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The US government's expanding role in assisting businesses with the development of new technologies has significantly increased corporate dependence on the state. This dependence creates new opportunities for social movements to extract significant concessions from capital., The Left's standard theoretical tools are inadequate for making sense of US politics in the current period. They give us little leverage to explain the threat of authoritarian or neofascist [...]

There is a story that has been told by both the physicist Stephen Hawking and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. They report that a famous scientist was lecturing on the structure [...]

The business community in the United States forged an alliance with the religious Right in 1970s and ever since then there is a divergence in the trajectories of market societies between the United States and Western Europe. A neo-Polanyian theoretical framework is suggested to understand the dynamics within contemporary market societies because it effectively identifies the key mechanisms that drive the developmental trajectories of contemporary market societies.

The U.S. economy has undergone a major transformation over the past quarter century. This transformation has the potential to improve living standards and humanize working conditions as advanced technologies increase [...]

This paper challenges the conventional belief that household saving in the U.S. declined during the Reagan Years. The paper proposes a definition of the household financial surplus that is available for use by corporations and the public sector. It shows how existing measures of household saving diverge from this definition, and it proposes alternative estimates of the trend of this household financial surplus in the 1980s. These alternative estimates show no downward trend, and in most years, the available supply of funds has exceeded business and government demands., The variable components of household saving during the Reagan administration was presented. Factors such as capital gains and capital consumptions, which are not considered by the traditional approaches in measuring household savings, are taken into account as well as other factors including financing for household extensions, capital gains and losses, social security surplus and public pension funds. It was conluded that household savings did not decline during the Reagan administration.

President Bill Clinton's plans of federal investment in infrastructure, training, and education, though better than its predecessors, needs institutional reforms if it is to give greater latitude to democracy, equality, personal liberty, and environmental protection. The possible areas of institutional reform to be integrated with the economy are reform in the election process, in banks and corporate bodies, and in the use of capital.

Capital could be made more readily available by reforming the rules governing corporations, preventing capital flight to foreign countries and legislating against the misdirection or withholding of capital for political ends. The task is to reduce the power of those who hold assets without creating a huge state apparatus. To ensure productivity in corporations owned by employees, management decisions will have to be institutionalized. Profits could then be redistributed through taxation.

Social welfare is a field marked by a huge chasm between what the public believes and what social scientists 'know.' For example, it is part of the society's common-sense that [...]

The only way to make the poor return to the natural state of scarcity and the human discipline is to abolish the relief for the poor. The experience of the speenhamland period and its reference in Karl Polanyi's classic work, The Great Transformation, is discussed.

In this chapter, we argue for an essential dualism in the U.S. economy; there are simultaneously institutional sources of dynamism and institutional patterns that portend a process of decay and decline. This dualism corresponds to a growing divide between innovative small- and medium-sized enterprises and big corporations -- both financial and non-financial -- that are increasingly predatory in their business strategies. Surprisingly, firms on both sides of the divide are increasingly dependent on government. The small- and medium-sized firms rely heavily on government science and technology programs to help them innovate. The large firms need government to protect their position. Whether dynamism or decay will prove to be stronger, we think, is contingent on political choices that will be made over the next ten years. This contingency, in turn, makes it easier to understand the highly polarized nature of partisan politics in the United States today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that social scientists should reconsider the analytic value of the term "capitalism." The paper argues that the two most coherent definitions of capitalism are those derived from classical Marxism and from the Worm System theory of Immanuel Wallerstein. Marx and Engels' formulation was basically a genetic theory in which the structure of a mode of production is determined by the mode of surplus extraction. During the course of the 20th century, however, Marxist theorists had to modify this framework and the result has been an uncomfortable hybrid. Wallerstein resolved these tensions by redefining capitalism in terms of the logic of a worm system. However, his argument has difficulty in explaining the consequential variations over time in the specific rules and institutional structures that operate at the global level. The article goes on to argue in favor of Karl Polanyi's concept of market society because it focuses attention on the political governance of market societies at both the national and the global levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the article "Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and the Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States" by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, which appears in the June 1, 2010 issue of the journal "Politics & Society."

To understand the rise of market fundamentalism from the margins of influence to mainstream hegemony, we compare the US. 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act and the English 1834 New Poor Law-two episodes in which existing welfare regimes were overturned by market-driven ones. Despite dramatic differences across the cases, both outcomes were mobilized by "the perversity thesis "-a public discourse that reassigned blame for the poor's condition from "poverty to perversity." We use the term "ideational embeddedness" to characterize the power of such ideas to shape, structure, and change market regimes. The success of the perversity thesis is based on the foundations of social naturalism, theoretical realism, and the conversion narrative. In the poverty to perversity conversion narrative, structural blame for poverty is discredited as empiricist appearance while the real problem is attributed to the corrosive effects of welfare's perverse incentives on poor people themselves-they become sexually promiscuous, thrust aside personal responsibility, and develop long-term dependency. This claim enables market fundamentalism to delegitimate existing ideational regimes, to survive disconfirming data, and to change the terms of debate from social problems to the timeless forces of nature and biology. Coupling economic sociology with a sociology of ideas, we argue that ideas count but not all ideas are created equal. Only some have the capacity to fuel radical transformations in the ideational embeddedness of markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]