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The characteristic features of 21st-century corporate capitalism - monopoly and financialization - are increasingly being recognized by public health scholars as undermining the foundations of human health. While the "vectors" through which this is occurring are well known - poverty, inequality, climate change among others - locating the root cause of this process in the nature and institutions of contemporary capitalism is relatively new. Researchers have been somewhat slow to study the relationship between contemporary capitalism and human health. In this paper, we focus on one of the leading causes of death in the United States; cancer, and empirically estimate the relationship between various measures of financialization and monopoly in the US healthcare system and cancer mortality. The measures we focus on are for the hospital industry, the health insurance industry, and the pharmaceutical industry. Using a fixed effects model with different specifications and control variables, our analysis is at the state level for the years 2012-2019. These variables include data on population demographic controls, social and economic factors, and health behavior and clinical care. We compare Medicaid expansion states with non-Medicaid expansion states to investigate variations in state-level funded health insurance coverage. The results show a statistically significant positive correlation between the HHI index in the individual healthcare market and cancer mortality and the opioid dispensing rate and cancer mortality., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

With the development of the market economy, agricultural trade has become more and more significant for the development of the agricultural economy, which has triggered people's further thinking and exploration on the impact of agricultural trade on agricultural carbon emissions. This paper takes the measurement of trade implied carbon as the carbon dioxide emission index under the impact of agricultural trade and analyzes the impact of trade implied carbon and implied carbon balance on carbon emission. Taking the impact of Sino-US agricultural trade as an empirical background, this paper measures the impact of environmental changes in agricultural trade opening on China's agricultural development and its carbon emissions, so as to predict changes in China's regional agricultural carbon emissions performance. After calculation, it is found that the scale of China's exports has decreased by 0.089%, which is lower than the decline of 0.361% in the United States. The trade conflict has a significant impact on China's import and export structure. Under the scenario of mutual tariffs on agricultural products, China's exports to the United States are expected to decrease by 6.28%, while China's imports from the United States decreased by 13.02%. The Sino-US agricultural trade dispute will reduce China's carbon emissions by 0.013% and the United States' carbon emissions by 0.024%, which is related to the negative impact on the economy. Improving the performance of agricultural carbon emissions is not only the need for the green and sustainable development of the agricultural economy but also conducive to improving the international competitiveness of agricultural products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early twentieth century, many Arab American writers who were recent immigrants to the United States considered themselves pioneers with a global vision. Many of them were suffering from feelings of alienation because they came from poor backgrounds and escaped to find that capitalism governs everyday living. Therefore, the main interest of the leading writers was promoting more spirituality in their literary works, especially by those who were writing primarily in Arabic. Nu'ayma who wrote in Arabic wanted to emphasize the importance of following a spiritual path in life in modern-day living in his play Ayoub. As a writer and a critic, Nu'ayma believed in the mystical aspects of literature, the power of language, and the importance of literary works in imparting spirituality in society. Living in the United States, he knew many Arab American, Russian, and American critics and writers with whom he shared literary interests and critical thoughts. In Nu'ayma's book The Ghirbal, he put forth critical ideas that he believed should govern literary composition. His mystical play, Ayoub (1967), was constructed as a literary model that illustrated the importance of rejuvenation in the Arabic language, the significance of mysticism in drama, and the role of literature in transforming society. The following paper traces Mikhail Nu'ayma's critical views in his play, Ayoub (1967) and discusses the theme of alienation in relations to Nu'ayma's spiritual outlook. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the economic growth imperative not only drives climate change and created the conditions for the development and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic but is also the context for climate change inaction and ineffective responses to the pandemic. Focusing on the United States, the paper identifies pretenses for collective inaction on COVID-19 that are similar in content to familiar justifications for delay in climate action: (1) denialism, (2) individualism, and (3) techno-optimism. These justifications must be identified as strategies to maintain the status-quo and benefit the wealthy few while allowing avoidable human suffering and loss. Adequately addressing climate change and future pandemics requires overcoming these false narratives and transitioning to social conditions that are resilient, healthy, and sustainable – specifically conditions where social and ecological well-being are prioritized over economic growth for the sake of profit maximization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Primary and secondary education under capitalism serves as an ideological apparatus to construct productive workers who