POLECON 101 FINAL FLASHCARD SAQ

Sylvia Federici Caliban and witch

• Source: Sylvia Federici (2004)

• Meaning: Capitalism required the subordination of women through control of reproduction and unpaid labor.

• Significance: Expands Marx by showing gender as central to capitalist development.

Primitive Accumulation (Federici’s critique)

• Source: Federici, feminist reinterpretation of Marx

• Meaning: Primitive accumulation is ongoing and includes disciplining women’s bodies and labor.

• Significance: Shows capitalism relies on gendered violence, not just class exploitation.

Witch Hunts

• Source: Federici

• Meaning: State-sponsored terror used to enforce patriarchal capitalist relations.

• Significance: Demonstrates political power behind market formation

Jayati Ghosh – Feminist Economics

• Source: Jayati Ghosh

• Meaning: Critiques standard economics for ignoring power, history, and unpaid labor.

• Significance: Justifies interdisciplinary political economy approaches.

  10-14 Feminist Economics (2)

Feminist Policy Agenda

• Source: Ghosh

• Meaning: Counter-cyclical policy, welfare, minimum wage, financial regulation, Green New Deal.

• Significance: Shows feminist economics has concrete policy implications.

Marilyn Waring – Who’s Counting?

• Source: Marilyn Waring (1995)

• Meaning: GDP excludes unpaid care work, especially by women.

• Significance: Challenges how development is measured.

Adam Smith – Primitive Accumulation

• Source: Adam Smith

• Meaning: Capital arose from peaceful savings and individual frugality.

• Significance: Baseline liberal account later critiqued by Marx and Robinson.

Marx – Primitive Accumulation

• Source: Karl Marx, Capital

• Meaning: Capital emerged through violence, dispossession, and colonial plunder.

• Significance: Undermines the idea that markets emerge naturally

Cedric Robinson – Racial Capitalism

• Source: Robinson, Black Marxism

• Meaning: Capitalism evolved through racial differentiation, not homogenization.

• Significance: Links race and capitalism historically and structurally.

Racial Capitalism (definition)

• Source: Robinson

• Meaning: Capitalism and racism co-evolve and reinforce one another.

• Significance: Challenges race-neutral political economy theories.

Barbara Fields – Race as Ideology

• Source: Barbara Fields

• Meaning: Race is an ideology that explains inequality after it exists.

• Significance: Rejects biological or natural explanations of racial hierarchy.

Race follows oppression”

• Source: Fields

• Meaning: Racial ideas emerge to justify unequal social relations.

• Significance: Flips conventional explanations of racism.

Human Capital Theory (racial critique)

• Source: Dantzler & Hackworth

• Meaning: Inequality framed as skill deficits rather than structural racism.

• Significance: Shows how “neutral” economics legitimates racial inequality

Racial Proxy Theory

• Source: Dantzler & Hackworth

• Meaning: Race used as a proxy to justify devaluation and displacement.

• Significance: Explains gentrification and wealth extraction

Markets as Natural vs Social Constructs

• Source: CPE debate

• Meaning: Markets require political and legal institutions to function.

• Significance: Rejects laissez-faire assumptions.

Lindblom – What Is Government For?

• Source: Charles Lindblom

• Meaning: Governments guide markets through regulation and indirect controls.

• Significance: Shows limits of market autonomy.

Vogel – Marketcraft

• Source: Steven Vogel

• Meaning: Governments actively construct and govern markets.

• Significance: Reframes “intervention” as necessary governance

Boyer’s Varieties of Capitalism

• Source: Robert Boyer

• Meaning: Capitalism varies by state role and coordination.

• Significance: Counters one-size-fits-all development models.

Wilensky – Corporatism

• Source: Harold Wilensky

• Meaning: Countries vary in labor–state–business coordination. (pluralist corporateist)

• Significance: Explains welfare and inequality differences.

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Hall & Soskice – LME vs CME

• Source: Hall & Soskice

• Meaning: LMEs rely on markets; CMEs rely on coordination.

• Significance: Explains firm behavior and policy preferences

Institutional Complementarities

• Source: Hall & Soskice

• Meaning: Institutions reinforce one another within national models.

• Significance: Explains why systems persist over time

Voice vs Exit (Japan vs US)

• Source: Vogel, Japan Remodeled

• Meaning: Japanese firms renegotiate; US firms restructure aggressively.

• Significance: Shows national models adapt without convergence

Mankiw – Just Deserts

• Source: N. Gregory Mankiw

• Meaning: Inequality acceptable if based on productivity, not rents.

• Significance: Standard neoliberal defense of inequality

Piketty – r > g

• Source: Thomas Piketty

• Meaning: When returns on capital exceed growth, inequality rises.

• Significance: Structural explanation for rising inequality

Predistribution vs Redistribution

• Source: Malhotra & Vogel

• Meaning: Predistribution reshapes markets before inequality emerges.

• Significance: Explains US–Europe divergence

Labor Market Monopsony

• Source: Vogel

• Meaning: Dominant employers suppress wages and employment.

• Significance: Challenges standard wage models

Chicago School Antitrust

• Source: Friedman, Williamson

• Meaning: Focus on consumer welfare and efficiency.

