By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, December 19th, 2011 
Ideological clichés are deadly. In 1989, the end of the short twentieth century (1917 – 1989) with all its horrors, I thought this simple proposition was something that had been learned, broadly across the political spectrum . I was wrong, and the evidence has been overwhelming. This was my biggest mistake as a sociologist of the politics and culture.
When Soviet Communism collapsed, I thought it had come to be generally understood that simple ideological explanations that purported to provide complete understanding of past, present and future, and the grounds for solving the problems of the human condition, were destined for the dustbin of history. The fantasies of race and class theory resulted in profound human suffering. I thought there was global awareness that modern magical thinking about human affairs should and would come to an end.
My first indication I had that I was mistaken came quickly, December 31, 1989, to be precise. It came in the form of an op ed. piece by Milton Friedman. While celebrating the demis e of socialism in the Soviet bloc, he called for its demise in the United States, which he asserted was forty-five per cent socialist, highlighting the post office, the military (a necessary evil to his mind) and education. He called for a domestic roll back of the socialist threat now that the foreign threat had been vanquished. Friedman knew with absolute certainty that only capitalism promoted freedom, and he consequentially promoted radical privatization as a solution to all social problems. This was an early battle cry for the neo-liberal assault of the post-cold war era.
The assault seemed particularly silly to me, and hit close to home, since I heard Friedman lecture when I . . .
Read more: My Big Mistake: The End of Ideology, Then and Now
By William Milberg, February 24th, 2011 
The current economic slowdown constitutes a breakdown for advanced capitalism. Its means of allocating capital – financial markets – froze up and would have collapsed completely if governments had not intervened on a massive scale. The rates of growth of output and employment in most industrialized countries are anemic and persistent. Does not the breakdown of capitalism require some fundamental rethinking of its explanation system, aka economic theory? Today’s troubles and the failure of most economists to predict them have given rise to a lively debate within the discipline about the sources of failure of economic theory and the ways in which it should be reformed. This is a good sign. But the current debate among economists is shallow and confined to a tweaking of its existing toolkit. There is no indication that this debate will produce the intellectual revolution needed to respond to the theoretical and policy challenges facing industrialized countries.
The discipline of economics has been no stranger to methodological controversy. The Methodenstreit (debate over method) among German social scientists in the 1880s, the Keynesian revolution in the 1930s, the ‘F-twist’ debate in the 1960s over the importance of realism of assumptions, and the ‘Cambridge controversy’ over the meaning of capital in the 1970s are some of the most notable debates. But not all methodological discussions are created equal. Some are profound—questioning the very structure of the reigning methodology—while others are more superficial, aiming at incremental reform or merely cosmetic change. We find that the current discussion is for the most part quite shallow, and will remain so unless certain voices in the debate are given more emphasis.
The central problem is that almost nobody dares to rethink the nature of economic life and the proper scope of economic thinking. This deeper approach is precisely what we find in the Methodenstreit and in Keynes’ innovations. On its surface the Methodenstreit was a debate over whether concrete historical analysis or mathematical modeling was better suited to explain economics. But this question ultimately rested on the question of what the realm of political . . .
Read more: Waiting for the New Keynes
By Vince Carducci, January 7th, 2011 
“Austerity” is a watchword in the media these days in both domestic and international economic news. The recent downturn, the story goes, has meant that governments can no longer sustain entitlement obligations or take on any more debt. So too must citizens reduce their expectations and assume more personal responsibility, accepting less in return.
In her book Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, economist and sociologist Juliet B. Schor presents a different narrative, one that suggests the current environment is an opportunity to live a more satisfactory, which is to say richer, life. She offers a solution to the “work-and-spend” dilemma of modern consumerism she initially described in her 1992 bestseller “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure” and continued in the follow up “The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need” of 1999. Her thesis rests on four principles: freeing up time by reducing work hours outside the home, shifting that free time to more self-provisioning, developing low cost, low impact but high satisfaction consumption, and reinvesting in community and other forms of social capital.
Why “Business As Usual” No Longer Works
One of Schor’s main assertions is that we must find another way to define wealth and well-being because, in a phrase, there is no alternative. The supposedly endless cycle of material expansion that fueled economic growth as part of what historian Lizabeth Cohen calls the “consumers’ republic” of the postwar era has been exhausted in America at least. Double-digit unemployment, evaporating home equity, and eroding pension balances have taken the gloss off the consumer spending that accounted for between two-thirds and 70 percent of the US economy in recent years.
But more than that, business as usual (or as Schor refers to it “BAU”) has run into another, less malleable barrier: the environment. Mainstream economics has by and large failed to account for the environmental effects (so-called externalities) of growth, a charge many progressives will no doubt find familiar. In particular, Schor debunks the Environmental Kuznets Curve that projects a bell-shaped ratio of . . .
Read more: Juliet B. Schor’s Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 15th, 2010 
 I had to make a decision about this blog early on.
Would it be DeliberatelyConsidered.org or DeliberatelyConsidered.com, non-commercial or commercial? I chose the commercial route in the hopes that the blog would be self-sustaining and self-defining as much as possible from the start, and if it grew, if I needed more support in providing a space for serious reflections and exchanges about pressing issues of the day, it wouldn’t cost me and I wouldn’t need to raise funds.
For many people, this decision would be straightforward. For those who are sure that capitalism is the root of all evil, who imagine a systemic alternative to capitalism, in socialism, it’s clear, “.org” is clearly the way to go. For those who see the free market as the answer to all problems, the decision is equally clear. But I am more ambivalent, less sure than such true believers, as I wrote about in an earlier post.
In going commercial, I had in mind an observation Russell Jacoby made in his book, The Last Intellectuals. He mourned the substitution of academic life for the culture of urbane intellectuals, the culture of university cafeterias for café culture, academic journals for the small magazines that sustained such intellectuals as Edmund Wilson, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy and others like them.
Jacoby celebrated a world in which people actually could make a living from critical writing. They had a freedom and independence that supported a style of intellectual life that appears to be a thing of the past, a lost golden age as Jacoby sees it.
While I am not so nostalgic, I thought that a commercial blog may provide a space for a revival of the sort of critical culture he and I admire. I would create a space for critical reflection that was not dependent on academic priorities but upon public concerns, of everyday, in the Kitchen Table, of interdisciplinary scholarly concern, in the Scholars’ Lounge, of general intellectual and public concern, at Joe’s Café, and in the emerging but not completely formed world of global public discussion, in Global Perspectives. The spontaneity and flexibility of the market and . . .
Read more: “.Org” or “.Com”?
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