The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. Joseph E. Stiglitz, 414 pages, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.I LOVE THESE GUYS''(Joseph Stiglitz) is an insanely great economist,'' so writes Paul R. Krugman, who should know. These two like to write books for the populace at large on the topic of macroeconomics. Krugman also likes to spout offon Sunday news shows like ''Meet the Press,'' and on all the cable news programs. You can see Krugman arguing with Bill O'Reilly on Meet the Press. From YouTube: ''Don't call me a liar, pal, that's what you do all the time,'' says O'Reilly; ''This is not your show, so you can't cut offmy mic,'' says Krugman. Judging by their expressions, I was glad Tim Russert (6- 3-) was there in the studio at the time to protect Krugman (5- 7-) (O'Reilly stands 6- 4-). Conservative pundits dislike both economists, but pretty much leave Stiglitz alone.Krugman makes it a point to stay out of government affairs. Stiglitz does just the opposite, and he sometimes gets burned. Stiglitz was part of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and was Chief Economist for the World Bank. After much criticism of the way the International Monetary Fund (IMF) conducted lending to developing countries, he was pretty much fired from the World Bank. Comparing the two, you would have to say that Stiglitz is more the bleeding heart, while Krugman says that what he dislikes most is the dishonesty he sees in political-economic discourse. Both are champions of the common man.Since Stiglitz can make the very valid claim for being ''an insanely great economist,'' most everything he says in his books should be taken seriously. There are some real gems in this book. I especially like the perspective he lends to some of the more peculiar things that happened before, during, and after the financial crisis. People hear about these things in the news from some announcer who makes them sound like just more news-bites, but they are, after all, unprecedented (and largely absurd). Take ''robo-signing'' for instance (page 198).WHAT GOES FOR NEWSRobo-signing was part of what happened during the foreclosure process after the massive numbers of defaults of subprime mortgages. Big banks intentionally did not follow mandated law. Apart from ignoring debtors' rights, an ensuing mess followed. Robo-signing was nothing less than a blatant attempt at rewriting property law, and resulted in lying to the courts about the state of each property's title, literally hundreds of times. No bank officer was charged with a crime. By contrast, the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s led to 829 individual convictions and 650 prison sentences. Nowadays the big banks just pay fines as part of settlements where they admit no guilt, and it's just part of doing business.Take algorithmic or ''flash'' trading in the stock exchanges (page 164). These are buys and sales made in nanoseconds on the basis of extracting information from the patterns of prices and trades. Nothing like real information gathered through market research on an industry, or on a firm in a certain industry, backs up these trades. But traders swear that ''price discovery'' is happening this way, and that all this backs up the efficient markets model. So on May 6, 2010 stock prices plummeted to a point where the Dow Jones temporarily lost 10% of its value. There are reasons to believe that these trades ''make markets not just more volatile but also less 'informative' '' (page 166). Still, the talk on the street is all about efficient markets (echoing Alan Greenspan's failures at the Federal Reserve).Take failed privatizations. When electric power in California was liberalized and Enron manipulated prices and public power to its advantage, this was a story about the company's accounting practices, not about privatizing something that had no business being privatized. …

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

Historians and social scientists analyzing the contemporary world unfortunately have too little contact and hence miss some of the ways that their interests overlap and the research of one field might benefit another. I am, therefore, extremely grateful that the Journal of Consumer Research has invited me to share with its readers an overview of my recent research on the political and social impact of the flourishing of mass consumption on twentieth-century America. What follows is a summary of my major arguments, enough to entice you, I hope, to read A Consumers' Republic (Cohen 2003), in which I elaborate on these themes. Although this essay is by necessity schematic, the book itself is filled with extensive historical evidence and is heavily illustrated with period images. In tracing the growing importance of mass consumption to the American economy, polity, culture, and social landscape from the 1920s to the present, I in many ways establish the historical context for your research into contemporary consumer behavior and markets. I hope you will …

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A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

Here is a short fragment of a new book that will be published in the summer 2003 with the title of: “The basics of the institutional dynamics: to the new sociology of markets”. The book will include a big theoretical part and the part devoted to empirical studies of the market that were held during the last two years. The provided text is the theoretical part of the book. The author analyzes the notion of competition and compares several basic approaches to its definition.

What is the Competition

The Limits of the Criminal Sanction

Surveys the history of the House of Representatives and describes its structure, current function, and influence on American society.

