My SSRN Working Papers: Some Thoughts

I have been posting at the Social Science Research Network for some years now, and recently decided to "take stock." Looking back it seems to me that my SSRN working papers had three principal themes.

1. Political Language and its Application.
I wrote about how we use terms like "neoliberal," "centrist," "neoconservative," "fascism," etc.--the meanings we assign them, and their relevance to our public life. Thus did I not only deal with what neoliberalism is, but finding it indeed a useful term whose conventional understanding is in fact descriptive of an importantly interconnected political-economic theory, political tendency, practical policy, economic model, and cultural condition, considered whether particular governments (such as that of Tony Blair) have adhered to neoliberalism in policy (and usually finding that they did so), and the way in which neoliberal practice has often diverged from neoliberal theory (and the results still more so). The ways in which centrist political thinking has colored the news media's biases (evident in such things as its uses of "expert opinion" and its penchant for "both sidesism") similarly emerged as a recurring theme. I also spent a lot of time looking at some older terms which may not be heard much these days but whose relevance may not have necessarily passed, as with "status politics," "pseudo-conservative," and "market populism," as well as still others which are less obviously "political," but have undeniably had political significances, like "middle class."

2. The Performance of the World Economy Since the End of the Post-World War II Boom.
Alongside the examination of so much terminology and its relation to the facts of the record I did a lot of number-crunching, comparing differing estimates of growth with an eye to the downward trend in the rate of economic growth evident in the world economy since the 1970s. In the process I wrote a lot about different ways of measuring growth, paying special attention to the differing results we get when we use the Consumer Price Index rather than chained-dollar deflators to adjust for prices over time (and arguing for the value of the results we get from the latter approach, which can seem to indicate that, China apart, per capita Product has just not grown since the 1970s). This carried over to a particular interest in the deindustrialization observable in many advanced industrial countries, particularly the U.S. but also Britain, among others; and the combination of deindustrialization with financialization that seemed to me characteristic of the neoliberal model, quantitatively demonstrating the reality of important changes in an economy like that of the U.S. as it shifted from "Keynesian Fordism" toward "Neoliberal Financialization." (Thus did I examine changes in the makeup of Gross Domestic Product, value added, asset accumulation, international trade and profits by sector amid the U.S. economy's "restructuring" in the neoliberal era.) I also spent quite a bit of time on what seemed to me possible explanations for this state of affairs, focusing on the limitations of the Keynesian growth model and its possibilities at mid-century, what neoliberalism has really meant for our economic life, and how different countries got different results (with, for example, its stronger defense-industrial boom and the shale boom making an important difference in how deindustrialization proceeded in the U.S. as against a harder-hit Britain). All of this, of course, factored into my aforementioned writing about neoliberalism and the middle class--and I should add, my writing on social withdrawal in such forms as the "hikikomori" phenomenon.

3. The Contrast Between the Expectations of the 1990s and the Realities of the Twenty-First Century.
The third theme, which can seem derivative of the first two (particularly the neoliberalism about which I wrote so much, and the downward trend of growth in the past half century), has been how a particular image of the post-Cold War era that in the 1990s had prevailed in America--of a permanent tech boom interacting with unstoppable globalization within a unipolar, American-led world order that would only become more so--and how that image has differed greatly from the reality. In this vein I discussed the odd combination of declinism and triumphalism so prominent in the period, the "information age" of which we heard so much then and so much less since, and just what "unipolarity" was supposed to mean, as well as whether or not it has eroded in this era of increasing great power conflict (extending to examinations of the military balance between the U.S. and its allies and other powers such as Russia and China). I also ended up discussing the broader outlook prevailing in American culture in the 1990s and its aftermath, extending to the famous '90s penchant for the ironic, and for the "extreme!"--as well as such notions as "market populism" that would seem to have suffered badly in the years since, and such related issues as why we give "Silicon Valley" so much attention, and the larger matter of whether neoliberalism's day is passing.

I did write about a good many other things over those years--like why argument over popular culture is so prominent in our political life--but even to the extent that this can seem removed from those other themes (and this is arguably imperfect) it was the Big Three to which I kept coming back.

So does it generally go with most writers, I suppose, coming back to the same themes over and over again.

The trick, I suppose, is to keep it all from getting stale.