Household indebtedness, distribution, and bargaining power under distribution-induced technological change: a macroeconomic analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-318
Author(s):  
Eric Kemp-Benedict ◽  
Y.K. Kim
Keyword(s):  
Income Distribution ◽  
Technological Change ◽  
Bargaining Power ◽  
Technological Changes ◽  
Profit Rate ◽  
Wage Share ◽  
Macroeconomic Analysis ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

We present a stylized model to explore the interaction between household debt, functional income distribution, and technological change. We assume that weak labor bargaining power allows firms to set their mark-ups in order to meet a target profit rate. At a low wage share, workers’ households are assumed to have limited flexibility in meeting financial goals, so household indebtedness tends to rise as the wage share falls. Rising indebtedness further lowers labor's bargaining power, a phenomenon that was observed in the wave of financialization that began in the late twentieth century. Thus, rising debt levels allow firms even greater freedom to raise their target profit rate. We find that the dynamics can be either stable or unstable, with the potential for a self-reinforcing pattern of rising household indebtedness and falling wage share, consistent with trends in the US from the 1980s onward. The unstable cycle can be triggered by increased willingness by workers to incur debt and rising influence of household indebtedness on labor's bargaining strength and income distribution. The model can shed some light on widely observed trends over recent decades regarding household indebtedness, inequality, and technological changes in the US, and potentially in other OECD countries.

scholarly journals Green-revolution epistemologies in China and India: technocracy and revolution in the production of scientific knowledge and peasant identity

BJHS Themes ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 145-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
MADHUMITA SAHA ◽  
SIGRID SCHMALZER
Keyword(s):  
Green Revolution ◽  
Socialist Revolution ◽  
Technical Knowledge ◽  
Agricultural Technologies ◽  
The Us ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Chemical Inputs ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
India And China

AbstractThis paper juxtaposes the epistemological challenges raised by new agricultural technologies in India and China during the mid- to late twentieth century. In both places, the state actively sought to adopt the ‘improved’ seeds and chemical inputs of what USAID triumphantly called the ‘green revolution’; however, in neither country did this imply an unproblematic acceptance of the technocratic assumptions that undergirded the US programme. India and China's distinct ideological contexts produced divergent epistemological alternatives to the US vision, with particularly important differences in the perceived relationship between the sociopolitical and technoscientific realms and also in the understanding of what constituted a ‘modern’ farmer. In India, critics persistently challenged the technocratic state to consider social, political and economic aspects of agrarian modernization, but radical leaders in Mao-era China went considerably further in attacking the very notion that technological change could be divorced from social and political revolution. Leaders in both India and China sought to overcome ‘backwardness’ and ‘superstition’; however, the Indian state held up examples of farmers who exemplified capitalist ideals of modernity through their willingness to take risks in pursuit of profit, while Chinese leaders valorized peasant technicians who combined experience in labour, new technical knowledge and faith in socialist revolution.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alys Moody
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This book has traced a history of modernism’s decline and of its doubters. In post-Vichy France, the US circa 1968, and late apartheid South Africa, modernism’s fate was precarious, its reputation tarnished, and its politics reviled. The inescapability of the political in these contexts compromised the structural conditions of the autonomous literary field on which modernism had been built. In turn, it threw into crisis the philosophical defense of autonomy and the literary legacies of modernism, which grew out of and were guaranteed by this autonomous literary field. The stories we tell about late twentieth-century literary history reflect this dilemma. According to received wisdom, the period between 1945 and 1990 saw postmodernism replace modernism in both literature and scholarship, and new waves of postcolonial literature and theory discredited the Eurocentric specter of modernism. ...

Samba

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mika Lior
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Northeastern Brazil ◽  
Upper Body ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Afro Brazilian

Modern samba music and dance began in Rio de Janeiro’s Afro-Brazilian communities in the early 1900s and spread rapidly to international audiences through twentieth-century technologies of mass media, recording, and cinema. Rio’s samba developed from Bahian samba de roda, which has been danced and played by enslaved Africans and their descendants from the sixteenth century to the present. Modern samba differed from the circular samba de roda through its harmonic elements, the linear use of space, increased speed and footwork, and stylized upper body positions. First brought to the US by Brazilian sensation Carmen Miranda through Hollywood films of the 1940s, samba’s numerous rhythmic variations have achieved broad global recognition in the twenty-first century. The fast-paced samba no pé singularizes Rio’s world-famous carnaval, which expanded through modern industrial fabrication of floats and costumes and through increasingly cross-national commerce while continuing to capitalize on influences from traditional Afro-Brazilian dance and percussion. The partner dance samba de gafieira has spread from its origins in Rio’s neighborhoods to nightclubs in urban locations across Brazil, North America, and Europe. Meanwhile samba reggae, a late twentieth-century reappropriation of samba within northeastern Brazil that integrates African aesthetic elements with reggae beats and steps has become emblematic of Bahian popular culture.

