Market Circulations Flashcards
For orthodox neoclassical economists what are economic geographies of circulation?
Market exchanges
What is the philosophy of neoclassical economics?
Market is not a problem, it solves problem
What are the conditions for the basic model of markets as mechanisms of exchange?
- Propensity to truck, barter and exchange
- Sellers and buyers meet to satisfy needs by transacting upon a free contract
What is the distinction between economy and culture/society in neoclassical economics?
Separate perfect Market from concrete imperfect markets
Berndt and Boeckler (2009)
How does socioeconomics critique the neoclassical distinction between economy and culture/society?
Markets cannot be separated from social and institutional context
Berndt and Boeckler (2009)
How do Orthodox neoclassical economics theorize an economy?
- At equilibrium
- Markets are capable of self-equilibration
- And by extension self regulation
- Thereby economic crisis are produced by ‘external shocks’
How do economic geographers theorize an economy?
- In disequilibrium
- Different kinds/scales
- Stability is an exception
- Crises arise due to unfolding of contradictions within economic system
What are the characteristics of geographical industrialization theory?
- Development of new industries creates new places (or transforms existing ones)
- Urban industrial regions and clusters
- These places localize and circulate super profits
- Support urban-regional economies
- Facilitate secondary things in the economy
- For example, shifting (and competing) US ‘high-tech’ regions
What is the spatial-temporal fixation theory?
- Industry produces and transforms places
- Geographic industrializations works for industrial production, tech breakthroughs
- But building cities and industrial ‘fixed capital’ is also a business
- Critical way to invest overaccumulated capital to avoid devaluation
- Harvey’s ‘circuit switching’ – circulating capital switching out primary circuit (production) into secondary circuit of infrastructure, land and real estate
Why do spatio-temporal fixes themselves eventually become problems?
- Capital seeks to regain freedom to circulate in search of highest profits
- Geographies of production are a sink of capital
- Rise and fall of production regions –> gales of creative destruction
How have economic geographers rediscovered the market?
As an abstract institutional logic as well as its materialization on the ground
Berndt (2015)
How does economic geography offers a critical understanding of worlds of circulation in contrast with economics’ logic of markets?
- Worlds of circulation are not equated to an imagined and normative space of market exchange and international trade
- Markets are not ‘natural’ or ‘perfect’
- Spatiality-temporality of markets is uneven, uncertain and in flux
- Freed markets deepen socio-spatial inequalities and enrich social elites
How are markets conceptualized through Marxist and Polyani traditions of Political Economy?
- Markets as the problem, creates inequality through uneven capital accumulation
- Inherently embedded in social and political relations
Berndt and Boeckler (2009)
What does Political Economy of Markets analytically focus on?
Relations of production and role of labour
What are the characteristics of relations of production and role of labour?
- Workers in a commodity exchange of trading labour-power for money so that they can buy other commodities produced by other people
- Labour time, not market place becomes frame for Marx’s reference
Berndt and Boeckler (2009)
How is the idea of value theorized in political economy of markets?
No value is produced in process of circulation (Marx, 1894); value is created in production and as a value is his central concern, exchange can be sidelined
Berndt and Boeckler (2009)
How does political economy approach theorize the market mechanism?
- As a destructive force
- Fictitious ideological device to hide underlying dynamics of capitalism
Berndt and Boeckler (2009)
What market economy variants replaced the Market/plan dualism?
- Closely relate to perfect models, e.g. USA
- More strongly ordered by social and political institutions, e.g. Germany
- Important to understand that German variant cannot be reduced to role of Anglo-American capitalism’s “other” –> new dualism
Berndt and Boeckler (2009)
What is the difference between economic and non-economic?
- Former being the capitalistic market mechanism
- Latter as the state as a guardian of the institutions that effect the efficiency of national capitalist systems
How do political economy economists argue what performativity reinforces?
Reinforces orthodox economics as it treats economic models as if they were the core of actual economies rather than (false) projection of economists
Berndt and Boeckler (2009)
How does Callon extend Actor Network Theory relate to the economic field?
- ANT as ontological equality where everything exists within constantly shifting networks of relation
- No external social forces
- It is the relations that perform
- These relations amongst heterogeneous elements perform but also create the social and the cultural
What shapes agency in cultural economy of marketization approach?
Relatively discrete socio-technical assemblages of economic knowledges, devices, material transformations that shape agency
Berndt and Boeckler (2009)
What are the three dominant framings in the cultural economy of marketization approach?
- Conversion of goods into commodities
- Calculative agencies that value objectified goods
- Sociotechnical devices that organize encounter between goods and agencies, e.g. warehouses, computer screens or auctions
Berndt and Boeckler (2009)
How are markets temporarily stabilized?
Process of framing and overflowing
Berndt and Boeckler (2009)
