Robert Brenner outlines the long-term causes of the present economic crisis. Rather than understanding the current downturn as merely a function of financial incompetence and miscalculation, he demonstrates that the US economy and that of the G7 has been slower growth in most of the major indices with each passing business cycle since the 1970s. In the last two cycles, asset bubbles inclined US consumers to take on more debt in order to spend and achieve limited GDP growth. Brenner outlines in detail how and why the financial sector played a key role in the creation and inflation of debt bubbles with new financial instruments. The implications for the US and the global economy are also outlined including the US current account deficit, trade imbalances, the rise of China and the East Asian economies as well as declining investment in the real economy and overcapacity in manufacturing worldwide.

Robert Brenner outlines the long-term causes of the present economic meltdown. Rather than understanding the current downturn as solely a function of financial malpractice and incompetence, he demonstrates that the economy has been growing slower in most of the major indices with each passing business cycle since the 1970s. In the last two cycles, asset bubbles inclined US consumers to take on more debt in order to spend and achieve limited GDP growth. The implications for the US and the global economy are also considered including the US current account deficit, trade imbalances, the rise of China and the East Asian economies as well as declining investment in the real economy and overcapacity in manufacturing worldwide.

Gary Dymski makes the case that banks are much more responsible than borrowers for the subprime crisis that has since led to a financial crisis and economic decline in the rest of the economy. The subprime bubble had its origins in the “strategic reorientation” of banks in the neoliberal era. Deregulation allowed banks to change their profit centers from “interest margin to fee-based income”. The securitization of debt opened new possibilities to rake in higher fees. Banks targeted lower income and minorities because they could be sold products that increased bank income in the form of penalties, short maturities on loans, application fees and higher risk loans. In light of the collapse of the banks, Dymski suggests that banks can and should return to more stable and socially constructive practices.

The accompanying audio files provide the complete recording of the two talks.

This dissertation examines the rise in what I call, in an approximate sense, "global unemployment," since the 1950s. The category of unemployment is difficult to apply precisely at the global level, since in most countries either there is no unemployment insurance, or that insurance covers only a small portion of the unemployed. As a result, the unemployed must work even though they are unable to find regular work. Some of these unemployed individuals end up underemployed in the formal sector of the economy. Globally, many more find their way into the informal sector. I develop a category of "surplus population," drawn from 19th century political economy, to describe the diverse situations of these unemployed and marginally employed individuals. I also offer a dynamic theory of how people come to find themselves in those situations--due to processes leading, on the one hand, to an oversupply of labor and, on the other hand, to an under-demand for labor. And I estimate the size of the global surplus population, at present.

The dissertation then goes on to provide an historical account of the rise of surplus populations worldwide, mainly in the period since World War II. My argument is that the rise of surplus populations was largely the result of three processes that unfolded globally: (1) a massive, demographically driven increase in the world's working population; (2) a global "Green Revolution," which significantly reduced the price of food but also resulted in a worldwide wave of agricultural exit, making for the further rise in the population needing jobs; and (3) a global wave of deindustrialization, which unfolded not only in the high-income countries, but also across the low-income world. The result was a huge increase in the global supply of labor relative to a weakening demand for labor, and this brought into being a gigantic population of unemployed people--whether in open or hidden forms. I try to buttress this account by reference to the exception that proves the rule: the unique developmental path of East Asia, where a combination of a more slowly growing labor supply and a larger demand for labor reduced the scale of the surplus-population problem, as compared to other developing regions.

This dissertation examines the imperial fiscal arrangement during the Qing dynasty that separated the privy or crown’s purse from the state treasury. In my dissertation, I argue that while the distinction between public and private finance has long been identified in European studies as an important sign of the rise of modernity, similar fiscal arrangements in China arose from the crown’s endeavor over several decades to consolidate authority first over the nobility and then over the Chinese state. I see dynamics of this separation as deeply rooted in China’s longstanding patrimonial bureaucratic rule. The continued functioning of the imperial state system into the Qing, a dynasty founded by non-Han rulers, thus suggests the remarkable resiliency of Chinese political traditions despite dramatic institutional changes brought by alien conquest.

This dissertation is composed of an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction sets out the reasons why the public/private divide structure does not necessarily mean the rise of modernity and demonstrates how the separation was both indicative of and shaped by China’s longstanding patrimonial bureaucratic rule. Chapter 1 discusses the role played by Nurhaci’s economic strategies in the rise of Manchu power. Understanding the emergence of the imperial fiscal separation in the Manchu state formation process, Chapter 2 discusses how the establishment of the bureaucracy helped the throne win over the Manchu nobility and how the establishment of the bureaucracy as the new foundation of the imperial authority transformed the nature of the privy purse. Chapter 3 examines the formalization of the imperial fiscal separation and its functions, looking especially at how the consolidation of the Qing rule and the expanded territories under the imperial control shaped both source of privy revenues and imperial spending behaviors. Chapter 4 unveils the expansion of privy revenues during the eighteenth-century economic prosperous era both as the consequence of the political centralization and as the instrument of releasing fiscal and military dynamisms of the centralized crown. Chapter 5 discusses how the unprecedented duration and intensity of the Taiping Rebellion not only disrupted the traditional fiscal relationship between central and provincial governments, but also broke down the traditional fiscal separation between the central government and the imperial household. Chapter 6 examines the court’s effort to codify imperial fiscal separation into the constitution in last few years of the dynasty as its last attempt to revive centralized imperial power and how such efforts provoked even more vigorous elite protests and facilitated the dynastic downfall. The conclusion summarizes arguments of each chapter and unfolds the significance of this study on our understanding of the nature of the Qing rule and modernity in Chinese history.

This dissertation examines the thought of the five principal thinkers of the distinctive German neo-liberal tradition of ordo-liberalism, a consistent and often prominent current in the intellectual life of the Bundesrepublik since the end of the Second World War. By way of intellectual profiles of these main figures, the dissertation shows that ordo-liberalism developed as a political rather than purely economic theory. Shaped by the double crisis of capitalism of the inter-war period – of inflation and global economic depression – it attempted a response to the failure of the liberalism of the time. From the 1920s, these thinkers sought institutional and social arrangements that would preserve the separation of economic and political spheres, which they believed to be the basic requirement of a functioning price mechanism. They achieved this by appeal to the state in its capacity to enforce this separation and regulate social life. The dissertation proceeds by close reading of the main texts of Walter Eucken (1891-1950) and Franz B�hm (1895-1977), representatives of the Freiburg School who developed a method of political economy and constitutional legal theory that sought to isolate the economic responsibilities of the state from democratic pressure. The dissertation then turns to the sociological thinkers Wilhelm R�pke (1899-1966) and Alexander R�stow (1885-1963), and profiles their development of a theory of mass culture and the measures the state might take to reintroduce and preserve a politics of vitality to combat it. The concluding chapter, on Alfred M�ller-Armack (1901-1978), theorist of capitalist crisis in the 1930s, economist of European integration within the Christian Democratic Union, and sociologist of religion, reconstructs his development of the social market economy and concludes with his response to the onset of the downturn of the 1970s. The dissertation shows that by various means, ordo-liberals of the first generation sought resolution to economic crisis directly through politics, and therefore were compelled to undertake comprehensive revision of liberal economics and political theory.