Mulberiddlesex

Through a careful tracing of the botanical presence of mulberry trees in Middlesex, Sandilands argues for a reading practice that takes plants seriously. Thinking with plants interrupts the tendency to consider literary plants primarily as motifs, metaphors or agents of crude naturalization. Sandilands insists on involving plants in reading Middlesex in order to take the novel in less anthropocentric directions: even as Cal enlists mulberries to signal inevitability, their own stories overflow the novel’s deterministic views of race, species, territory, and gender identity

La politica urbana y el bienestar en el pensamiento económico de Lauchlin Currie (The Economic Thought of Lauchlin Currie)

The construction sector is an indispensable element in the labour mobility mechanism. This promotes not only faster growth but also better distribution. In Colombia there is still a great imbalance in the allocation of labour, notably between low-paying agriculture and high-paying urban activities. And in cities like Bogota there is urgent need for better balance between where people live and where they work, and for an improvement in the quality of the housing needed and/or demanded by all income groups. All this was covered by Currie in his work on 'taming the megalopolis' through the 'cities-within-cities' approach to urban planning, and in answering the question: 'For whom should houses be built?

China : the role of rural-urban migration in economic development under capitalism

Examining the problems for post-communist countries in the context of the European Union. This paper focuses on China and the role of rural-urban migration in economic development under capitalism. The economic relationships between the urban and rural areas of a less developed economy encompass the terms of trade between rural and urban products, the intersectoral transfer of labour, the relative wages of labour in the two sectors, the intersectoral transfer of saving, the relative sectoral returns to investment, the relative sectoral contributions to tax revenue and benefits from public expenditure, and the extent to which government policies favour one sector over the other. There are at least three theoretical frameworks for the analysis of these relationships: the Lewis model of eco­nomic growth with surplus rural labour, the 'coercive', or 'price-scissors', model of economic growth financed by extracting a rural surplus, and the notion that economic policy is subject to 'urban bias'

Allyn Abbott Young (1876-1929)

The Biographical Dictionary of American Economists covers American and Canadian economists and writers/thinkers with views on economics from the pre-Revolutionary period to the 1950s. All the major schools of American economic thought are represented, ranging from the Constitutional school to the Keynesian and the Chicago School. A significant number of the subjects are female, including figures such as Anna Schwartz, Mabel Timlin, Mabel Newcomer, Margaret Gilpin Reid, Rose Friedman and Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter, highlighting the role that women have played in the development of American economic thought. More generally, the dictionary includes many minor but important figures who have contributed to that development; this chapter focuses on the work of Allyn Abbott Young. His best-known single paper was his presidential address to the British Association in September 1928 on "Increasing returns and economic progress"

Lauchlin Currie (1902-1993)

Biography of the economist Lauchlin Currie. At Harvard in the early 1930s Currie pioneered a monetary diagnosis of the 1929-32 collapse and placed blame on the Federal Reserve Board. As a prominent New Dealer at the Fed during 1934-9 he urged contra-cyclical monetary and fiscal activism. During 1939-45 he worked in Washington as President Roosevelt's economic adviser. After heading a World Bank mission to Colombia in 1949 he spent 40 years advising on national development there. He emphasized urban housing as a leading sector, based on an innovative housing finance system, and extended Allyn Young's ideas on macroeconomic increasing returns and endogenous growth

Combustion

Match, wood, flame. Pyrocultures, settler colonial pyrophobia. Internal combustion. Wildfire. Petrocapitalist immolation. This short photo essay reflects on fire as simultaneously a sensuous phenomenon of everyday life and an entity that, because of both its presence and its absence in particular formations, makes worlds. To be aware, both corporeally and politically, of our involvement in pyric practices and regimes allows us to begin to imagine what it might mean to understand and change our relations to fire as part of a larger project of energetic transformation: bodily, socially, politically

Solovian and New Growth Theory from the Perspective of Allyn Young on Macroeconomic Increasing Returns

This paper evaluates, from an Allyn Youngian perspective, the neoclassical Solow model of growth and the associated empirical estimates of the sources of growth based on it. It attempts to clarify Young’s particular concept of generalised or macroeconomic “increasing returns” to show the limitations of a model of growth based on an assumption that the aggregate production function is characterised by constant returns to scale but “augmented” by exogenous technical progress. Young’s concept of endogenous, self-sustaining growth is also shown to differ in important respects (including in its policy implications) from modern endogenous growth theory.Solow model; aggregate production function; Allyn Young; endogenous growth theory; macroeconomic increasing returns.

How to motivate faster growth in Colombia : the leading sector strategy revisited

This paper reproduces two public lectures given at an Incolda conference in Bogota, October 1, 2002 on La Realidad de la Economía Colombiana. It reviews the great structuralchanges in output and employment over recent decades and how macroeconomic policies can strengthen or weaken the natural forces underlying these changes. It distinguishes between potentially inflationary policies designed to increase demand ina monetary sense, and those that focus on institutional changes that enhance competition and mobility. It explains how inflation distorts the allocation of resources, and why it especially harms long-term housing finance and exports. It explains the logic of Lauchlin Currie's leading sector theory of growth and shows whyand how housing and exports can be given special protection to accelerate development

Social Housing Policies in Latin America and Singapore: Lessons for China

This paper addresses the challenges facing China in accelerating the pace of rural-urban migration as part of its on-going economic development programme. It explains the push and pull influences on migration and in particular explains why a continuing focus on urbanisation is justified by the very large gap between rural and urban incomes and the relatively higher income elasticity of demand for urban-based goods and services. The provision of affordable housing is an integral part of this structural shift programme. The paper thus considers the most appropriate ways in which housing finance can be mobilised, and thence how both the quality and the affordability of the housing stock can be increased. Positive and negative lessons for China are offered from the different urbanisation experiences of Latin America (especially Colombia) and Singapore.China, Colombia, Singapore, rural-urban migration, housing finance

An Archival Case Study: Revisiting The Life and Political Economy of Lauchlin Currie

This paper forms part of a wider project to show the significance of archival material on distinguished economists, in this case Lauchlin Currie (1902-93), who studied and taught at Harvard before entering government service at the US Treasury and Federal Reserve Board as the intellectual leader of Roosevelt’s New Deal, 1934-39, as FDR’s White House economic adviser in peace and war, 1939-45, and as a post-war development economist. It discusses the uses made of the written and oral material available when the author was writing his intellectual biography of Currie (Duke University Press 1990) while Currie was still alive, and the significance of the material that has come to light after Currie’s death.Lauchlin Currie; economic biography; the New Deal; macroeconomic policy; development economics.