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Nov 21, 2024
An Existential Fight between Green and Carbon Assets (with Mark Blyth)
"What Just Happened?" Series, no. 1
Summary
Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussing the coming four years. Mark Blyth (whose planned February 2020 appearance was scrubbed by the pandemic) is an international economist from Brown University, whose many books for both scholars and a popular audience include Great Transformations (2002), Angrynomics (2020; with Eric Lonergan) and (with Nicolo Fraccaroli) Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers (New York: Norton 2025).
Mark sees 2008-9 as a true economic and political volta, one that the world has been busily ignoring to its peril in the years since. Early on, Mark mentions his 2016 article "Global Trumpism." Piketty's "Brahmins vs Merchants" explains the diploma divide. The top two employers in America are Amazon and Walmart, both warehouses for foreign goods coming for American consumers. Mark invokes the business cycle theory pioneered by Nikolai Kondratiev known as Kondratiev waves. He also invokes Piketty's "R over G"; that if return on investment among the rentier class exceeds growth, inequality will grow and grow.
In the short term, Mark sees immense financial gains mainly for the top but for the middle and bottom as well. The Republicans are in a pole position to capitalize on this. Higher ed is a legitimate site of concern: Blyth points to the Agenda 47 commitment to hamstringing private and public universities in various ways.
Is there hope? Well, sort of. US carbon emissions will make less of an impact on global warming than you might think--and yes it is still the most creative and technologically advanced country. Cheers!
Tune in tomorrow to hear another perspective from Vincent Brown, and finally from David Cunningham.
Listen and Read Here.
Your Host
Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz
Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world. Recall This Book is hosted by Elizabeth Ferry, Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University and John Plotz, Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative.
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