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?

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

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

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

New Evidence on Allyn Young’s Style and Influence as a Teacher

This paper publishes the hitherto unpublished correspondence between Allyn Abbott Young’s biographer Charles Blitch and 17 of Young’s former students or associates. Together with related biographical and archival material, the paper shows the way in which this adds to our knowledge of Young’s considerable influence as a teacher upon some of the twentieth century’s greatest economists. The correspondents are as follows: James W Angell, Colin Clark, Arthur H Cole, Lauchlin Currie, Melvin G de Chazeau, Eleanor Lansing Dulles, Howard S Ellis, Frank W Fetter, Earl J Hamilton, Seymour S Harris, Richard S Howey, Nicholas Kaldor, Melvin M Knight, Bertil Ohlin, Geoffrey Shepherd, Overton H Taylor, and Gilbert Walker.Allyn Young, Harvard University, London School of Economics

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.

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 structural changes 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 in a 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 why and how housing and exports can be given special protection to accelerate development.

Introduction: Sex and the (Motor) City: Ecologies of Middlesex

This special cluster consists of twelve short essays, originally presented in two linked roundtables at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) conference in Detroit in June 2017, examining Jeffrey Eugenides\u27 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex. Through the novel, these papers explore the historical, intersectional, and ecological understandings of Detroit, exposing an exceptional—indeed, epic—range of social ecologies, concerned with everything from intersex and multispecies bio/geopolitics to transnational economies, to the aesthetics of architecture and decay. Focused on a very particular novel, written about a very particular city and experience of it, these papers bring to light and develop an ecocritical trajectory that collects voices and perspectives not always already familiar to the environmental humanities, and also deepens or extends already ongoing discussions within the field. The cluster thus assembles people and perspectives from multiple institutions, countries, educations, and standpoints within the environmental humanities, in an attempt to both complicate and explore the desire for resilience in, as highlighted in the ASLE conference theme, a “rusted” economy