Political Economy Commons^™

The Elusive Rainbow Nation: Assessing Post-Apartheid Reconstruction Strategies In Johannesburg, South Africa, Ashley May Eugley

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This paper examines how South Africa’s political and economic orientation following the nation’s democratization in 1994 enabled a continuation of Apartheid-era patterns in the City of Johannesburg. In particular, it contends that governmental decentralization, neoliberalism, and global city aspirations—enshrined in both local and national policy documents—turned attention away from addressing internal deprivations. Rather than redistributing social and economic power, uplifting the Black-majority, and allowing urban stakeholders to play a central role in policy formation and decision-making, Johannesburg’s City Government catered to elite outside interests, effectively introducing new forms of segmentation and disenfranchisement. Although the African National Congress committed to transform …

Economic Propaganda In The United States, Brooklyn Montgomery

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis aims to identify and analyze three different forms of economic propaganda: cultural, structural, and political. I first examine ‘Do What You Love’ culture and its impact on the labor force. Chapter Two explores the propagation of neoliberal economics as an objective study, and the final chapter analyzes the use of Black capitalism as a political mechanism to quell Black radical sentiment. In detailing these phenomenons, I investigate the implementation, normalization, and effects, as well as the material repercussions of these ideas and structures.

It's Capitalism, Stupid!: The Theoretical And Political Limitations Of The Concept Of Neoliberalism, Bryant William Sculos

Class, Race and Corporate Power

This polemical essay explores the meaning and function of the concept of neoliberalism, focusing on the serious theoretical and political limitations of the concept. The crux of the argument is that, for those interested in overcoming the exploitative and oppressively destructive elements of global capitalism, opposing "neoliberalism" (even if best understood as a process or a spectrum of "neoliberalization" or simply privatization) is both insufficient and potentially self-undermining. This article also goes into some detail on the issues of health care and climate change in relation to "neoliberalism" (both conceptually and the material processes and policies that this term refers …

Taxation For Whom?:A Diachronic Analysis Of Taxation In Ireland And The United Kingdom From 1970-2015., Ewan Macdonald, John Hogan, Brendan O'Rourke

Other

This paper explores the discursive development of taxation within budget speeches in two countries, the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, from 1970 to 2015 by means of a corpus-assisted discourse analysis. We ask the following questions; how have discourses of taxation developed diachronically in both countries, what are the similarities and differences in the observable discourses across both countries, and for whom and how are these discourses legitimised? In answering these questions, this paper makes use of Corpus linguistics, a methodological approach which utilises computational analysis of large bodies of text to draw statistically significant conclusions about the …

The Fair And Laissez-Faire Markets: From A Neoliberal Laissez-Faire Baseline To A Fair Market, Eric L. Dixon

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

The essay begins with a brief overview of the role of the neoliberal conception of the laissez-faire market in modern political economy. The essay then goes on to defend three claims: 1) the laissez-faire version of a market should not be considered the economic ideal or baseline version of a market because often the fundamental conditions required to reach a genuine equilibrium are unfulfilled under a laissez-faire environment, 2) a distribution resultant from a laissez-faire market should not be considered the ultima facie just distributive baseline because an unregulated market may allocate commodities according to morally arbitrary factors and requires …

From Financing Social Insurance To Insuring Financial Markets: The Socialisation Of Risk And The Privatisation Of Profit In An Age Of Irresponsibility, Simon Lee, Richard Woodward

Books/Book Chapters

Commentaries on the financial meltdown that began with Lehman Brothers’ collapse in September 2008 trace its origins to greedy bankers exploiting lax regulatory practices to take excessive risks through exotic and arcane financial instruments. While not wishing to demur from this analysis this chapter takes issue with the frequent failure to acknowledge that this has come about as a consequence of the (mis)application of state power over the past 50 years (see Helleiner 1994). Starting with the tacit support for the development of the Euromarkets in the 1960s and culminating with the responses to the turmoil of 2008-2010 the chapter …

Moving Beyond Markets And Minimalism: Democracy In The Era Of Globalization, Richard Burchill

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Democracy as Human Rights: Freedom and Equality in the Age of Globalization by Michael Goodhart. London: Routledge, 2005.