Midterm Review - People and Readings Flashcards
(19 cards)
John Locke
The Labor Theory of Property:
Land initially belongs to all people in common, but when you mix your own labor and/or improve someone else’s land, it becomes your private property
Karl Marx
Poverty Theory:
- capitalism needed surplus value/continued flow of capital, when overaccumulation occurs due to need for low production costs and continuous markets, spatial fixes occur (enclosure/captive markets and offshoring) or temporal fixes (risky investments)
Hickel supports as reason for poverty and inequality from a spatially interconnected lens
William Easterly
Reading: “White Man’s Burden”
Poverty Action Theory:
- small tailored piecemeal aid effective, big aid not
- no real evidence of success for big aid (but also hard to quantify)
Counter argue:
- too quick to dismiss. both types of aid can be important
Jeffery Sachs
Reading: “The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time”
Poverty Action Theory:
- big aid needed to get underdeveloped countries onto the development ladder
- investment through ODA’s for humanitarian aid, microfinance, and government budget support
- poverty trap: fiscal, political, geographic, cultural, innovation, technology, etc.
Authors that would Counter argue: Easterly, Hickel, Escobar
Jason Hickel
Reading: “The Divide”
4 Factors of Poverty - increasing overaccumulation and need for spatial fix:
1) ecological windfalls and captive markets
(enclosure - privatization of peasant land and colonialism capturing of foreign markets/slave labor for silver,gold, sugar extraction in latin america for example)
2) violence and coercion (military intervention -india/china ex, colonialism w/ slave labor and breaking of hands for missing quotas, coups, threat of intervention or removal of investment if didn’t comply with GN demands like SAPs)
3) legal and political formation (displacement of peasants when landlord class privatized commons - enclosure- for wool and agriculture industry giving land to most productive and the control in parliament they took allowed them to permanently abolish these rights and landlessness of peasants forced these refugees to move to urban factories for low wages -birth of capitalism and large scale poverty/econ inequality) -> (then colonialism capturing of other markets like military intervention and unequal treaties after china resisted opium but they lost bc of strong British military and how opium devastated their economy leading to uneqaul treaties and china having to pay all war costs –> huge ^ poverty in china)
4) development ideology (locke and liberalization)
- lockes labor theory of property/improvement (those who can best profit maximize the land should get it)
- Malthus population theory, most productive members of society should get resources and others will naturally be poor and to intervene would cause harmful economic inefficiencies since population grows at a rate faster than humans can produce for (food and resources should go to the most productive)
Reasons for Poverty:
- colonialism giving the GN advantages in global economy
- SAPs - forcing neoliberal policies, undoing developmentalist gains
- Debt trap - captive markets/dependency bc of debt
- WTO/Trade policies - favoring the GN and allowing protectionist policies like subsidies and tariffs only for GN
Connected Concepts:
captive market, virtual senate, enclosure, neocolonialism
James Scott
Reading: “Moral Economy”
Main Argument:
Connected Concepts:
Authors that would Counter argue:
Robbins, Hintz, and Moore
Reading: “Environment and Society”
Main Argument:
- With capitalism capitalists (with control over conditions and means of production) take surplus value created from the labor and reinvest it in the conditions of production (environmental resources) so that production can continue or into the wages of laborers (who are consumers) – can’t pay both enough while maintaining surplus so workers usually underpaid + envi. degradation - no matter what ecological and overaccumulation crises occur
- primitive accumulation of conditions/means of production through privatization = economic inequality
- 2 contradictions: over accumulation (overproduction/underconsumption) and environmental degradation
- financial and environmental crisis (ex. layoffs and wage cuts worsening crisis)
Harmful Aspects of capitalism:
- commodification of nature
- uneven development - spatial fix and captive markets (primitive accumulation)
- social reproduction of harmful impacts (privatization and pollution)
Walter Rodeny
Reading: “Colonialism as a System for Under developing Africa”
Assasinated (1980)
Guyanese historian, political activist, and academic
Main Argument:
colonialism –> underdevelopment
- imposition of taxes
- puppet regimes
- fostering tribalism
- Destruction of domestic handicraft industry
- Division of labor/ monocultures (compartmentalization)
- Isolation via Infrastructure and technology (compartmentalization)
- intentional underdevelopment (division of labor theory)
- Destruction of initiative
Greta Krippner
Reading: “The Social Politics of US Financial Deregulation”
Main Argument:
Critic of Regulation Q
- reduced capital for investment (banks had limited ability to attract deposits, restricting lending for productive investments)
- Regulation Q often shifted economic burdens to the housing sector, creating recessions in construction during periods of economic downturn.
