Who Rules the World? A Portrait of the Global Leadership Class — John Gerring, Erzen Oncel, Kevin Morrison, and Daniel Pemstein

Empirical study of global elites.

Download PDF at link.

Notice that the title assumes a social structure based on class and class differences. This is SOP in sociology; yet, the significance of class is denied in conventional economics, if not also the existence of class structure and even society as a meaningful concept.

Cambridge University
Who Rules the World? A Portrait of the Global Leadership Class

John Gerring, Erzen Oncel, Kevin Morrison, and Daniel Pemstein

Thomas Piketty’s New Book Brings Political Economy Back to Its Sources — Branko Milanovic

In the same way that Capital in the Twenty-First Century transformed the way economists look at inequality, Piketty’s new book Capital and Ideology will transform the way political scientists look at their own field.

ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Thomas Piketty’s New Book Brings Political Economy Back to Its Sources

Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Robert Paul Wolff — The Deep State

Robert Paul Wolff is largely correct here, but "the deep state" cannot be equated with bureaucracy as a political factor ensuring constancy and stability, as Max Weber described.

He apparently did not so a search on the term "deep state," which seems to have originated with respect to Turkish state and intelligence services and senior administration under Kemal Ataturk. In Russia is this is known as the siloviki (senior career intelligence and military) and nomenklatura (senior administrative bureaucracy). In China, the deep state is the senior level of the CCP. 

These are special cases of a state within a state as the locus of power in a nation-state, and not all deep states resemble each other closely. However, the family resemblance is arguably close enough to provide a context for at least a semi-analytical the use of the concept of a deep state in political science. However, the meaning should be carefully specified to avoid ambiguity, conflation, and confusion.

In the US the "deep state" has several meanings, given by different analysts. The most restricted is the senior career intelligence, military, and government service that persists across administrations. It also means those that control the military-intelligence-industrial-financial-government apparatus that is based on the revolving door that provides continuity between the public and private sectors insuring effective control by unelected elites. NGOs such as think tanks but not limited to them constitute another factor mediating the connection of public and private, state and non-state, government and shadow government.

The post describes something that is related to the these factors but is not coterminous with it. The US government bureaucracy is huge since it includes all the civil servants. The deep state is something different. It is partially a subset of the bureaucracy but not limited to it, and the revolving door makes it dynamic, uniting the public and private sectors.

US deep state is also more amorphous than the government bureaucracy, since it is a shadow organization rather than one with institutional arrangements, including a foundation in law. Because it lacks institutional arrangements, many deny its existence as an entity. And that is the way the deep state likes it.

But RPW's point that bureaucracies provide continuity that can inhibit change, including reform, owing to the iron law of oligarchy, is well-taken. A deep state can be viewed as a aspect of bureaucracy that is concentrated and entrenched at the top, providing elite control.

The deep state is also a subset of the Establishment, but also different from it. The Establishment is made up of the entrenched elite and their cronies and minions. The deep state is a concentrated subset of the Establishment, characterized by occupying positions of power and influence.

The Philosopher's Stone
The Deep State
Robert Paul Wolff | Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Gabriel Rockhill — The U.S. is Not a Democracy, It Never Was

American history.

The Establishment and its propagandists regularly insist that a structural aristocracy is a “democracy” because the latter is defined by the guarantee of certain fundamental rights (legal definition) and the holding of regular elections (procedural definition). This is, of course, a purely formal, abstract and largely negative understanding of democracy, which says nothing whatsoever about people having real, sustained power over the governing of their lives.…

“Multivariate analysis indicates,” according to an important recent study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination […], but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy.”…

Indeed, if the United States is not a democracy today, it is in large part due to the fact that it never was one. Far from being a pessimistic conclusion, however, it is precisely by cracking open the hard shell of ideological encasement that we can tap into the radical forces that have been suppressed by it. These forces—not those that have been deployed to destroy them—should be the ultimate source of our pride in the power of the people.

In his rousing Gettysburg Address at the time of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln defined "democracy" as "government of the people, by the people and for the people." The definition is correct, but Lincoln misapplied it to the United States at the time, and that remains true today. In fact, the class hierarchy is more entrenched now than ever as shown by rising inequality of income and wealth, and the asymmetry of power.

Counterpunch
The U.S. is Not a Democracy, It Never Was

Gabriel Rockhill, Franco-American philosopher and cultural critic (public intellectual), Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, and founding Director of the Atelier de Théorie Critique at the Sorbonne

Tyler Cowen — What the hell is going on?

Donald Trump may get the nuclear suitcase, a cranky “park bench” socialist took Hillary Clinton to the wire, many countries are becoming less free, and the neo-Nazi party came very close to assuming power in Austria. I could list more such events.

Haven’t you, like I, wondered what is up? What the hell is going on?

I don’t know, but let me tell you my (highly uncertain) default hypothesis. I don’t see decisive evidence for it, but it is a kind of “first blast” attempt to fit the basic facts while remaining within the realm of reason.…

Marginal Revolution
What the hell is going on?
Tyler Cowen | Holbert C. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center

Bryan Caplan — Conspiracy Theory: The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind

It's a book review, but it's value lies in summarizing how ideology trumps self-interest. Self-interest is too narrow a concept to account for human motivation, choice and action. Narrow utilitarianism is not sustained by evidence.

Does self-interest explain individuals' political views? Surprisingly, political science's standard answer is No. While self-interest occasionally plays a role, it poorly predicts both issue positions and voting behavior.

