even invent, memory/imagination being what it is) different aspects of the happening, and I don't take this as talk about what did happen but rather as their working through these aspects in a new context, new assemblages, and I'm attending to, even highlighting, what living possibilities might arise/be-devised.
People have many habits, including stock answers in response to certain questions, but these habits in toto aren't logically consistent/coherent (often are in conflict), and don't privileged/follow the linguistic/Language/spoken.
Certainly interacting with people in terms familiar to them will be more powerful/moving to them because of all of the associations they bring and language is relatively easy to manipulate vs many other relevant organizational factors but here a 'flat' ontology of happening/behaviors/apects is useful to keep perspective and as wittgenstein taught us to stick to descriptions and beware of being bewitched by, or subliming, language.
dmf
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/223851_2261783066799_1315121006_32757374_4078366_n.jpg
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/21/138537515/how-alec-shapes-state-politics-behind-the-scenes
David Foster Wallace on American values: http://ostap.livejournal.com/799511.html
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