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The Diffusion of Activities

Articles // 08.06.2010

The Diffusion of Activities

The diffusion of activities from the “metropolitan core” to the underdeveloped economies of the “periphery” can occur under a variety of circumstances. The import- substituting development strategy that many economies of the “periphery” had followed in the post-war period had led to a diffusion of activities from the “core” to these economies, but that instance of diffusion constituted [...]

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Whose Crisis Is That? Thinking Finance Otherwise

Articles // 08.06.2010

Whose Crisis Is That? Thinking Finance Otherwise

By now the pliant is all to familiar. They were the smartest ones in the room. They had invented the game and perfected the equipment required to play it. They had convinced regulators, investors, accountants, journalists, consumers–all the relevant participants–that theirs was the way of the world. They had the track record to prove it, the returns to justify it, the bonuses to affirm it.

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Academic Activism

Articles // 07.06.2010

Academic Activism

As tendentious as these definitions are, they reference the colliding conceptions from which academic activism issues. The often reductive contrast between theory and practice, thinking and doing, has been used to regulate what is admissible as campus politics as if it were apparent in advance which actions where insufficiently imbued with reflection and which worldly commitments compromised disciplinary or institutional loyalty.

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The Derivative Nature of Capitalism

Articles // 07.06.2010

The Derivative Nature of Capitalism

In a recent speech, governor Elizabeth Duke of the Federal Reserve told an anecdote from just after the failure of Lehman Brothers last September. Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, was asked, ‘Well, what if we don’t do anything?’ To which he replied: ‘There will be no economy on Monday.’ (cited in Wolf 2009) [...]

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