From: gerald_a_levy (gerald_a_levy@msn.com)
Date: Tue Mar 11 2003 - 09:43:39 EST
Re Phil's [8570]: > I will have a look at the exchanges on OPE-L on this. I haven't read any > of the work of Webber and Rigby. Although Michael J. Webber and David L. Rigby collaborated on a number of articles, the source I was referring to was _The Golden Age Illusion: Rethinking Postwar Capitalism_ (NY, The Guilford Press, 1996, ISBN 0-89862-573-4). Both authors teach geography. The reason I asked you about this is because it is one of the more ambitious theoretical and empirical efforts by authors who were strongly influenced by Machover & Farjoun's _Laws of Chaos_. Of course, there are others as well (including OPE-Lers Paul C and Allin) whose empirical work was strongly influenced by M&F. _The Golden Age Illusion_ has been mentioned a number of times on OPE-L (once, I recall, in connection with a discussion about the empirical estimation of turnover time) but there has been no real attempt here by anyone that I recall) to subject this work to critique. This is somewhat surprising for three reasons: (1) The early part of the book contains a critique of other perspectives -- including many of those advanced by listmembers; (2) this is a massive and major intellectual effort -- it is over 550 pages long and contains cross-national empirical data on the rate of profit and technical change; (3) the empirical work covers ground that was also analyzed separately and differently by a number of other listmembers. So I think there are a lot of reasons to really read and discuss this book -- but a thread hasn't really caught on yet. Perhaps even more surprising is that we haven't -- that I can recall -- ever really attempted to evaluate and critique probabilistic approaches to value theory and _Laws of Chaos_. Has anyone on the list written a review of _The Golden Age Illusion_? Solidarity, Jerry
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Mar 12 2003 - 00:00:00 EST