Maximizing Risk and Uncertainty in a Changing World

Notes on Volatility in Cultures of Finance

One of the most remarkable contemporary developments has been the rise of what might be called a “politics of volatility” in which volatility is deliberately produced to take advantage of the uncertainty it creates. Its current embodiment is Donald Trump. Like the efficient market that he embraces, in the primaries, ...
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Maximizing Risk and Uncertainty in a Changing World

Remaking the Rust Belt

The Postindustrial Transformation of North America

The decline of American manufacturing and what to do about it has been a key topic in the current election cycle. The demise of the nation's industrial plant, and its implications for manufacturing cities such as Detroit, Akron, and Pittsburgh, has often been seen as inevitable, a result of blind ...
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Remaking the Rust Belt

You Broke It Now You Buy It

Trump Voters Lose Ability to Separate Themselves from President-Elect

In the aftermath of the election I'm hearing from some Trump supporters. They do not want to be grouped with the racists, the sexists, the xenophobes, the hatemongers. They personally have no sympathy for the KKK they claim. They voted for change, for the breakup of an entrenched Washington elite, ...
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You Broke It Now You Buy It

The Revolt of the Rust Belt

A closer analysis of Trump’s victory

The election is over and a potentially disastrous candidate has won. The damage to civil tolerance and multiculturalism is likely to be profound. A lot of people’s lives will change. Naturally, people are asking the question: who could have voted Trump into office? Well, clearly it’s white people. This isn’t ...
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The Revolt of the Rust Belt

Why The Free Market Is No Longer Free

Rent Control in the Bay Area

The San Francisco Bay Area is in a state of emergency where teachers, janitors, and engineers are living in RVs or commuting hours to get to their jobs. Unchecked rent increases and unjust evictions are putting people into the streets. California has 115,000 homeless residents at last count, and the ...
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Why The Free Market Is No Longer Free

Punk Preempts the Post-Popstar Age

Prosumption and Celebrity within Neoliberal Economics

“maybe they’re born with it. maybe they watched loads of YouTube tutorials.” So reads the SoundCloud page description of Internet-native photographer, artist, and musician Arvida Byström. In the 1977 issue of the UK fanzine Sideburns, the punk movement was once instructed, “this is a chord, this is another, this is a ...
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Punk Preempts the Post-Popstar Age

Italian Constitutional Reform

The “Urgent” Solution to a Non-Existent Problem

“The reform of the second part of the Constitution cannot wait any longer.” This sentence from the introductory report to the “Renzi-Boschi” Constitutional Bill (A.C. 2613 -- D) could sound quite odd to an American reader. In fact, the Italian Constitution, entered into force on January 1, 1948, has been ...
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Italian Constitutional Reform

The Smartest Places on Earth

Why Rustbelts Are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation

For nearly four decades, the manufacturing centers of the industrialized world have been in decline, their once mighty engines of mass productivity decommissioned and rendered into silent, rusting hulks. Waves of capital and (mostly white) people have streamed out of the central cities, leaving ruined landscapes in their wake. Recently ...

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The Smartest Places on Earth

Thoughts on the Hungarian and Polish New Right in Power

Eviscerating the Constitutional Court and purging the judiciary, complete politicization of the civil service, turning public media into a government mouthpiece, restricting opposition prerogatives in parliament, unilateral wholesale change of the Constitution or plain violation of it, official tolerance and even promotion of racism and bigotry, administrative assertion of traditional ...

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Thoughts on the Hungarian and Polish New Right in Power