Penelope Fitzgerald

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Adlington
Keyword(s):  
Full Range ◽  
Blue Flower ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
Literary Reputation ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Compositional Method ◽  
Final Work

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) has been acclaimed as one of the finest novelists of the late-twentieth century. Four of her novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. One of them, Offshore (1979), won. Her final work of historical fiction, The Blue Flower (1995), won the US National Book Critics’ Circle Award. Fitzgerald’s works are distinguished by their acute wit, deft handling of emotional tone and an unsentimental yet deeply felt commitment to portraying the lives of those men, women and children ’who seem to have been born defeated’. Admirers have long recognized the brilliance of Fitzgerald’s writing, yet the deceptive simplicity of her style invariably leads readers to ask, ‘How is it done?’ This book seeks to answer that question, providing the first sustained exposition of Penelope Fitzgerald’s compositional method, working both inwards from the surface of her writing and outwards from the archival evidence of Fitzgerald’s own drafts and working papers. The book’s six main chapter cover the full range of Fitzgerald’s writing, including her extensive critical writing, her three biographies, nine novels, numerous short stories, poems and letters. It also considers Fitzgerald’s literary reputation and influence, and contains a biographical outline, an appendix of uncollected and unattributed poems, and an annotated bibliography.

Evening in America

2020 ◽  
pp. 69-92
Author(s):  
Dan Sinykin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mexican War ◽  
Blood Meridian ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Economic Imperialism ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

James Baldwin’s observation that “American investments cannot be considered safe wherever the population cannot be considered tractable” could serve as a précis for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I show how McCarthy’s novel traces US scalp hunters in northern Mexico in the aftermath of the US-Mexican War as they clear the land of intractable Indians—i.e. slaughter them for cash—so the United States can pivot from settler colonialism to economic imperialism. The scalp hunters prove as bad for capital as the Indians they decimate, debauching cities, taking Mexican scalps that might pass as Indian, and destroying the means of production. Writing from late twentieth-century capitalist crisis, McCarthy depicts a constitutive violence that capitalism has unleashed, but cannot control. What remains, for McCarthy, beyond capitalism is the excess that fells it, a drive to violence.

scholarly journals Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Great Britain and the United States Since 1850

2013 ◽  
Vol 103 (4) ◽  
pp. 1109-1137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Long ◽  
Joseph Ferrie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Occupational Mobility ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
Fathers And Sons ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The US tolerates more inequality than Europe and believes its economic mobility is greater than Europe's, though they had roughly equal rates of intergenerational occupational mobility in the late twentieth century. We extend this comparison into the nineteenth century using 10,000 nationally-representative British and US fathers and sons. The US was more mobile than Britain through 1900, so in the experience of those who created the US welfare state in the 1930s, the US had indeed been “exceptional.” The US mobility lead over Britain was erased by the 1950s, as US mobility fell from its nineteenth century levels. (JEL J62, N31, N32, N33, N34)

‘Fascinans’ or ‘tremendum’? Permutations of the state, the body, and the divine in late-twentieth-century Havana

2004 ◽  
Vol 78 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 229-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Palmié
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
Special Period ◽  
The Us ◽  
Cuban Government ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Us Dollar ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Focuses on the introduction of capitalist elements, such as the use of the dollar as currency, in Cuba in the 1990s, and discusses survival strategies among the Cuban people, during the "special period" since 1989. Based on fieldwork and experiences in Havana, the author pays particular attention to the important role of (obtaining) dollars instead of the less valuable peso currency for Cubans in response to deprivations, and how this occurs through different forms of hustling people with money, including offering sexual favours to tourists, as well as to an increased focus on own interests instead of on courteous sharing among Cubans, and increased racial cleavages. He finds that the introduction of the dollar in Cuba, as well as tourism's growth, garnered income, but also stimulated inequalities in access to dollars and to dollar-prized commodities, and had morally problematic effects, because working formally for the state with wages in pesos generally paid less than informal work to obtain dollars. He describes how this increased instrumental thinking and made hustling widespread, and also stimulated shams and secular intentionality within the practice of Afro-Cuban religions, e.g. fake possessions to obtain dollar offerings to deities from foreigners at ceremonies. In addition, he refers to the ending of the circulation of the US dollar as currency in Cuba as decreed by the Cuban government in November 2004, making the dollar's role in practice historical.

The Future Challenge to the Past: The Case of the American Welfare State

1984 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 383-416
Author(s):  
Robert Morris
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Future Challenge ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
The Welfare State

ABSTRACTThis article and its commentaries examine some of the difficulties that confront supporters of the welfare state as they encounter critical opposition which has evolved in the US in recent years. Attention is directed to trends in popular attitudes which seem to produce a more narrow vision of welfare than that usually advanced by advocates and social policy makers, the changing nature of dependency and the unexpected consequences of universal benefit programmes. Different views are presented about how to approach welfare state developments in the US in the late twentieth century.

Trashing Identity Politics: Does It Really Get Us Back to Class?

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 42-49
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Us ◽  
Privileged Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Verity Burgmann creates an unnecessary and ahistorical distinction between the politics of class and that of the various identities through which the contemporary working class defines itself. Indeed, her vision of a self-conscious proletariat seems too male and too musty. Racial and gender identities have achieved a privileged status, compared to that of class, but this has less to do with the outlook of the left-wing academy than with the late twentieth-century transformation of law, politics, and social policy, both in the US and other multicultural nations.

Nine Centuries of Man

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Court Records ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Police Reports ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document