Keith Hart on Sun, 20 Jan 2013 21:26:38 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Nobel laureate in economics aged 102 endorses the human economy approach |
Hi Brian, Oliver Williamson got a Nobel prize last year for his development of Coase's idea. This is that everything inside and outside the firm is up for grabs, especially the relationship between corporations and governments. The Fordist phase of internalizing transaction costs is over for a number of reasons, not least because the digital revolution has cheapened the cost of transferring information reliably. This does not mean the corporations have ceased to be large and powerful. Of the 100 largest economic entities on earth two-thirds are corporations and of those half are bigger than all but 8 countries. Moreover, I believe we are witnessing a drive for corporate home rule which would leave them the only citizens in a world society made to suit their interests. This is the logical conclusion of the collapse of the difference between real and artificial persons in law, since how could mere human beings compete with organizations of their size, wealth and longevity? The left has been effectively blindsided by this development because our models of what is happening are more rigid and old-fashioned. We talk about capital as if it is a static phenomenon that we know about better than the fat cats, whereas Coase/Williamson underpins a fast-moving evolution that we lack the intellectual equipment and experience to understand. Arrighi is still recycling Kondratiev cycles, again an essentially static vision of history that only looks backwards. To this extent, Coase at 102 is covering his bets by embracing a more humane economics. Ning Wang by the way came up through Human Development at the U of Chicago and is more likely to be the main author. Coase/Williamson provides the flexibility to imagine a world where companies control the marketing of their brand, outsource production, logistics and much else and internalize government. For example, the story goes, why rely on governments for conflict resolution? Corporations also have to handle conflict resolution. The discourse of Corporate Social Responsibility is a major field for negotiating changes in the relationship between firms and society. We all know about the privation of public servcies which is another side of that coin. This is a matter of deadly significance and we have to ask what kinds of political mobilization are capable of resisting it. The human economy idea may have its origins in small-scale informal activities and its ideology may be humanist, but effective resistance to a corporate takeover will require selective alliances between self-organized initiatives on the ground and large-scale bureaucracies of the public and private kind. For, as Camus told us in La Peste, the human predicament is impersonal, even anti-humanist in scope. So we have to build bridges between local subjectivities and world society as a whole. I share your fears, Brian. It really is a dangerous situation. I offered the Coase anecdote not as proof that our side is winning, but because it makes it easier to say that the search for alternatives has some prominent supporters inside the economics profession. Keith On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 6:55 PM, Brian Holmes < bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote: >> All of this is both fascinating and encouraging. -- Prof. Keith Hart www.thememorybank.co.uk 135 rue du Faubourg Poissonniere 75009 Paris, France Cell: +33684797365 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org