- worsened inflation
Critic of Deregulation
- increased economic inequality since wealthier had more access to high-yielding and safe investments (a lot more capital flowing, but mostly accessible to the wealthy, not the poor who couldn’t access high yielding economic growth investments)
- increased risky practices
Tony Weis
Reading: “Restructuring Redundancy”
Main Argument:
- argues for sovereignty - control of Jamaican market to be in hands of small farms for sake of food security and economic equality.
- bade neoliberal Policies like in SAPs assumed free market forces would “naturally” allocate resources efficiently, but instead created deep inequalities.
- Global market pressures favored large transnational corporations, leaving small, domestic producers at a disadvantage.
consider life and debt
Daniel Jaffee
Reading: “Weak Coffee: Certification and Co-Optation in Fair Trade Movement”
Main Argument:
The article highlights the limitations of relying on market-based strategies to challenge corporate power, as they may unintentionally strengthen the very systems they aim to reform.
- Corporations co-opt movements by adopting superficial reforms while resisting substantive change.
- Co-optation on the terrain of certification standards leads to lower-bar alternatives that dilute the movement’s goals.
- Originally a small civil society initiative, fair trade expanded into an international system generating $5 billion in sales, attracting major transnational corporations.
- The fair trade movement uses third-party certification and labeling to regulate transnational corporations
Connected Concepts:
Authors that would Counter argue:
Arturo Escobar
Reading: “The invention of development”
Main Argument:
- harmful development discourse in control of white western elites who use a technocratic statistical approach to developmentalism, not considering the unique and diverse cultures/politics of each GS nations
- professionalization (technocrats) and institutionalization (sources of funding)
Other authors
- hickel would support (green revolution ex)
- sachs would disagree
(grameen Bank ex)
James Ferguson
Reading: “the anti-politics machine”
Main Argument:
“anti-politics machine,” disguising power dynamics and reinforcing bureaucratic control under the guise of poverty reduction.
- resistance of people to development bc of differing social values
- ignores social and political systemic inequalities and colonial histories that have made them a captive market
^all this reason for development failure
Escobar would agree
Keynes
Theory of Poverty Action - Keynesianism
- state-led development, increased public spending for higher wages, financial industry regulations, nationalization, etc.
Hickel supports for alleviation of poverty
Walter Rostow
Stages of Economic Growth
Outlines progression from traditional societies to high mass consumption.
- Traditional Society: Limited Technology; static society
(Transition triggered by external support)
- Preconditions for Takeoff: Commercial exploitation of agriculture and extractive industry
(Installation of infrastructure and emergence of social political elite)
- Take-Off: development of a manufacturing sector
(Investment in manufacturing exceeds 10% of national income; development of modern social, political, and economic institutions)
- Drive to Maturity: development of wider industrial and commercial base
(Exploitation of comparative advantages in international trade)
- High Mass Consumption
Escobar and Hickel would disagree
sachs would agree
Thomas Malthus
Population Theory
- people will reproduce at rates higher than they can sustain themselves
- survival of the fittest: the top people (subjective and racist) should get land and resources, and the rest should be left in poverty
- against intervention
David Ricardo
Comparative Advantage Theory:
every country should produce the goods or perform the function that they are best at relative to other countries
- countries with abundant, cheap labor should produce labor intensive goods; countries with more capital should produce capital intensive goods
- natural division of labor
- benefits common good by raising trade, incomes, and consumption
Milton Freidman & Freidrich Hayek
Neoliberalism supporters
- deregulation breaks down trade barriers
- privatization
- austerity
- free trade with low gov intervention for best allocation of resources and economic growth
ex. SAPs in life and debt film - jamaica
Hayek
- spontanous order - effeciency when everyone gravitates to their own interests and skills (similar to division of labor in ricardo’s comparative advantage theory)
*both against Keynesianism
India undevelopment
EIC military intervention and unequal treaties to control and take control and advance India’s agriculture industry for increase exportation based on logic of improvement (specifically to Europe).
- heavy taxes
- no more commons -> privitization
- used their forest to build their boats
- no more grain reserves
- controlled irrigation routes/water supply
- controlled railroads which were used for exporting (no food left for people in india - became captive market)
- high one-way tarrifs to eliminate india textile industry and breaking hands of loom workers so that british textile industry would become dominant
- didn’t inervene when speculation drove up grain prices hurting the captive indian market because of Malthusian logic
- when el nino hit, starvation of 30 million