will participate in the extractive economy and consent to their own exploitation. However, some school children are marked as deficient--impaired, disabled, and mad--incapable of being good workers who facilitate capitalist accumulation. Just as capital banishes incapacitated workers to the reserve army of labor, so too do school children learn to "surplus" and "disable" their peers who do not meet school norms. In this paper, I use a revolutionary Marxist perspective to analyze empirical data from a grade 1 United States classroom where students were teasing a neurodivergent classmate and excluding her from participation. I explore how the teacher intervened by using critical literacy to design a curricular unit on hidden disabilities that would engage her students in transformative, disability justice, and how students built a community around their disabled peers. Along the way, I explore how disability is a relation under capitalism rather than an identity; how nature gives us diverse bodyminds but it is capitalism that disables us; how the education system in capitalist societies is a vehicle for the dissemination of ruling class ideologies of productivity; how some school children are surplused and labeled as incapable of being good workers who facilitate capitalist accumulation; and possible solutions--what educators, parents, caregivers, and others can do about it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimating the contribution of enslaved workers to output and growth in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century is a crucial building block to better understand the contours of nineteenth‐century US economic history, and more generally, the connection between slavery and capitalism. Existing estimates only present a partial picture and are potentially problematic. In this paper, we use data on enslaved person valuations to calculate the contribution made by enslaved workers to regional and national gross national product (GNP) in 1839 and 1859 and to the growth in per capita output in the 20 years before the Civil War. We find that in the United States, enslaved workers were responsible for somewhere between 12.49 per cent and 18.0 per cent of the increase in output per capita between 1839 and 1859. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rates of mental illness have increased dramatically over the past 15 years in the United States [Products-Data Briefs-Number 283-August 2017. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db283.htm . Published August 15, 2017]. Additionally, life expectancy has fallen over the past several years due to increases in death from suicide, opioid overdose, and alcoholic liver cirrhosis as reported by Case and Deaton [Deaths of despair and the future of capitalism. Princeton University Press, 2020]. Over the last decade some have questioned whether these changes are due to neoliberal capitalist policies and ideologies. Neoliberal capitalism incorporates theories of eliminating all restrictions on the market and decreasing government assistance programs as reported by Harvey [A brief history of neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, 2005]. Since then these policies have led to income inequality, disempowerment of workers, outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, inadequate social services, mass incarceration and an expensive and ineffective healthcare system as reported by Case and Deaton [Deaths of despair and the future of capitalism. Princeton University Press, 2020] and Nkansah-Amankra et al. [International Journal of Health Services 43(2):217-240, 2013]. Studies have shown that the consequences of these policies and ideologies likely have a role in increasing rates of mental illness. This paper will discuss how these factors increase mental distress and postulate ways that mental health professionals can advocate for change., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

Copyright of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (University of Toronto Press) is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Global price increases have reached their highest levels in recent times. Finding the reasons for the price increase is very important for economic stabilization. In this paper, it has been estimated that exorbitant price increases may be related to a free market economy. For this purpose, unlike other studies, a comparative analysis of the impact of the free market economy on prices was conducted. The study covers the period 1990–2020, and using the U.S. economy, which is a free market economy, the relationship between property rights, the size of government in the economy, and prices were examined using the autoregressive distributed lag model. The results show that the free market model has a positive effect on the price increase, while the size of the government's economy does not affect the price increase in the same direction. This study aims to provide a different perspective to policymakers in the fight against price instability, which is one of the most important problems facing the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social reproduction theory names at least two distinct traditions, one of which has a long history in educational research. Social reproduction theory in education emerged out of a concern with education's relationship to capitalist inequalities. By contrast, social reproduction feminism developed out of feminist interventions regarding the role of women's unpaid care-work in the reproduction of capitalism. In this paper, we suggest that the renewed energy surrounding social reproduction feminism provides an opportunity to revisit social reproduction theorizing in education. We review the fields' histories and ready the ground for an integrated framework. At the heart of this integration is a feminist analysis of reproductive labor in its contradictory relationship to capitalism. Expanding the analysis from the reproduction of capitalist relations to the reproduction of life under