Neoliberal governmentality, knowledge work, and thumos

Research has shown that the knowledge worker, the decisive driver of the knowledge economy, works increasingly longer hours. In fact, it would appear that instead of working to live, they live to work. There appears to be three reasons for this living-to-work development. First, the knowledge worker ‘has to’ on account of the pressure to become ever more efficient. Such pressure translates into internalized coercion in the case of the self-responsible knowledge worker. Secondly, working is constant, because the Internet and smart technologies and mobile devices have made it ‘possible’. It gives the worker the capacity and management omnipotent control. In the final instance, the neoliberal knowledge worker works all the time because s/he paradoxically ‘wants to’. It is a curious phenomenon, because this compulsive working is concomitant with a rise of a host of physical, emotional, and psychological disorders as well as the erosion of social bonds. The paradox is exacerbated by the fact that the knowledge worker does not derive any of the usual utilities or satisfactions associated with hard work. Elsewhere I have ascribed this apparent contradiction at the heart of the living-to-work phenomenon to the invisible thumotic satisfaction generated by knowledge work. In the present article, I argue that neoliberal governmentality has found a way to tether thumos directly to the profit incentive. I draw on Foucault’s 1978-1979 Collége de France lecture course in which he analysed neoliberal governmentality with specific emphasis on the work of the neoliberal theorist of human capital, Gary Becker.

Crimen y economía: un acercamiento a la teoría de Gary Becker

Este artículo presenta algunas aportaciones del Premio Nobel de Economía Gary Becker (1992), quien estudió los incentivos económicos que pueden provocar diversos grados de incumplimiento normativo. Según Becker (1971), quien elige conductas criminales asigna, a partir de sus costos de oportunidad, un precio diferenciado a cada delito. Este artículo presenta algunas aplicaciones de la microeconomía a un problema social sumamente relevante: la criminalidad.

Thick Concepts in Economics: The Case of Becker and Murphy’s Theory of Rational Addiction

In this paper, we examine the viability of avoiding value judgments encoded in thick concepts when these concepts are used in economic theories. We focus on what implications the use of such thick concepts might have for the tenability of the fact/value dichotomy in economics. Thick concepts have an evaluative and a descriptive component. Our suggestion is that despite attempts to rid thick concepts of their evaluative component, economists are often not successful. We focus on the strategy of explication to remove the evaluative component of thick concepts and argue that often economists either have to make value judgments or are unable to individuate out the phenomenon under analysis. We support our claim with a case study, namely the concept of addiction in Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy’s Theory of Rational Addiction (1988). One consequence of our analysis is that theories containing thick concepts could commit economists to making value judgments and as such undermine the fact/value dichotomy.

Conditional Cash Transfers and Migration: Reconciling Feminist Theoretical Approaches With the New Economics of Labor Migration

In 2019, I published a study titled “Reexamining the Influence of Conditional Cash Transfers on Migration from a Gendered Lens,” to which Oded Stark has since issued a formal comment. This response has been written to address the major themes of Stark's comment. While the first three sections focus on specific items related to framing, selection bias, and endogeneity, the fourth and final section tackles a more substantive theoretical debate between Stark and me over how to conceptualize the New Economics of Labor Migration framework in relation to gender. In my original paper, I argued that conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are gendered in their program conditions in ways that promote a normative gendered division of labor and that constrain beneficiary women from migrating. I note here that Stark's primary issue with this point appears to be his contention that CCTs are not necessarily gendered but rather that women have a comparative advantage in completing housework and care work. My response first compares Stark's argument to that made by Gary Becker in A Treatise on the Family and engages with the literature that has emerged to critique Becker's own arguments regarding gendered comparative advantage. I then conclude my final section by offering some suggestions that might open a common theoretical path forward—one that insists on grounding microeconomic analyses of family behavior on assumptions that take gender and other aspects of culture and institutions seriously and one that also moves toward a bargaining model of microeconomic behavior rather than one that assumes consensus among all relevant actors.

Relationship Between Year of Schooling and Household Income: Special Reference with Two Localities of Dibrugarh and Jorhat District of Assam

The study is based on the relationship between year of schooling of children and their parents’ income. Gary Becker, a noble prize winning economist made a preposition in 1950s that the amount of education had a direct bearing on income. This study is based on the relationship between years of schooling of children and the income of their parents and how the socio-economic condition of a family impact on the World’s Human Development. The data for the study was collected from two localities of Jorhat and Dibrugarh District of Assam, India. The data was primary and it consists of 750 people from a village and a tea tribe of 599 people. Methods used to analyse the data was Ordinary least squares.

Effects of Energy Use on Socioeconomic Predictors in Africa: Synthesizing Evidence

The paper examined the effects of energy use on socioeconomic predictors in Africa. The Gary Becker hypothesis and the Michael Grossman demand for healthcare model were used to interact with energy related predictors on socioeconomic essentials. Our experimented model foretold the urgent need for government intervention programmes to resolve the energy misery in the African region.

EL CONCEPTO DE EDUCACIÓN Y SU RELACIÓN CON EL CRECIMIENTO ECONÓMICO EN LA UE-28

RESUMEN Los primeros análisis teóricos sobre la correlación entre educación y crecimiento económico fueron sustentados por Theodore Schultz, Edward Deninson y Gary Becker, durante la década de los 60. El estudio de las interconexiones dadas entre dichas variables viene determinada por la Economía de la Educación, la cual analiza de manera detallada cuales son las principales actuaciones que llevan los Estados nacionales sobre el sector educativo y sus consecuencias en el crecimiento económico de una sociedad.

The Economics of Parenting

Parenting decisions are among the most consequential choices that people make throughout their lives. Starting with the work of pioneers such as Gary Becker, economists have used the tool set of their discipline to understand what parents do and how parents’ actions affect their children. In recent years, the literature on parenting within economics has increasingly leveraged findings and concepts from related disciplines that also deal with parent–child interactions. For example, economists have developed models to understand the choice among various parenting styles that were first explored in the developmental psychology literature and have estimated detailed empirical models of children's accumulation of cognitive and noncognitive skills in response to parental and other inputs. In this review, we survey the economic literature on parenting and point out promising directions for future research.