Hiding the Rentier Elephant in Plain Sight: The Epistemology of Vanishing Rent

Economic rent is defined as excessive financial returns made possible by control or monopoly over a particular market. A minority of economists suggest that we live in an era of “rentier capitalism” characterized by exploitative extreme wealth. Their arguments are framed in new and powerful ways, but their focus has a long heritage, flowing back to classical economists such as Adam Smith who criticized the wealthy for reaping “where they never sowed.” While interest in rentierism is growing, other economists, including on the left, disagree that rentier gains underpin most extreme fortunes today. I introduce the concept of “ignorance pathways” to raise new points about the perceptual divide between those who “see” rent and those who do not. Mapping different ignorance pathways within modern economic thought, I theorize the reasons for why rentier returns remain “unseen”. Terminology is policy: it is harder to make a policy case for redistributing rentier returns when the contentious object of scrutiny — in this case “rent” — is believed to be something that does not exist

Philanthrocapitalism and the Separation of Powers

This article discusses the rise of an approach to philanthropic giving known as philanthrocapitalism. I relate it to a new paradigm in management theory that has claimed that private profit making naturally aligns with improved public welfare. I show how growing belief in the inherent “compatibility” of corporate missions and public benefits has led to new laws and contributed to major shifts in how giving practices are structured and legitimated. The original point made in this article is that the philanthrocapitalist turn is more than simply an organizational change in the structure of different philanthropic institutions. Rather, the belief that profit-making and public welfare are naturally aligned also has significant, undertheorized implications for different principles in European-American legal traditions. The ascendancy of the philanthrocapitalist approach represents a subtle but profound displacement of belief in the need for democratic checks and balances on the use of public funds for private enrichment

The value of ignorance: Antidepressant drugs and the policies of objectivity in medicine.

This thesis explores the strategies of ignorance and uncertainty employed by UK regulators, practitioners and policymakers during the controversy over whether selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants such as Prozac contribute to suicidal and homicidal reactions in some users. Empirically, the thesis is based on archival research, textual analysis, and interviews with UK policymakers and clinicians involved with efforts to determine the safety of SSRIs. By analyzing these materials with methodological and conceptual tools from the fields of science studies and the sociology of reason and objectivity, the thesis demonstrates the following four findings. First, drawing on the case of SSRIs, I demonstrate that many policymakers within the UK's National Health Service are frustrated with their inability to access clinical trial data necessary for developing treatment guidelines. Second, I argue that problems surrounding access to clinical trial data illustrate weaknesses within evidence-based medicine, a model of medicine that has become dominant in the UK and internationally over the past three decades. Third, I argue that when practitioners and policymakers wish to criticize the socio-political factors that make it difficult to access clinical trial data, their dissent must be limited to the universe of numbers, a phenomena which I term the "moral authority of objectivity" in medicine. Fourth, drawing on interviews with expert advisors to the MHRA, I argue that, in the case of SSRIs, regulators employed a strategic use of ignorance in order to absolve themselves of liability in not disclosing the knowledge of adverse effects when they first learned of them. This final finding has theoretical implications for recent studies of uncertainty and ignorance. I suggest that the SSRI controversy illuminates the regulatory value of inconsistent, uncertain and contradictory facts. The usefulness of uncertainty lies in its performative nature: uncertainty creates a demand for solutions to the ambiguity which it perpetuates, often consolidating the authority of those who have advanced a position of uncertainty to begin with

Liberal fatalism, Covid-19 and the politics of impossibility

How liberal governments manage knowledge, ignorance, prediction, and uncertainty has attracted increased attention across the social sciences. In this article, we analyse the strategy and rhetoric of the UK Government during the Covid-19 pandemic, with particular attention to the first half of 2020. We see the initial UK policy response – as well as its later legitimation – as a form of ‘politics of impossibility’, effecting political change through claims of incapacity or impotence. We argue this approach departs from the uses of knowledge and ignorance in both classical liberalism and neoliberalism, and suggests the emergence of a new, hybrid form of governance which can be dubbed liberal fatalism. We discuss the relevance of this new form of governance for political futures of an increasingly volatile world

