Howard M. Wachtel

Looking At Poverty From a Radical Perspective

The interaction of these institutions of capitalism manifest themselves in a set of attributes and problems that we normally associate with the condition of poverty in society. These attributes of poverty, however, are incorrectly viewed as the causes of poverty. For example, income distribution, the living conditions of the poor, education, health, and the personal characteristics of the poor are merely surface manifestations (the superstructure) of a systemically caused problem. It is important to differentiate between these manifestations of poverty -normally called &dquo;the poverty problem&dquo; -and their underlying causes. We return to this theme later, but first let us contrast this formulation with the orthodox view of poverty and its causes.

Water Conflicts and International Water Markets

Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) exist in a semi-arid region where the overwhelming use of water is for agriculture. The water deficit that faces each can be closed either by importing food, importing water, achieving higher productivity per unit of water input, or manufacturing water by techniques such as desalination. The problem arises because of autarky in the production of water and the absence of an international trading market for water. Each country can only use the water within its borders or the water it can pilfer from its neighbor if it is an upper riparian. It is as if every country was confined to the energy it could produce within its own borders and did not have access to imported energy on an international market. Obviously, no one would countenance this policy condition for a moment - very few countries could survive in this regime - and the immediate answer would be to trade energy through an international market. But this is precisely what is not done with water. Absent an international trading market, water flowing down its natural course can create national security conflicts and sometimes wars among neighboring countries that share a common water resource, whether it be fresh water above ground in a river or below ground in an aquifer. In the context of water issues between Israel and the PA, this paper will explore problems of water pricing, the relationship between food and water security, the feasibility of an international trading market for water in the 21st century, and how such an arrangement compares in price and efficiency with the principal alternative, desalination.

The Review of Radical Political Economics at Its Half Century: A Retrospective

Fifty years on, the Review of Radical Political Economics (RRPE) lives on against the odds that such a quixotic 1968 adventure could survive for half a century. As the first managing editor of the RRPE and one of the founders of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), I have compiled a history of the first five years of the journal and the organization. This retrospective is primarily based on archival research, supplemented by my recollections. It concludes with some thoughts on how URPE and the RRPE affected the study and uses of economics in the past half century.

Donald Dore. British Factory-Japanese Factory: The Origins of National Diversity in Industrial Relations. Pp. 432. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1973.

Freedom of Religion, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear he would add the Freedom to Give. The pursuit of the Fifth Freedom furnishes the theme for this book. Foundations, says the author, made many contributions to the World War II efforts. The conditions of that war compelled the author to vow that he would thereafter work for peace-a vow which he kept. Because of the war time inflation and high profits, many people created foundations in the post-war years. The rapid increase in founda-

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Old myths never die, they only reappear as different variables in new equations. In the nineteenth century, we were treated to the spectacle of people being blamed for their own starvation, with little blame placed on the economic and social system of laissez-faire capitalism, which, in fact, was the culprit. Presumably, this nonsense was interred by Marx and Keynes who explicitly recognized the possibility of systemic causes of individual economic failure in the face of the individual’s impotence to do anything about it. However, with the triumph of what could be called the &dquo;right Keynesians&dquo; we