The House of Representatives

PART A INTRODUCTION 1. Criminalising Cartels: Why Critical Studies? Caron Beaton-Wells and Ariel Ezrachi PART B THE US EXPERIENCE WITH CRIMINAL CARTEL ENFORCEMENT 2. Punishment for Cartel Participants in the United States: A Special Model? Donald I Baker PART C EXPERIENCES OUTSIDE THE US WITH CRIMINAL CARTEL ENFORCEMENT 3. Redesigning a Criminal Cartel Regime: The Canadian Conversion D Martin Low and Casey Halladay 4. Competition Offences in Ireland: The Regime and Its Results Patrick Massey and John D Cooke 5. DOA: Can the UK Cartel Offence Be Resuscitated? Julian Joshua 6. What if All Bid Riggers Went to Prison and Nobody Noticed? Criminal Antitrust Law Enforcement in Germany Florian Wagner-von Papp 7. Cartel Criminalisation and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission: Opportunities and Challenges Caron Beaton-Wells PART D EU PERSPECTIVES ON CARTEL CRIMINALISATION 8. Criminalising Cartels in the European Union: Is There a Case for Harmonisation? Ingeborg Simonsson 9. Criminal Cartel Enforcement in the European Union: Avoiding a Human Rights Trade-Off Peter Whelan PART E TESTING ORTHODOX ASSUMPTIONS UNDERPINNING CARTEL CRIMINALISATION 10. Criminal Cartel Sanctions and Compliance: The Gap between Rhetoric and Reality Christine Parker 11. Am I a Price Fixer? A Behavioural Economics Analysis of Cartels Maurice E Stucke 12. Cartels in the Criminal Law Landscape Rebecca Williams 13. Cartel Offences and Non-Monetary Punishment: The Punitive Injunction as a Sanction against Corporations Brent Fisse PART F EXPLORING THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CARTEL CRIMINALISATION 14. Cartel Criminalisation as Juridification: Political and Regulatory Dangers Stephen Wilks 15. The Anti-Cartel Enforcement Industry: Criminological Perspectives on Cartel Criminalisation Christopher Harding 16. 'The Battle for Hearts and Minds': The Role of the Media in Treating Cartels as Criminal Andreas Stephan PART G FUTURE CHALLENGES FACING CARTEL CRIMINALISATION ON AN INTERNATIONAL SCALE 17. International Cartels, Concurrent Criminal Prosecutions and Extradition: Law, Practice and Policy Michael O'Kane 18. Cartels as Criminal? The Long Road from Unilateral Enforcement to International Consensus Ariel Ezrachi and Jioi Kindl

Criminalising cartels : critical studies of an international regulatory movement

This article explores the regulation of cartel conduct in Australia focusing, in particular, on the recent decision to criminalise so-called ‘hard-core’ cartels. It illuminates three interdependent ambiguities in regulating such conduct: economic, moral and legal. The case study is drawn on to highlight the challenges for the criminal law in attempting to resolve such ambiguities or tensions as they arise in the regulation of business behaviour generally. We argue that such challenges exist because the ambiguities reflect broader shifts taking place on an ongoing basis in economic policy, political ideology and social norms in Australian society

Making Cartel Conduct Criminal: A Case-Study of Ambiguity in Controlling Business Behaviour

Major constitutional reform was undertaken in South Africa in the mid-1990s. As part of this reform, rights to administrative justice were included in a Bill of Rights. In 2000 national legislation was passed to give effect to these rights. This article reviews one of the principal pieces of such legislation, the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act 2000, highlighting key similarities and differences to the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977.

Administrative Law in South Africa: No Longer a

1. Introduction 2. The legal framework governing cartel conduct 3. Collusion (contracts, arrangements and understandings) 4. Cartel and other provisions 5. Fault elements of the cartel offences 6. Individual liability 7. Corporate liability 8. Exceptions 9. Enforcement policy 10. Immunity and cooperation policies 11. Sanctions 12. Compliance and liability control 13. Conclusion.

Australian Cartel Regulation: Law, Policy and Practice in an International Context

This article reviews the proposal to make serious cartel conduct a criminal offence in Australia. It analyses the extent to which the proposal captures the criminality of the conduct to which it will apply; in particular, its culpability, harmfulness and moral wrongfulness. Two key assumptions underpin this analysis. First, criminalisation makes the morality of serious cartel activity a relevant consideration in the design and application of the new law. Secondly, recognition of the moral dimension will enhance the prospects of the criminal regime securing the support necessary for its effective enforcement. It should also boost the regime's deterrence value by facilitating internalisation of relevant moral norms in the business community. The article concludes that there is still much work to be done in refining and even rethinking aspects of the new offence to ensure that it properly reflects the criminal nature of hard core cartels.

Caron Beaton-Wells

Papers

Criminalising cartels : critical studies of an international regulatory movement

Making Cartel Conduct Criminal: A Case-Study of Ambiguity in Controlling Business Behaviour

Administrative Law in South Africa: No Longer a

Australian Cartel Regulation: Law, Policy and Practice in an International Context

Capturing the Criminality of Hard-Core Cartels: The Australian Proposal