Constant Capital and the Crisis in Contemporary Capitalism: Echoes from the Late Nineteenth Century

Because constant capital involves irreversible decisions, understanding this subject is essential for coming to grips with the complexity of the economy, especially crisis theory. This paper attempts to show how both Marx and late 19th century neoclassical economists in the United States realized that the relative growth of constant capital made competitive economies unsustainable.

La politique agricole et l’accumulation du capital : Le cas des États-Unis

Confronted with economic crisis, american agricultural policy since 1970 has been dominated by one priority : the solution of problems associated with other sectors, by saving public agricultural expenses as well as by using exports as a « food weapon ». But this policy does no more than shift the contradictions of american society : it doesn't stop the food/wage spiral and it re-activates the internal tensions of agricultural production. A longer term logic dominates this short term policy: to safeguard the functions of agriculture within the accumulation process. The study emphasizes the function of supplier of labor for other sectors of agriculture. It shows how the american food model, by consuming an irrational amount of ressources, ensures that the labor's supply grows more rapidly than its demande

Sofware Patents and the Information Economy

Modern economists universally acknowledge that information is an essential component of productivity. Moreover, as they begin to focus more and more on the nature of information, their conception of information widens considerably

Spatial coherence of forward-scattered light in a turbid medium

We study spatially coherent forward-scattered light propagating in a turbid medium of moderate optical depth (0-9 mean free paths). Coherent detection was achieved by using a tilted heterodyne geometry, which desensitizes coherent detection of the attenuated incident light. We show that the degree of spatial coherence is significantly higher for light scattered only once in comparison with that for multiply scattered light and that it approaches a small constant value for large numbers of scattering events

The Power of Economics vs the Economics of Power: Introduction

This article analyzes the systematic absence of power in economic analysis, beginning with early economist's almost universal denial of the process of primitive accumulation. Microeconomics also excludes considerations of power, except for what it considers to be abuse of power by government and labor unions. Monetary theory also avoids the application of Federal Reserve power to create unemployment in order to reduce wages. Businesses also employ power in competing with other businesses. Economists ignore such use of power, emphasizing the benign consequences of competition: lower prices, improved quality, and even entirely new products. Business wields power against workers, the power that might be limited by labor unions, which themselves are limited because of business' application of political power. Not only can business use monopolistic power in order to increase prices, as buyers, business can use monopsonistic power to reduce the prices it pays. Business can also apply power in order to hamper competitors. The final form of power is the power of economists to exclude power from their theory, except for the two exceptions mentioned

DECODING ECONOMIC IDEOLOGY

Economics derives its power from an illusion of scientific objectivity. From the very beginning of the discipline, economists have gone to great lengths to craft their work, excluding work, workers, and working conditions. Two particular episodes illustrate this failing. Adam Smith's story about the pin factory never mentioned that the pin manufacturers were working with the world's largest industrial operation in the world, located outside of Smith's little village and that the owners were close friends. The French documents, which he plagiarized, described pin makers' unhealthy working conditions. A much older steam-driven pin factory was famous. Finally, other than describing the division of labor work, workers, and working conditions mostly disappears from his work. After the Paris Commune, to respond to Marx, economists crafted marginalism, but, they opposed marginalism in their policy recommendations and organized the American Economic Association as a bulwark against marginalism. </p

The Anarchy of Globalization: Local and Global, Intended and Unintended Consequences

Globalization is full of contradictions, creating homogeneity alongside differentiation. Classes become more differentiated while products become more homogeneous. Globalization has stimulated growth in China, while it has contributed to dysfunctional financialization, which largely disregards the productive side of the economy. This article emphasizes globalization as a shift in power relations in which corporations require powers that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago, while government power is becoming restricted to the point that globalization is creating a form of unchecked corporate anarchy

THE ECONOMICS OF CRISIS AND THE CRISIS OF ECONOMICS AS SEEN FROM THE US EPICENTER

The intertwining of excessive financialization and extreme inequality was undermining the foundations of the US economy prior to the recent crisis. Mainstream economists were unable to recognize the symptoms. This failure was a repetition of economists' prior failures during earlier economic crises. In the midst of these crises, the reputation of economics suffers, but each subsequent recovery revives their reputations and their confidence in the market. The article concludes by showing how a defective conception of capital prevents a proper understanding of economic processes. </p

Multi-level automated sub-zoning of water distribution systems

Water distribution systems (WDS) are complex pipe networks with looped and branching topologies that often comprise of thousands of links and nodes. This work presents a generic framework for improved analysis and management of WDS by partitioning the system into smaller (almost) independent sub-systems with balanced loads and minimal number of interconnections. This paper compares the performance of three classes of unsupervised learning algorithms from graph theory for practical sub-zoning of WDS: (1) Graph clustering – a bottom-up algorithm for clustering n objects with respect to a similarity function, (2) Community structure – a bottom-up algorithm based on network modularity property, which is a measure of the quality of network partition to clusters versus randomly generated graph with respect to the same nodal degree, and (3) Graph partitioning – a flat partitioning algorithm for dividing a network with n nodes into k clusters, such that the total weight of edges crossing between clusters is minimized and the loads of all the clusters are balanced. The algorithms are adapted to WDS to provide a decision support tool for water utilities. The proposed methods are applied and results are demonstrated for a large-scale water distribution system serving heavily populated areas in Singapore