Technology & Innovation

The Precariat under Rentier Capitalism Guy Standing We are in the midst of a Global Transformation, analogous to Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation described in his seminal 1944 book. Whereas Polanyi’s Transformation was about constructing national market systems, today’s is about the painful construction of a global market system. To use Polanyi’s term, the ‘dis-embedded’ phase has been dominated by an ideology of market liberalisation, commodification and privatisation, orchestrated by financial interests, as in his model. The similarities also extend to today’s fundamental challenge, how to construct a ‘re-embedded’ phase, with new systems of regulation, distribution and social protection.

A discussion with Michael Grubb, INET Grantee and Professor of Energy and Climate Change at University College of London.

“Dual Economy” models were developed to explain growth in the developing world. Now they appear necessary to comprehend the high income trap that afflicts the world’s most developed economies.

The prevailing stock market ideology enriches value extractors, not value creators

In recent decades, market values have crowded out non- market norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?

Along the entire “innovation chain” — from research and development, to production and commercialization — government and private sectors have very different roles to play.

How rationalization, marketization, and globalization characterize the U.S. economy during the past 50 years, and how the behavior of companies and fate of American workers have changed during this process.

Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market economies.

Taxing the use of robotics may or may not be the answer, but the question remains how to compensate for the growing inequality created by our changing economies

As part of our “Experts on Trial Series”, Antonella Palumbo argues for stripping away ‘scientific’ shibboleths that mask social and political choices

Evidence thus far questions the assumption that robotics are eliminating jobs. INET Senior Vice President for Programs Rick McGahey says the UBI debate should focus on the long-term weakening of labor’s bargaining power

In an Al Jazeera documentary “In Search of the Great American Job”, Institute scholar William Lazonick offers some arch insights into the relationship between financialization — particularly the “shareholder value” ideology in corporations, which drives the transfer of profits to shareholders through stock buybacks — and job creation and inequality.

Improved access to education is often touted as the key to addressing racial inequality in the economy, but Lisa Cook’s research into the innovation economy shows that women and African-Americans are underrepresented despite their educational qualifications.

A conversation with Richard Vague, Managing Partner at Gabriel Investments and Chairman of the Governor’s Woods Foundation.

The “dean of short sellers” says bitcoin is the last thing he’d want to own in the event of a catastrophe.