Goodwin: Chaotic Economic Dynamics (1990) PREFACE

 Preface to "Chaotic Economic Dynamics" by Richard M. Goodwin (1990)


THE origin of this collection of short essays was a series of seminars given in 1988 at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. My aim has been to elaborate the central conceptual framework of the modern industrial economy. In this sense it derives from the formulation of the problem by my teacher and friend Joseph Schumpeter. Though a neoclassical economist, he perceived the essentially evolutionary nature of the industrialized nations.

By comparison with the natural sciences, economics suffers from the lack of a solid empirical foundation based on generally valid experimental data. To make up for this deficiency, an ingenious substitute has been elaborated with great subtlety and considerable success. The method consists in asking what would a rational man (now fashionably called an 'agent') do when confronted by the manifold problems of an economic nature: he is alleged to maximize his utility or his satisfactions, by minimizing his costs and maximizing his profits or his gains of whatever sort he desires.

Under the banner of General Equilibrium Theory, this has been developed into an imposing analytic web of how a system of a large number of such agents would interact in a unified market mechanism. This programme, in an increasingly mathematical form, has produced impressive results, which may be considered 'mainstream' economics. Some tentative efforts at a kind of experimental economics have raised serious doubts about this 'rational' behaviour.

John Halle reports on #occupywallstreet

Very good report on #occupywallstreet reposted from Facebook http://www.facebook.com/notes/john-halle/wall-street-protest-sept-24-2011/10150384437470050

Hi Everyone,

The following is a report from the Wall Street Occupation protest march which I am now on the train returning home from.

Wednesday Orgdown 9/21/11

Brandworkers International is an interesting organization, they specialize in business-to-business boycott tactics, such as persuading restaurants to drop suppliers with bad labor practices. I was reminded of them today because they are publicizing an international day of action against Tnuva, a NYC distributor with a truly horrible record of wage theft, intimidation of workers, and illegal firing.

The action against Tnuva is part of the "Focus on the Food Chain" campaign, which, according to its facebook page is "a joint effort of the non-profit organization Brandworkers and the Industrial Workers of the World (NYC) labor union" to "[organize] recent immigrant workers in New York City's food processing and distribution sector to challenge and overcome sweatshop conditions."

A recent article in Crain's New York talks about Brandworkers, FFC, and the Tnuva campaign: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110821/SMALLBIZ/308219981

Bill Fletcher on Black Power at Work

Book Review republished from Industrial and Labor Relations Review, vol. 15 July 2011

Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative
Action, and the Construction Industry.
Edited by David Goldberg and Trevor Griffey.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010,
265 pp. ISBN 978-0-8014-7431-6, $24.95
(paper).

I did not actually meet and speak with Leo Fletcher (no relation) until the 1980s, but in the fall of 1972 as a freshman at Harvard, and as a student radical, I quickly discovered who he was. Leo was the chief leader of an organization known as the United Community Construction Workers (UCCW). This group of Black and Latino workers was on the frontline in the struggle to desegregate the racist building trades industry of Boston. Leo and his colleagues were at one and the same time worker-leaders at the tail-end of the Black Power phase of the Black Freedom Movement while also serving as champions of a radical vision of labor unionism.

The UCCW was not an isolated initiative. It was part of a national phenomenon that has been largely ignored by both labor historians and historians of the Black Freedom Movement. Black worker organizing, whether from the early 1950s and the National Negro Labor Council or much later in the 1960s/early 1970s with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, has been marginalized by historians as almost being an enigma. The reality is that such efforts, along with many others—including the famous 1968 Memphis, TN sanitation workers organizing and strike where Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered—were essential components of the Black Freedom movement as well as attempts to construct a different vision of labor unionism in the United States.

In this light, David Goldberg and Trevor Griffey’s edited volume Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Action, and the Construction Industry is an invaluable resource.

Conversation with Gregory Butler re: associate membership programs

Sam Calvin
New Union Approach in New Zealand (2 articles) "undertaking...to build a modern union movement capable of offering easy, low threshold membership to any worker that wants to participate, including having plans and capacity to support unions to change and organize in new sectors."
LISTSERV 16.0 - PORTSIDELABOR Archives
https://lists.portside.org/cgi-bin/listserv/wa?A2=ind1109A&L=PORTSIDELABOR&F&S&P=92
LikeUnlike • • Share • Sunday at 4:37pm
Sam Calvin Also: "Together is a values based organization - by its nature and by the nature of the workplaces of its members, bargaining is not an option at this stage for most members but participation and organization is."
Sunday at 4:38pm • LikeUnlike
Gregory A. Butler
This sounds a LOT like the various "associate membership" schemes that the AFL-CIO have tried over the last 30 years.

Those schemes have to date been a resounding failure.

Bottom line, if a unoin can't get workers more money in their paycheck and protect them from abuses on the job, its useless to them.

Workers aren't stupid. They aren't going to join some amorphous labor social club and pay their hard earned money in dues unless it does something concrete for them.See More
Sunday at 5:10pm • UnlikeLike • 1 person

Arguing in terms of Virtue

David Brooks - The Vigorous Virtues (New York Times)

This article is interesting because of the comments it generates. Moving the debate onto the terrain of virtue produces more profound, more populist responses than are typically seen in "policy" centered debates, where many of the moral issues are submerged. Union supporters take note, this shift is very effective, and something that needs to be understood by folks who want to move popular opinion...

It's tempting for those who have seen the effects of the moral style of argumentation used by the right so effectively since the time of Regan to conclude it is demogogic, but in fact it would be more accurate to call it persuasive persuasive...

Aronowitz quote

The rest of his piece on the split-off of the Change to Win coalition from the AFL-CIO is fairly mundane, if reasonably accurate, but this quote has a bit of fire:

Whatever its practices, until the 1970s, the Teamsters paraded an image of economic power that was unrivalled by its AFL-CIO competitors most of whom were making nice to the bosses. The Teamsters had success because they offered a program of resistance. Are there any sections of Organized Labor that even remember how to talk the talk of class power when for decades, they have assured workers that they can secure justice by peaceful means, that the old methods of baptism by fire were outmoded and the labor movement had become “responsible”?

Can't remember the last time I read the phrase "class power"...