114 research outputs found
Human rights and ethical reasoning : capabilities, conventions and spheres of public action
This interdisciplinary article argues that human rights must be understood in terms of opportunities for social participation and that social and economic rights are integral to any discussion of the subject. We offer both a social constructionist and a normative framework for a sociology of human rights which reaches beyond liberal individualism, combining insights from the work of Amartya Sen and from French convention theory. Following Sen, we argue that human rights are founded on the promotion of human capabilities as ethical demands shaped by public reasoning. Using French convention theory, we show how the terms of such deliberation are shaped by different constructions of collectively held values and the compromises reached between them. We conclude by demonstrating how our approach offers a new perspective on spheres of public action and the role these should play in promoting social cohesion, individual capabilities and human rights
Introduction to Eurocrisis, Neoliberalism and the Common
This introduction frames the articles collected in the special section as the outcome of a process of âself-educationâ taking place in the Italian free university network UniNomade 2.0 between 2010 and 2013. The open seminars and conferences orga- nized by UniNomade 2.0 took as their object of inquiry the concept of the Common, while the articles selected focus in particular on the sovereign debt crisis of the European Union (Eurocrisis) following the global financial crisis of 2008. The intro- duction thus summarizes the overall approach of contemporary âpost-operaistâ authors such as Toni Negri, Christian Marazzi, Maurizio Lazzarato, Andrea Fumagalli and Stefano Lucarelli, and Carlo Vercellone to the new role of financial capital, the transformation of money, the material constitution of Europe, the role played by the relationship between debtors and creditors, and the possibilities opened by the concept of Commonfare for struggles against austerity
Crises and collective socio-economic phenomena: simple models and challenges
Financial and economic history is strewn with bubbles and crashes, booms and
busts, crises and upheavals of all sorts. Understanding the origin of these
events is arguably one of the most important problems in economic theory. In
this paper, we review recent efforts to include heterogeneities and
interactions in models of decision. We argue that the Random Field Ising model
(RFIM) indeed provides a unifying framework to account for many collective
socio-economic phenomena that lead to sudden ruptures and crises. We discuss
different models that can capture potentially destabilising self-referential
feedback loops, induced either by herding, i.e. reference to peers, or
trending, i.e. reference to the past, and account for some of the phenomenology
missing in the standard models. We discuss some empirically testable
predictions of these models, for example robust signatures of RFIM-like herding
effects, or the logarithmic decay of spatial correlations of voting patterns.
One of the most striking result, inspired by statistical physics methods, is
that Adam Smith's invisible hand can badly fail at solving simple coordination
problems. We also insist on the issue of time-scales, that can be extremely
long in some cases, and prevent socially optimal equilibria to be reached. As a
theoretical challenge, the study of so-called "detailed-balance" violating
decision rules is needed to decide whether conclusions based on current models
(that all assume detailed-balance) are indeed robust and generic.Comment: Review paper accepted for a special issue of J Stat Phys; several
minor improvements along reviewers' comment
Social integration and system integration: Reconsidering the classical distinction
Accepted versio
Entanglement between Demand and Supply in Markets with Bandwagon Goods
Whenever customers' choices (e.g. to buy or not a given good) depend on
others choices (cases coined 'positive externalities' or 'bandwagon effect' in
the economic literature), the demand may be multiply valued: for a same posted
price, there is either a small number of buyers, or a large one -- in which
case one says that the customers coordinate. This leads to a dilemma for the
seller: should he sell at a high price, targeting a small number of buyers, or
at low price targeting a large number of buyers? In this paper we show that the
interaction between demand and supply is even more complex than expected,
leading to what we call the curse of coordination: the pricing strategy for the
seller which aimed at maximizing his profit corresponds to posting a price
which, not only assumes that the customers will coordinate, but also lies very
near the critical price value at which such high demand no more exists. This is
obtained by the detailed mathematical analysis of a particular model formally
related to the Random Field Ising Model and to a model introduced in social
sciences by T C Schelling in the 70's.Comment: Updated version, accepted for publication, Journal of Statistical
Physics, online Dec 201
A hierarquia monetĂĄria e suas implicaçÔes para as taxas de cĂąmbio e de juros e a polĂtica econĂŽmica dos paĂses perifĂ©ricos
DESENVOLVIMENTOECONĂMICO E POLĂTICA INDUSTRIAL E TECNOLĂGICA: A VISĂO DO PROFESSOR FABIO ERBER
How expectations became governable: institutional change and the performative power of central banks
Central banks have accumulated unparalleled power over the conduct of macroeconomic policy. Key for this development was the articulation and differentiation of monetary policy as a distinct policy domain. While political economists emphasize the foundational institutional changes that enabled this development, recent performativity-studies focus on central bankersâ invention of expectation management techniques. In line with a few other works, this article aims to bring these two aspects together. The key argument is that, over the last few decades, central banks have identified different strategies to assume authority over âexpectational politicsâ and reinforced dominant institutional forces within them. I introduce a comparative scheme to distinguish two different expectational governance regimes. My own empirical investigation focuses on a monetarist regime that emerged from corporatist contexts, where central banks enjoyed âembedded autonomyâ and where commercial banks maintained conservative reserve management routines. I further argue that innovations towards inflation targeting took place in countries with non-existent or disintegrating corporatist structures and where central banks turned to finance to establish a different version of expectation coordination. A widespread adoption of this âfinancializedâ expectational governance has been made possible by broader processes of institutional convergence that were supported by central bankers themselves
Is money a convention and/or a creature of the state? the convention of acceptability, the state, contracts, and taxes
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