Unlike most economists, I strongly endorse political scientists' consensus. Their research doesn't just look solid. I've also personally played with the data for over a thousand hours, confirming that their basic approach is correct. When I teach this material, I make my graduate students hunt for counter-examples - exceptional cases where self-interest ishighly predictive of political views. Most return from this quest empty-handed, or nearly so. 

Jason Weedon and Robert Kurzban's new The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won't Admit It (Princeton University Press, 2014) frontally attack the academic consensus against political self-interest. Since they charmingly paint me as a leading voice in this consensus, it is in my self-interest for their book to be widely-read. Unfortunately, Weedon and Kurzban are basically high-brow conspiracy theorists. They trumpet a strong, incredible thesis, then "interpret" virtually every fact to fit it...

Econlog
Conspiracy Theory: The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind

Bryan Caplan | Professor of Economics, George Mason University

Gaius Publius — The Global Rich Are a Tribe with Their Own Folkways, Values & Mythology. Those Values Are "Pathological."

The sociology of the tribe.

[HARTMANN] The Swiss bank UBS says that four one-thousandth of one percent, 0.004% of the world's adult population, controls $30 trillion. The GDP of the United States is $15 trillion. This is about 13% of the entire planet's total wealth. ...How do we deal with this in this age of globalization, when we have American corporations with hundreds of billions of dollars offshore, you've got American billionaires with trillions of dollars offshore? ... 

[ESKOW] It's not a simple problem. But one of the things we do first of all is we recognize the scope of the problem and we don't let people scare us away from talking about it, saying "It's class warfare" or "It's demonizing the wealthy" or whatever. ...
200,000 people isn't a lot. 200,000 people is a large tribe of a small town, first of all. Secondly, if you just break out the number of those people that are in Europe or the United States, you've got ... 10,000? United States maybe 4 or 5,000? ... these are the social circles. ... 

This goes back to why I think that our political and economic system is a study in anthropology and sociology, as well as economics and political science. This is a little community, Thom. These people know each other.

These people have shared values and those values are inculcated into the Tim Geithners and the Barack Obamas and the Bill Clintons — and everybody else, or most people, who move up the political ladder do so by hobnobbing with these people. And there is a very distinct tribal kind of culture that develops, with its own folkways, its own values, its own mythology. And until we understand that and then extrapolate that out to the global scene, we're not going to be able to address it.

The fundamental problem is that they interpret as virtuous what ordinary people view as pathological. '"Ordinary people" are "normal" by definition. So the tribe sees itself as occupying the "supernormal" tail of the distributional curve rather than "subnormal". The tribe lives in a different world cognitively and affectively in addition to materially, similar to ruling elites historically. As the Vietnamese proverb goes, "The dungheap remains the same, only the flies change."

Down with Tyranny!
The Global Rich Are a Tribe with Their Own Folkways, Values & Mythology. Those Values Are "Pathological."

Gaius Publius

Joshua Holland — Rising income inequality makes us want to bomb the crap out of everyone: study

MIT political scientist Jonathan Caverley, author of Democratic Militarism Voting, Wealth, and War, and himself a US Navy veteran, argues that increasingly high-tech militaries, with all-volunteer armies that sustain fewer casualties in smaller conflicts, combine with rising economic inequality to create perverse incentives that turn the conventional view of war on its head. His research looks at public opinion and military aggressiveness, and concludes that it’s the working class and poor who are more likely to favor military action today. And that bottom-up pressure makes wealthy democracies more aggressive.

BillMoyers.com spoke with Caverley about his research. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.

Rational behavior actually, in terms of cost/benefit. But the headline overstates the case.

Raw Story
Rising income inequality makes us want to bomb the crap out of everyone: study
Joshua Holland, Moyers & Company

Paul Krugman's Moment of Dumb Questioness

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Ask A Dumb Question ... And Does It Matter What The Answer Is?

Moment of Truthiness

" ... we asked whether the [fiat] deficit has gone up or down since January 2010, .."

I'm picking my jaw up off the floor.  The sad part is that even these supposed luminaries - Christopher Achen, Larry Bartels, Paul Krugman & Google's Chief Economist Hal Varian - all persisted in asking an absolutely irrelevant, meaningless, and yes, dumb, question.

Why even ask about a deficit in fiat, 80 years after we changed from a gold-std to a fiat currency std? What on earth does a deficit in fiat even mean?!!!

BMHOTK! At this point I throw up my hands and say the entire economics profession is part of the problem, not part of any possible solution. Probably the political science profession too.

I don't see any difference in voter's response to a dumb question, and Krugman's action in asking it. What the hell was he thinking? Nothing relevant to a solution path, that's for damn sure.

Why not ask voters if there's any pragmatic person left in the country, who could return us to the sanity that prevailed under Marriner Eccles? At least that has some connection to real context.

Until then, as Walter Shewhart said, "Without context, data is meaningless."  Ditto for economists and political scientists.

Is there a Nobel Prize for meaningless, Ness?

Greg Fisher — Beyond the plc

On Monday Civitas published a book written by me and Paul Ormerod entitled “Beyond the plc”. A press release and summary can be found on Civitas’ website here.

In this article I want to provide some background to this work in two broad ways. First, I will frame our thinking in the context of collective action (helping distinguish it from any political ideology). And, second, I’ll mention how our approach takes an evolutionary (or ‘complex’) view of the economy. When discussing political ideologies, I will use libertarianism and statism as reference points, well aware that these do not represent the plethora of views in political philosophy.

Synthesis
Beyond the plc
Greg Fisher

Revisioning the joint stock corporation from a systems POV.