This paper presents a non-median voter model of redistribution in which greater inequality leads to lower redistribution. Bargaining between interest groups and politicians over exemptions implies that individuals with sufficiently high income will not pay taxes in equilibrium. Therefore, voters will set tax rates low enough so as to control the incentives for rent-seeking. An increase in inequality, by putting more income in the hands of individuals that can buy exemptions, will lead to lower equilibrium redistribution. The model can be used to account for a negative relationship between inequality and growth and provides a new explanation of why the poor do not expropriate the rich in democracies.

/pdf/inequality-redistribution-and-rent-seeking-2ohgvm9az2.pdf

Inequality, redistribution, and rent-seeking

The 2006 outbreak of E. coli O157:H7, traced to bagged spinach from California, illustrates a number of contradictions. The solutions sought by many politicians and popular food analysts have been to create a centralized federal agency and a uniform set of production standards modeled after those of the animal industry. Such an approach would disproportionately harm smaller-scale producers, whose operations were not responsible for the epidemic, as well as reduce the agroecological diversity that is essential for maintaining healthy human beings and ecosystems. Why should responses that only reinforce the problem be proffered? We use the framework of accumulation and legitimation to suggest corporate and government motives for concealing underlying problems and reinforcing powerful ideologies of individualism, scientism, and centralizing authority. Food safety (or the illusion of safety) is being positioned to secure capital rather than public welfare. We propose implementing the principle of subsidiarity as a more democratic and decentralized alternative. Because full implementation of this principle will be resisted by powerful interests, some promising intermediate steps include peer production or mass collaboration as currently applied to disease prevention and surveillance, as well as studying nascent movements resisting current food safety regulations.

Safe at any scale? Food scares, food regulation, and scaled alternatives

An interpretation of the Marxian theory of crisis that rejects the ‘Keynesianism’ of most post-war contributions on the topic. Various criticisms of Marx's position are examined and two popular but incorrect versions of the theory are discussed; the underconsumptionist and disproportionality theory of crisis. An attempt is made to begin an analysis of the role of state intervention in the economy and indicate the limitations of intervention by the capitalist state implied by Marx's theory of crisis.

The Marxian theory of crisis, capital and the state ∗

The subaltern speaks: financial relations and the limits of governmentality

Edward Hallet Carr observed that “the science of economics presupposes a given political order, and cannot be profitably studied in isolation from politics.” Throughout history, the larger configurations of world politics and state interests have in large measure determined the framework of the international economy. Succeeding imperial and hegemonic powers have sought to organize and maintain the international economy in terms of their economic and security interests.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0020818300017896

Three models of the future

Who Decides?- Economics & Politics@@@Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order@@@The New Industrial State@@@New Dimensions of Political Economy

PROFESSOR DESPRES' review of Effects of Strategic Bombing on the German War Economy in the November issue of this REVIEW presents one of the comparatively rare occasions when an author is justified and perhaps even obliged to take issue with his reviewer. His interpretation of this report is both erroneous and casual; to allow it to pass unchallenged would imply concurrence in an egregious misreading of the report and, much more important, would perpetuate a false interpretation of the German war economy which it was a major task of the report to correct. Professor Despres begins his review with a handsome compliment to the authors for the light they throw on the German war economy. We (and our colleagues for whom we are presuming to speak) are grateful and we shall not be a whit less generous than Professor Despres. He was a leading member of the able group of economists whose advice to the Air Forces it was, in some measure, our task to appraise. It is our conviction -and one shared, we believe, by our colleagues on the Survey,1 -that the economic intelligence developed and the recommendations on targets derived represented a high level of achievement. In challenging Professor Despres' criticism of the report, we should like to be clear that we do not claim perfection for our handiwork. Its shortcomings, however, are not the ones Professor Despres discusses. He taxes the authors with "recurrent confusions" in economic analysis a blanket indictment which he does not feel obliged to substantiate. We find him guilty of lack of diligence in reading the report and of leaving confusion where there was none before. Professor Despres begins by accepting the central contention of the report, namely, that Germany's economy during most of the war was not in the technocratic state of total mobilization surmised by many foreign observers. The civilian population was not squeezed to the physiologically attainable limit, and the national industrial plant was not exploited to the technical optimum. The fascist political and economic equilibrium was different from that of the democratic countries, yet it was anything but stable there were class conflicts that were bridged but not solved, and divergent interests that were compromised but not unified. This social and political framework imposed insurmountable limitations on the volume of output and on the degree of mobilization.2 A wrong (or naive) theory of the monolithic nature of the fascist state gave rise to an equally wrong notion that the sky was the only limit on Germany's technocratic efficiency. By agreeing on this point, Professor Despres clears the way for his most serious objection. He believes the authors stumbled into a booby trap set up for them by General Thomas when they accepted his view that Germany's preparations were insufficient. A fairly superficial examination of the report (particularly of Chapters I and II) would have convinced Professor Despres of the absurdity of his charge. Germany's war preparations are there described as fully adequate for the kind of a war that Hitler hoped to conduct and win. For a program of aggrandizement based on threats, blackmail, and occasional police action, "armament in width" i.e., an impressive volume of available arms, exceeding by far the one at the disposal of the Western Powers was all that was needed. The report then makes clear that General Thomas and his colleagues on the General Staff never underwrote Hitler's strat-

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/1927888

John Kenneth Galbraith

Papers

Who Decides?- Economics & Politics@@@Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order@@@The New Industrial State@@@New Dimensions of Political Economy

Professor Despres on "Effects of Strategic Bombing on the German War Economy"