SPL Midterm

Neoliberalism

Ideology that reduces all values to money values: the worth of a thing is its price, the worth of a person is their wealth

Moral education

Education that builds character and the ability to decide right from wrong, not just job skills

What does geography try to explain?

The why and how of places, not just where they are: why phenomena occur where they do, how places shape behavior, and how actions in one place affect others across scales

What can maps show beyond location?

Relationships between phenomena, movement in space and time, and embedded unacknowledged assumptions (cultural and political signals)

Euclidean space

Space understood through measurable coordinates

Constructed space

Space shaped by culture (e.g., language) and by technology (e.g., space-time compression)

Space-time compression

Technology making distant places feel closer

Spatial practice

How space is organized and used in practice (e.g., zoning, the difference between a street and a home)

Representations of space

How space is conceived and depicted, carrying biases and politics (e.g., which countries are labeled the northern hemisphere)

Representational spaces

Spaces containing archetypes and symbols that mean something (e.g., farmland being divided)

Climate change and scale

One warm winter is not global warming, and a warming planet does not mean warmer temperatures everywhere; extra energy in the system interacts with weather systems to produce new patterns

Globalization

Increasingly close relationships between spatially distant locations; often economic, but also political and cultural

Black Stack (Bratton)

Computational technologies should be seen as one interdependent megastructure rather than separate technologies

Structural power

Structures constrain what is possible (class structure, patriarchy, heteronormativity); redlining is an example

Dispersed (distributed) power

Power is omnidirectional and everyone exerts it; in a library, people's reactions to someone talking loudly govern that person's behavior

Politics and space

Political power operates through representations of space, representational spaces, and spatial practices

Nation

An imagined community whose members think of themselves as a metaphoric family with a shared identity

What unites nations?

Language, history, religion, values, racial or ethnic identity

Citizenship and exclusion

Can be a mechanism of exclusion or violence, can be seen as a performance where ideal types are rewarded, and is closely tied to nationalism and migration

Nationalism

A political appeal to a population's sense of shared identity, and the idea that belonging to a national identity supersedes other considerations

Ethno-nationalism

Desire for a common ethnic identity; sees a people as bound to a particular history and characteristics; prefers melting pot and assimilation over coexistence and diversity

State

A politically organized entity with a permanent population, government, and defined territory (not states like NJ, PA, OK)

Costs of non-recognition

Inability to participate in broader economies, no access to international assistance, standing alone in a connected world

Nation-state

A state whose boundaries are coterminous with a nation; the whole governed population shares a common national identity

Argument against nation-states

Risks ignoring minorities, preventing cooperation with other states, and promoting dogma over reasoned debate

Mercantilist states

Early states founded on expansion, colonization, and economic protection

Territoriality

An attempt to control and influence space by delimiting and defining it

How did the state idea spread?

Through colonialism, justified by social Darwinism (some states are stronger and so entitled to expand); later, colonized peoples used the same idea to gain independence

Washington Consensus

The neoliberal policy package: trade liberalization, privatization, freer access to finance

International economic institutions

WTO develops and enforces trade regulation, IMF monitors the monetary system and provides loans, World Bank lends for development; all are non-state political actors

Deterritorialization

Destabilizing centrifugal forces: globalization/free trade, international migration, nuclear weapons, terrorism, the Internet, cryptocurrency

Reterritorialization

Centripetal forces: strengthening institutions, building domestic industry, policing borders, protectionist economic policy

Home economics

A household supports and reproduces its people (food, facilities, educating children, efficient inputs and outputs, relations with other households); the state does the same at larger scale

Polis and oikonomos

Polis = city/state/government; oikonomos = one who manages a household or estate

Capitalism

Means of production are privately held; laborers work for wages paid by owners; industrial capitalism produces goods as commodities, post-industrial produces more services

Neoliberal capitalism

The market should be the final arbiter and main focus of decision-making

Managed capitalism

Markets do lots of good but let things fall through the cracks, like health and the environment

Rational choice

Profit-maximization: people generally decide based on self-interest and ability to benefit economically

Market-based economy

Practices are organized by movement of prices in a market; privileges private property and state regulation over common property and customary regulation

Marxian political economy

Economy is understood through the competing interests of groups; capitalism is defined by the relationship and contradiction between labor and capital

Economic determinism

Marxian view: class relations determine all other social relations; neoclassical view: market forces do

Property

Rights in things, not the things themselves; not all property is private

Commons

Resources to which access rights are held in common

Tragedy of the commons

Each herder gains the full benefit of adding a goat but shares the cost with everyone, so individually rational choices overuse and degrade the shared resource

Enclosure

Transforming a commons by limiting access rights to individuals (privatization) or by restricting access (public property); resources like the atmosphere defy enclosure

Globalization (economy lens)

A smaller world through increased connectivity between distant places via transport and communication networks; big data accelerates it

Merchant capitalism

Merchants reinvest surplus in trade routes, then in handicraft producers, which eventually outpaces profits from trade itself

Industrial capitalism

Surplus is invested in ever more concentrated means of production (industrial infrastructure); requires a robust private property regime

Artisanal vs. centralized production

Artisans follow a process from start to finish; centralized production breaks it into sub-processes

Fordism

Assembly line mass production and mass consumption, no need for skilled artisans, close corporation-state ties, demand-side economics

Vertical integration

Bringing raw materials, refinement, labor, and manufacturing together under a single managerial framework

Tension in the golden age economy

Wage and benefit gains made profit harder, and vertical integration needed heavy capital investment, reducing workforce flexibility

Demand-side vs. supply-side economics

Demand-side props up demand by supporting labor (social programs, home ownership); supply-side props up supply via lower taxes, innovation, and a pro-business stance; neoliberalism favors supply-side with deregulation and privatization

Post-Fordism / service economy

Performing services rather than producing goods: tourism, information and capital, research/education, medicine, home construction, retail

Commodification cycle

Products begin expensive, competition lowers prices until they are commonplace, so new products must be introduced to sustain profit

Core, periphery, semi-periphery

Core handles capital investment, management, and innovation; periphery exports raw materials and simple manufactured goods under looser rules; semi-periphery does both for different regions

Flexible production

Value comes from producing desire, so success is a logistics problem; components are made worldwide, suppliers can be switched, and goods are produced as needed with a flexible workforce

Keys to flexible production

Cheap transportation, container ships and intermodal connections, no large inventories, and favorable regulation

Platform capitalism

Shift from selling products to running platforms (e.g., selling use of an engine instead of the engine itself)

Lean platforms

Companies like Uber and Airbnb employ few people and own little property; they own branding, data, and analytics, and treat workers as independent contractors

Stage 1 of the model

Pre-industrial; the Four Horsemen (death/disease, famine, war, conquest) keep the population in check

Stage 2 of the model

Death rates fall (especially infant mortality) from better sanitation, medicine, and germ theory replacing miasma theory, with migration to cities; population grows rapidly

Stage 3 of the model

Birth rates decline due to urbanization, more women working, and families that don't fit in cities

Stage 4 of the model

Continued urbanization, medical advances, birth control, more education, and rising costs yield smaller families and fluctuating populations

Lowest population growth today

Where women are the most educated and most integrated into the workforce

Criticism of the model: stages interact

Societies in different stages interact in real time; underdevelopment is often a result of colonialism and exploitation