capitalism, this approach avoids the pitfalls of determinism and attends to students' participation and teachers' work in the contested labor of social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It's now well appreciated that social determinants of health are the strongest predictors of our health and well-being. A good argument could be made that housing is at the top of the pyramid of these determinants. And, surprisingly, housing is also the social determinant that could rapidly turn on a dime—that is, with sufficient political will, creating access to housing could be radically expanded in short order. (Unfortunately, of course, it's true one can also become suddenly homeless, since few protections exist in policy or capitalist economies to prevent it). That alone sets it apart from social factors such as education and racism—conditions that take a long time to change. In contrast to long-term interventions (education) or culturally stubborn and historically rooted problems (racism), housing is rapidly malleable. In this article, we describe the social condition of homelessness in two settings, comparing and contrasting the concepts, causes, and consequences, along with how people are mobilizing to challenge the conditions that create their housing insecurity. As we review the factors that create housing conditions in each setting, we propose some universal international principles for a new approach to the human right of decent and secure housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the relative strength of public policies promoting advanced manufacturing by comparing the government programs and capacities of two world leaders in science and technology: the USA and Germany. Based on insights from 'varieties-of-capitalism' literature and using process tracing methodology, this study identifies significant differences in today's pursuit of advanced manufacturing. The German model of Rhine capitalism has strength due to its long tradition of diversified quality work, built on a long-term commitment to government-industry collaboration, with significant indirect public support provided by vocational training and research institutes. The American model of Manchester capitalism has been challenged by the loss of millions of low-skilled manufacturing jobs due to outsourcing and competition from Asia. The study finds that the "Manufacturing USA" policy initiative of the Obama era, although directly inspired by Germany's Fraunhofer institutes, is hampered by the contextual and institutional circumstances identified. With biobased carbon fibers offering the potential of a novel, low-cost material, pursued with research and development (R&D) efforts in both countries, it provides a measure for evaluating policy outcomes, and the study confirms Germany's technological lead. In addition, the study's process-tracing methodology reveals that significant legacies from German knowledge creation in the past have spilled over to American science and technology, and may continue to do so, lured by government funds. Further studies on advanced manufacturing should test the robustness of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the importance of innovations as a factor for economic growth and competitiveness, ensuring their sustainable development is a universal task for the country. The most intense race for innovation is observed among countries striving for global dominance. This article is dedicated to the study of the specific features of innovation development in the United States, where innovative potential has become one of the cornerstones of their economic strategy and a key driver of their success. The United States has significant distinctions from other countries in terms of culture, institutions, economic organizations, economic regulation, etc., which together create the basic conditions for innovation and require consideration. The focus on innovation development in the United States is driven by intensified competition with other global players, particularly from China. The main goal of the research is to summarize and characterize the systemic features of innovation development in the United States, as well as to identify the key factors intensifying innovation productivity in the country. The study of the systemic features of innovation development in the United States covered the analysis of 1) civilizational factors; 2) institutional system; 3) economic system; 4) innovation system; 5) state innovation policy. The main factors intensifying innovation productivity in the United States were identified as the combination of entrepreneurial and large-scale capitalism, venture capital investment, and territorial agglomerations of innovative structures. The need to consider the peculiarities of innovation generation in the military sector, universities, and non-profit organizations has been justified. The strength of the United States innovation system has been statistically demonstrated, however, the increasing competition in science and innovation from China has been confirmed. This has led to the intensification and change in the type of state innovation policy in the United States, with a focus on targeted support for innovation in industry in the context of the green transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary landscape of dread in living and teaching demands a creative and experimental form of investigation that can trace the affective contours of the present and uncover the obscure openings for an oppositional imagination. In a series of interlinked excurses, this essay articulates a poetic probing of the nexus of slow fascism and capitalist realism in the contemporary United States, as this is lived in the waking dreams of pedagogy and imaginative praxis. Looking beyond familiar analyses, this project exposes the terror of loss that motivates the punishments visited upon school and society by elites and points to the spectral presence of justice, which lives with us as persistent horizon even as it is persistently refused by power. Interleaved with these unravelings of the texture of experience as domination, this project gestures toward a thinking and teaching that is wise to capitalism's recurrent fantasies. This pedagogy inverts the certainties that organize our senses of knowledge and curriculum, navigates the hidden topology of the real (beyond the reflexive affirmation in schools of what is), and proposes an unruly form of thought that moves out past the walls that sign the edge of the classroom and the edge of the truth. This project does not announce a settled approach but rather challenges the limits of the familiar at the level of our structures of feeling. We feel the terror of the given in the present, but we can also follow the seam of experience toward the point at which its impositions are attached—in spite of themselves—to the confounding/liberatory logic of the "impossible." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis seeks to demonstrate the theoretical and empirical salience of the 'law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall' in relation to the concrete evolution of the US economy between 1950 and 2020. The theoretical-methodological approach adopted in this study is based on the work of Shane Mage and Murray E.G. Smith. This approach re-specifies the Marxian value categories and ratios for purposes of empirically operationalizing them as a theory of fundamental capitalist dynamics using national accounting data. Contributions include (1) the treatment of systemically necessary unproductive labour as a 'constant capital overhead cost' and (2) a method of managing 'fictitious profits' that are imputed into the national accounts and thereby enabling a more realistic estimate of 'social surplus value' (the numerator of the Marxian average rate of profit) in what has become an 'era of fictitious capital'. The empirical findings reveal a persistent rise in the organic composition of capital, as well as a rise in the rate of surplus value, accompanied by a long-term downward trend in the average rate of profit in the postwar US economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2020 COVID-19 disaster triggered an educational crisis in the United States, deeply exacerbating the inequities present in education as schools went online. This primary impact may not be the only one, however: literature describes a secondary impact of such disasters through "disaster capitalism," in which the private sector captures the public resources of disaster-struck communities for profit. In response to these warnings, we ask how schools, families, and communities can counteract disaster capitalism for educational equity. To address this question, we first synthesize a critical framework for analyzing digital inequity in education. We then dissect the strategies disaster capitalism uses to attack the school-family-community relationship and exacerbate digital inequity in "normal" times as well as during crises. Employing the notion of community funds of knowledge, we next examine the resources schools, families, and communities can mobilize against disaster capitalism and digital inequity. Finally, guided by the concepts of generative change and transformative learning, we consider actionable practices of countering disaster capitalism for a transformative education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the scholarly debate on the profitability of historical slavery. The article examines the case of the antebellum US South, using slave hire rates as a proxy for the net rent on investments in slavery. It employs empirical data and a more advanced methodological approach to the issue than in previous research. The results suggest that the profitability of slavery was much higher than what most previous research has shown, around 14–15 per cent per year on average after adjusting for mortality risk, but that the return also fluctuated over time. It was on average more profitable for Southern capital owners to invest in slaves than investing in many alternatives such as financial instruments or manufacturing activities in the US South, as long as slavery remained a legal institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The power of finance vis-à-vis the nonfinancial sector is changing. Macroeconomic developments and financial innovations have reduced financial actors' exit options, thus diminishing exit-based structural power. At the same time, shareholdings have become more concentrated in the hands of large asset managers, thus increasing control-based power. This article documents these trends, before examining whether asset managers wield their power and why, despite being universal shareholders, they have not steered corporate behavior toward decarbonization. Rather than assuming orderly, good-faith interactions between shareholders and managers, this article argues that in the United States today, political considerations govern the use of control-based power. Asset managers' corporate governance policies are subservient to the—increasingly inconsistent—goals of maximizing assets under management while avoiding regulatory backlash. Unlike exit-based power, control-based power is constrained by being highly visible and, therefore, easily politicized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a historical analysis based on archival research in Mexico, the United States, and Great Britain, this article argues that as Latin American negotiators waged campaigns for reforms to rules for trade, investment, and development lending in the twentieth century, they came to inadvertently illustrate what was acceptable and what was impossible within the terms of the Liberal International Order (LIO). In each of the three episodes examined, US government officials actually acquiesced to the demands of experts and political figures from the developing world, agreeing to broad international frameworks that were intended to scale-up the welfarist vision of 'embeddedness' to the international arena. But in each of these