Tagged "capitalism"

An excerpt from William Lazonick’s terrific work “Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy”, a book that offers a critique of what a ‘market economy’ is purported to be, through an evaluation of the strategies and economic histories of businesses within what can be called “actually existing capitalism”.

Here, at the risk of a small amount of repetition, I shall supplement that discussion by focusing on the nature of fixed costs, the different sources of uncertainty the innovative organization faces, and the relation between organizational capability and technological change. Through its investment activities, a business organization commits financial resources to specific processes to make particular products with the expectation of reaping financial returns. Once they are committed, the productive assets of the organization represent fixed costs that must then be recouped by the production and sale of output. If, through the sale of sufficient output, investments could generate expected financial returns instantaneously, fixed costs would not represent an economic problem to the organization. But then, we would probably not call the “assets” underlying these costs “investments.” Indeed, we might not even deem it appropriate to call these costs “fixed” or the entity that incurs them a firm. The problem of fixed costs occurs because the production and sale of the enterprise’s output occur neither instantaneously nor with certainty. The basic economic problem that confronts the capitalist enterprise is to transform fixed costs into revenue-generating products to realize financial returns. An analysis of how and with what success the business organization manages this transformation is the key to understanding technological change, value creation, and economic growth.

Stephen R. Shalom is emeritus professor of Political Science at William Paterson University of New Jersey, USA. He is a member of the editorial board of New Politics, and a long-time activist in peace and justice movements. Among other works, he is the author of Which Side Are You On? An Introduction to Politics (Longman, 2003), “Parpolity: A Political System for a Good Society,” in Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century, ed. Chris Spannos, AK Press, 2008) and editor of Socialist Visions (South End Press, 1983).

This is part 2 of the post on Jason Fung’s ‘Cancer Code’. I found this a remarkable case point in the iatrogenic potential of public health interventions in which the effect on mortality is masked by a surrogate of survival; early detection. When tracked for long enough time, early detection does more harm than good, and thus, fails as a successful surrogate. You can find part one here.

I encourage everyone to read the entirety of Jason’s “The Cancer Code”. It’s a terrific work of ‘popular’ scientific writing, a story as much about the biology of Cancer as it is about the sociology of biomedical practice and research.

This post will be in two parts, both of which I find are illustrative of the difficulties of public health strategies. One makes particularly obvious the severe misanthropic consequences of profit seeking drives in the areas of health and medicine, and the second is a remarkable case point in the iatrogenic potential of public health interventions which may be completely benevolent in intention – something that all states irrespective of political structure must address. Part one is contained below, you can find part two (here)[]