Aurelie Charles

Financialization, the Great Recession, and the Stratification of the US Labor Market

This contribution explores the possibility that the financialization of the US economy has created identity preference effects by linking managerial and financial occupations to high earnings, and in turn high earnings to the social status of the dominant demographic group in the labor force, namely white men. The empirical results for the 1983–2009 period confirm that a wage premium exists for individuals working in managerial and financial occupations, and that this finance wage premium is not equally distributed among all gender and ethnic groups. For each ethnic group, men have taken an increasing share of the finance wage premium at the expense of women. More specifically, white – and, to a lesser degree, Hispanic – men have enjoyed a disproportionate share of the finance wage premium. Financialization has thus been neither race nor gender neutral, and is at least in part responsible for the stratification effects of the Great Recession.

Jane Austen, Game Theorist

From the perspective of a game theorist with a romantic nature, Michael Chwe explores the six novels of Jane Austen. Chwe argues that Austen was a pioneer in the understanding of strategic thinking that shapes individual choices, and hence individual behavior. The result is an original interpretation of Austen’s imagination whose unique critical way of thinking put her ahead of her time not only for English literature but for understanding the individual motives driving human interactions.

Introduction to the Special Issue on “Ethics, Global Finance and the Great Recession”

Philip Arestis, Aurelie Charles and Giuseppe Fontana Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK; Departemento de Economia Aplicada, Universidad del Pais Vasco, Bilbao, Spain; Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath, Bath, UK; Department of Economics, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK; Dipartimento di Diritto, Economia, Management e Metodi Quantitativi (DEMM), Universita degli Studi del Sannio, Benevento, Italy

Power, Intergroup Conflicts and Social Stratification in the United States: What has the Global Crisis Taught Us?

Abstract Drawing on early sociological analyses of how power and intergroup conflicts can affect the development of modern economies, this paper investigates how the recent Global Crisis (GC) has affected the stratification of the US society. The paper argues that the consumerist society has reinforced the historical stratification of social identities with white men in high-paid, high-social status managerial and financial occupations at the top, and black women in low-paid, low-status service occupations at the bottom. This paper calls for a deconstruction of the neoliberal individual into a unique combination of identities in a stratified capitalist society in order to reveal how social stratification has evolved during the GC. The paper finally concludes on the importance of heterogeneous identities in reflecting the diversity of societal and economic interests in order to address the issues of financial stability and sustainability at the corporate and societal levels.

Economics of the Anthropocene Age by Adolfo Figueroa New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 272 pp., £70.00, ISBN 978-3-319-62584-3

and local knowledge base in shaping a recipient country’s control over foreign expert advice and policy-making. At the same time, it illustrates that not one of these conditions necessarily lead to donor dependency but it is their interaction that seems to be decisive. This also means that strengths in one structural condition (for example, administrative capacity) can be used as a leverage to outweigh weaknesses in another (for example, financial dependence). By interrogating the structural conditions shaping the nature and outcome of foreign expert advice, the book lays a powerful critique against the ‘development aid machinery’ and technical approaches suggesting that failures associated with ‘capacity building’ can be resolved with better implementation and more individual commitment. Refraining from this short-sighted perspective, the authors offer interesting alternative suggestions aimed at strengthening local knowledge communities who can become the producers and critical scrutinisers of expertise. In this way, the book speaks directly to the recent student movements in South Africa that have called for the decolonisation of knowledge at universities and beyond. There are of course also qualifications. Foreign expert advice is a global phenomenon, but the book’s scope is limited to a qualitative analysis of three sectors in two countries. While the main arguments outlined by the authors will be applicable to other contexts, there could be important variations across countries that merit further investigation. This includes contexts with very different donor-recipient set ups, for example South-South aid relations and beneficiaries of rapidly growing Chinese support. These limitations aside, the open access work is an indispensable contribution to the critical development literature and should be read by every development expert/practitioner/researcher working in this field. It prompts all of us to fundamentally interrogate the knowledge we produce and what purpose it serves, which in my opinion, can be no better outcome for a book.

Effective Contributions to the Review of Social Economy and Social Economics—Editorial

Michael Carr, Aurelie Charles, Wilfred Dolfsma, Robert McMaster and Tonia Warnecke College of Liberal Arts, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, USA; Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath, Bath, UK; School of Economics and Business, University of Groningen Groningen, The Netherlands; School of Management, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK; Department of Business and Social Entrepreneurship, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL, USA

Exchange Entitlement Mapping

An entitlement approach called “exchange entitlement mapping,” or E-mapping, is developed throughout this chapter and chapter 4 to understand how economic events, such as changes in exchange rate, interest rate, or inflation, affect individual well-being. With his work on poverty and famines, Sen provides a basis for the measurement of exchange entitlement sets faced by an individual in the context of market interactions. E-mapping, in the sense developed by Sen (1981), represents the set of consumption bundles that the individual faces, any of which can be chosen, given his or her endowments. Sen used E-mapping to explain famines, which are due to entitlement failures to food supply, instead of the traditional explanation of a shortage in food supply alone. However, the theoretical framework presented here proposes a dynamic approach to E-mapping augmented with capabilities, from achieved functionings at time t0 to potential functionings at time t according to the individual’s social and economic entitlements. This framework helps to demonstrate that the functionings of individuals become the social entitlements of others, thus leading to the interdependence of functionings between individuals.