cases, those government officials subsequently saw their concessions vetoed by the action of powerful capitalist interests fearful of what the limits to power might mean for their bottom lines. It was in this struggle unfolding over time—as representatives from Latin America and elsewhere in the industrialising world tried to build an infrastructure of development that would meaningfully embed US capital in a framework of rights and obligations, and as capital organised to respond, rallying business associations and allied government representatives—that the limits of the LIO came to be defined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When meatpacking plants in the United States lost a third of their undocumented Latinx workers to Federal immigration raids in the late 2000s, the industry began recruiting vulnerable, but "legal," refugee workers to replace them. In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 threatened to halt meatpacking, two separate executive orders designated meatpacking production as essential to the United States food system and introduced new restrictions on refugee resettlement in the United States. Bridging Marxian literature on race, labor, and capitalism and critical refugee studies, this paper examines the paradox of refugees' positioning as both "essential" sources of vulnerable labor and "prohibited" threats to the American nation-state. We argue that the placement of refugees in meatpacking jobs is actually the primitive accumulation of unfree labor. In the case of "essential" meatpacking work in the United States, racial capitalism articulates with conditions of statelessness and unequal citizenship rights to anchor "prohibited" refugees to meatpacking work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates the current (re)configuration of Latin American regionalism within the broader history of capitalist geopolitics. I argue that modern regionalism, in the post-war period and beyond, is better understood through a deeper historicization of geopolitical dynamics that shaped, and were shaped by, global capital accumulation. From the early regional imaginaries of post-independence Latin American leaders, to the emergence of 'continental history' marked by the rise of the continent-sized island in the United States, the origins of regional institutions forms a more longer lineage than is often thought. The article provides a class-relational analysis of the ISI period, the rise (and fall) of neoliberal discipline, and the resurgence of a new Latin American left in the early twenty-first century. Through the lens of capitalist geopolitics, I offer a potential critical-theory route towards understanding the current conjuncture, and what the future portents for Latin American regionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article encourages historians of technology to elevate the history of capitalism from a subsidiary theme to a research agenda. It studies the United States's early telegraphs to exemplify the inseparability of technology and capitalism. Entrepreneurs were able to innovate technologically (build telegraph systems) thanks to innovating financially. After trying and failing to sell large amounts of stock to a few investors in big cities for funding construction, entrepreneurs succeeded by selling small amounts of stock to many investors spread across the country. Financial innovators turned technology users into investors. Conversely, entrepreneurs were able to innovate financially because of their technological innovation. They built telegraphs to sell stock. Corporate charters made a company's capital a multiple of its line mileage, so the only way to increase capital was to build lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An enhanced economic philosophy, conscious capitalism, is ascending in the United States and gaining traction in helping corporations redefine their approach to business. This article analyzes and evaluates conscious capitalism, integrates it with biblical economics and the social justice faith tradition, and explores its relationship to business education. Business education researchers have the opportunity to integrate conscious capitalism ideas into business curriculum to give students ideas that broaden their understanding of an enhanced model of capitalism and the ways capitalism can do good. Additionally, there is opportunity for Christian business professors to integrate the social justice themes of mishpat, hesed, and shalom into business and economics curriculum and teach about stakeholder integration, higher purpose and values, leadership, culture, and management. Conscious capitalism is not perfectly aligned with a Christian worldview, nor has it sought to be, and as it emerges, more research can help confirm its efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Annals of the American Association of Geographers is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article develops a theoretical framework for the critical examination of cinematic tourist design. Considering 'film-induced tourism' as part of a bigger system involving the design of mobilities, it interrogates the connection between the aesthetic and ethical principles that end up informing the engineering of national hospitality in media platforms. The design, which is managed by a 'worldmaking authority' or network encompassing the host nation state and international tourist and media markets, conforms to the rationalised rules of what Boltanski and Chiapello termed the 'new spirit of capitalism', which mobilises romantic ideals of individual freedom to sell landscapes and exotic cultural characters. The phased development of such mobilities conforms to contingency and is indifferent to the welfare of particular social groups. The model is exemplified through the phased design of mobilities out of two films with virulent sexist and antisemitic content centred on the journeys of the fictional Kazakh journalist Borat to the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]