• Significance: Justifies weak antitrust enforcement.

Neo-Brandeisian Antitrust

• Source: Lina Khan

• Meaning: Antitrust should address power, democracy, and inequality.

• Significance: Basis for Biden-era antitrust

Network Effects

• Source: Big Tech literature

• Meaning: Platforms become more valuable as users increase.

• Significance: Explains tech monopolies

Net Neutrality

• Source: Telecom regulation

• Meaning: ISPs must treat all data equally.Net neutrality is the principle that internet service providers (ISPs) must treat all online data equally, without blocking, throttling, or prioritizing content for payment.

  Why it mattered / what it caused:

  • Protected competition and innovation by preventing ISPs from favoring large firms over startups.

  • Limited corporate power by stopping ISPs from acting as gatekeepers over information.

  • Framed the internet as a public utility–like infrastructure, not just a private market.

  • Its rollback reflected a broader shift toward neoliberal deregulation, prioritizing market freedom over state oversight.

• Significance: Shows markets depend on rules

Bretton Woods System

A post-WWII international monetary system (1944–1971) where currencies were pegged to the U.S. dollar, and the dollar was pegged to gold. It aimed to create exchange-rate stability, promote trade, and prevent economic crises, with institutions like the IMF and World Bank enforcing the system.

Globalization Backlash

• Source: Contemporary political economy

• Meaning: Political reaction to inequality and social dislocation.

• Significance: Explains rise of populism

Brahmin Left (Piketty)

• Source: Piketty

• Meaning: Left parties shifted from workers to educated elites.

• Significance: Explains populist realignment.

Financialization

• Source: Greta Krippner

• Meaning: Profits increasingly come from finance, not production.

• Significance: Key cause of instability and inequality.

Subprime Mortgages

• Source: US housing finance

• Meaning: High-risk loans targeted to marginalized borrowers.

• Significance: Triggered the 2008 crisis.

Predatory Inclusion

• Source: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

• Meaning: Predatory inclusion describes how marginalized groups—especially Black Americans—are formally included in markets (like housing or credit) on exploitative terms. Instead of exclusion, they face high costs, risk, and extraction, which reproduces inequality even while appearing progressive or inclusive.

Too Big to Fail

• Source: 2008 crisis response

• Meaning: Large banks rescued to prevent systemic collapse.

• Significance: Reveals state–finance entanglement.

Carbon as an Externality

• Source: Pigou / Nordhaus

• Meaning: Carbon emissions impose social costs not priced by markets.

• Significance: Justifies carbon taxes or cap-and-trade.

Pigouvian Carbon Tax

• Source: Arthur Pigou

• Meaning: Tax pollution equal to its social cost.

• Significance: Core economist solution to climate change.

Cap-and-Trade (Coasian logic

• Source: Ronald Coase

• Meaning: Emissions permits allow bargaining to reduce pollution efficiently.

• Significance: Market-based alternative to carbon taxes.

Aklin & Mildenberger – Wrong Dilemma

• Source: Aklin & Mildenberger (2020)

• Meaning: Climate politics is about distributive conflict, not free-riding.

• Significance: Explains domestic political barriers to climate action.

Distributive Politics of Climate Change

• Source: Political economy approach

• Meaning: Climate policy creates winners and losers within states.

• Significance: Shifts focus from global coordination to domestic politics.

Finnegan – Varieties of Decarbonization

• Source: Jared Finnegan (2020)

• Meaning: Institutional differences explain climate policy variation.

• Significance: Applies VOC logic to climate change

Green Industrial Policy

• Source: Meckling; climate political economy

• Meaning: States use industrial policy to promote clean tech.

• Significance: Challenges market-only climate solutions.

Nature as a Fictitious Commodity

• Source: Karl Polanyi

• Meaning: Nature is treated as a market good despite not being produced for sale.

• Significance: Explains ecological crisis under capitalism.

Fossil Capitalism

• Source: Malm; Wallace-Wells; Huber

• Meaning: Capitalist growth depends on fossil fuels.

• Significance: Links climate crisis to capitalist accumulation

Energy as Value (Huber)

• Source: Huber (2008)

• Meaning: Fossil fuels enabled rapid growth via dense energy.

• Significance: Revises historical materialism

Ecological Limits to Growth

• Source: Political economy of ecology

• Meaning: Capitalism requires perpetual growth on a finite planet.

• Significance: Raises question of capitalism’s sustainability.

Political Order as Precondition for Growth

• Source: Development strategies lecture

• Meaning: Stability and state capacity precede markets.

• Significance: Counters market-first development models.

Dani Rodrik – One Economics, Many Recipes

• Source: Rodrik (2007)

• Meaning: No single path to development; context matters.

• Significance: Rejects Washington Consensus.

Rodrik on Institutions

• Source: Rodrik

• Meaning: Property rights, regulation, macro management, social insurance matter.

• Significance: Blends institutions with policy

Washington Consensus

• Source: IMF / World Bank

• The Washington Consensus refers to a set of economic policy recommendations promoted in the 1980s–1990s by institutions based in Washington, D.C. (the IMF, World Bank, and U.S. Treasury) for developing and transition economies.