Charismatic violence and the sanctification of the super-rich

Drawing historical comparisons between the 19th century and the present, this article describes and analyses how an elite section of the global rich, through mega-giving and a reemerging notion of ‘noblesse oblige’ that is enshrined in the philanthrocapitalism movement, have fostered a sacred rationale for their extreme wealth. Not only do the new nobles hold the power of wealth but, through mega-giving, they generate a moral imagery akin to religious figures who ostensibly self-sacrifice for the good of everyone else. This generates a form of charismatic authority that affords the super-rich an influential space from which to spread a ‘theodicy of privilege’ – legitimating their elevated economic position, shielding growing wealth concentration from criticism, and sanctifying the claim that individual mega-wealth is collectively beneficial. Through its contribution to and facilitation of the inegalitarian status quo, this theodicy engenders various forms of structural violence. Here we explore the mechanisms that enable wealthy donors to position themselves as apparent benefactors of humanity, including a reliance on metrics that appear to justify the claim that targeted philanthropic expenditures can and are reducing global wealth and health inequalities, but which raise unanswered questions surrounding the actual effects of the outcomes claimed

Experimental failure: Notes on the limits of the performativity of markets

In a context of proliferating crises, from the environment to the economy, the politics and epistemology of “failure” – institutional, human, technological, environmental – is acquiring fresh relevance. Recent analyses in social studies of science and technology, as well as in political and economic sociology, have developed performative perspectives on this issue, and much of this work has focused on ‘market experiments.’ In this article, we suggest that these performative perspectives on market experiments suffer from some of the same shortcomings as market experiments themselves: they are biased towards success, and limited in their ability to acknowledge failure. Here, we seek to address this shortcoming by developing a three-fold typology. Adopting an expansive notion of experiments in political economy, we argue that an adequate analysis requires further interrogation of the multifaceted nature of experimental failure, in particular of its alternatively restrictive and generative aspects. In order to explore the diverse, overlapping, and often paradoxical effects of experimental failures – such as the way that failures can both create and diminish opportunities to challenge the authority of existent political and economic frameworks – we distinguish three types of failure: 1) entropic failure; 2) generative failure; and 3) performative failure

Philanthrocapitalism and crimes of the powerful [Le philanthrocapitalisme et les « crimes des dominants »]

Over the past decade, a new generation of philanthropic donors have taken to labelling their corporate practices ‘philanthropic’ even when their investments are for-profit in nature and explicitly bring direct financial benefits to donors – often at the expense of the recipients of philanthropic ‘gifts.’ Novel philanthropic trends subsumed under the term ‘philanthrocapitalism’ have led to calls for an end to the for-profit versus non-profit distinction when it comes to giving practices, insisting that money directed at for-profit recipients can be more ‘effective’ than grants to traditional, non-profit bodies. Today’s philanthrocapitalists sometimes cite Adam Smith’s discussion of the ‘invisible hand’ to defend their approach to charitable giving. But they deliberately ignore Smith’s writing on state’s vital role in distributing wealth and regulating criminal activity, as well as his views on why economic inequality is harmful for nations. Drawing parallels to work in criminology on ‘crimes of the powerful,’ we explore, firstly, how today’s wealth elites profit personally from a reconfiguration of the long-standing distinction between for-profit and non-profit grant recipients. Secondly, we draw on concepts from ignorance studies in order to theorize how and why elite actors whose actions often harm the general public have managed to successfully uphold self-serving strategies as publicly beneficial

Profitable failure: antidepressant drugs and the triumph of flawed experiments

Drawing on an analysis of Irving Kirsch and colleagues? controversial 2008 article in PLoS [Public Library of Science] Medicine on the efficacy of SSRI antidepressant drugs such as Prozac, I examine flaws within the methodologies of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that have made it difficult for regulators, clinicians and patients to determine the therapeutic value of this class of drug. I then argue, drawing analogies to work by Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Power, that it is the very limitations of RCTs ? their inadequacies in producing reliable evidence of clinical effects ? that help to strengthen assumptions of their superiority as methodological tools. Finally, I suggest that the case of RCTs helps to explore the question of why failure is often useful in consolidating the authority of those who have presided over that failure, and why systems widely recognized to be ineffective tend to assume greater authority at the very moment when people speak of their malfunction

The Elusive Rentier Rich: Piketty's Data Battles and the Power of Absent Evidence

The popularity of Thomas Piketty?s research on wealth inequality has drawn attention to a curious question: why was widening wealth inequality largely neglected by mainstream economists in recent decades? To explore and explain that neglect, I draw on the writing of the early neoclassical economist John Bates Clark, who introduced the notion of the marginal productivity of income distribution at the end of the nineteenth century. I then turn to Piketty?s Capital in order to analyze the salience of marginal productivity theories of income today. I suggest that most of the criticism and praise for Piketty?s research is focused on data that are accessible and measurable, obscuring attention to questions over whether current methods for measuring economic capital are defensible or not. My overarching aim is to explore how ?absent? data in economics as a whole help to reinforce blind spots within mainstream economic theory