  It emphasized market liberalization, privatization of state-owned enterprises, fiscal discipline, trade and capital account liberalization, deregulation, and reduced state intervention, aiming to stabilize economies and promote growth—especially in Latin America and post-socialist countries.

Augmented Washington Consensus

• Source: World Bank (2002)

• Meaning: Expanded version adding institutions, governance, social safety nets, and regulation, recognizing that markets alone are insufficient for development.

De Soto – Property Rights

• Source: Hernando de Soto

• Meaning: Lack of formal property rights traps the poor in informality by preventing assets from being used as capital.

Upham – Mythmaking

• Source: Frank Upham

• Meaning: Development succeeds when the state matches formal legal institutions to local social practices and norms, rather than importing “best-practice” Western laws wholesale. Effective institutions are context-specific, adaptive, and embedded in existing social relations.

Dependency Theory

• Source: Andre Gunder Frank

• Meaning: Global capitalism produces underdevelopment in the periphery.

• Significance: Structural critique of global inequality

Samir Amin – Unequal Exchange

• Source: Samir Amin

• Meaning: Core extracts surplus via super-exploitation.

• Significance: Calls for de-linking from global capitalism.

Dependent Development

• Source: Cardoso & Faletto; Evans

• Meaning: Meaning: Even under global dependency, development is possible if the state plays an active, strategic role (e.g. guiding industry, mediating foreign capital, and supporting domestic firms). Dependency does not automatically mean stagnation.

  Significance: This presents a more optimistic version of dependency theory, challenging the idea that peripheral countries are doomed to underdevelopment and emphasizing state capacity as the key variable.dependency variant.

Frantz Fanon – Colonial Violence

• Source: The Wretched of the Earth

• Meaning: Colonialism dehumanizes; decolonization is violent.

• Significance: Shows lasting colonial legacies.

East Asian Miracle

• Source: World Bank (1993)

• Meaning: The rapid and sustained economic growth of East Asian economies (roughly 1960s–1990s) that combined state-led industrial policy with export-oriented markets, producing high growth, poverty reduction, and industrial upgrading.

Amartya Sen – Development as Freedom

• Source: Sen (1999)

• Meaning: Development expands human capabilities.

• Significance: Moves beyond GDP

Schumacher – Small Is Beautiful

• Source: Schumacher (1973)

• Meaning: Max welfare with minimal consumption.

• Significance: Anti-growth development vision

Buddhist Economics (Clair Brown)

• Source: Brown (2017)

• Meaning: Well-being depends on social and ecological balance.

• Significance: Ethical critique of capitalism

Human Development Index

• Source: UNDP

• Meaning: GDP + education + health.

• Significance: Broader development measure

SSPI (Sustainable Shared Prosperity Index)

• Source: Clair Brown

• Meaning: Measures equity, sustainability, and governance.

• Significance: Policy-oriented alternative to GDP.

Shock Therapy

• Source: Sachs / Åslund

• Meaning: Rapid liberalization and privatization.

• Significance: Dominated early post-Soviet reform debates.

Gradualism (Stiglitz)

• Source: Joseph Stiglitz

• Meaning: Build institutions before markets.

• Significance: Critique of shock therapy.

Glasnost vs Perestroika

• Source: Gorbachev

• Meaning: Glasnost: Political openness — increased transparency, freedom of speech, and reduced censorship in the USSR.

• Perestroika: Economic restructuring — reforms to decentralize planning and introduce limited market mechanisms.

Context to the soviet collapse

Post-Soviet Developmentalism

• Source: Wengle

• Meaning: Strong state to manage markets.

• Significance: Challenges neoliberal transition models.

  11-25 Eastern Europe (2)

Chinese Gradualism

• Source: Deng Xiaoping

• Meaning: Incremental reform with experimentation.

• Significance: Explains China’s success vs Russia.

Dual-Track Pricing

• Source: Chinese reforms

• Meaning: Plan prices coexist with market prices.

• Significance: Reduced resistance to reform.

Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs

• Source: Chinese reform era

• Meaning: Local enterprises with partial property rights.

• Significance: Jump-started growth without full privatization

Growing Out of the Plan”

• Source: Barry Naughton

• Meaning: China reformed by letting the market expand alongside the planned economy, rather than dismantling the plan all at once. New market activities grew faster than the old plan, gradually making the plan irrelevant without shock therapy.

Special Economic Zones (SEZs)

• Source: Chinese development strategy

• Meaning: Controlled openness to foreign investment.

• Significance: Experimental market creation

China Model

• Source: Brown lecture

• Meaning: Flexibility, experimentation, controlled openness.

• Significance: Rejects universal development paths

End of History (Fukuyama)

• Source: Fukuyama (1992)

• Meaning: Liberal capitalism has no ideological rivals.

• Significance: Post-Cold War optimism

Heilbroner – Crisis of Capitalism

• Source: Heilbroner

• Capitalism is prone to recurring crises (inequality, instability, legitimacy) because markets cannot fully regulate themselves and require state intervention to survive.