Erin Lockwood
@erinkaylockwood
Assistant professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine | researching and teaching IPE, financial politics, global inequality | plants, birds, snacks, sci-fi, quilting | poet | she/her
It's not just that people are mad about inequality generally and that their anger is showing up in weak consumer sentiment data; it's that rosy consumer spending and GDP trends are increasingly -- and nearly exclusively -- the purview of the rich. www.ft.com/content/1c55...
Look what my kid made! Extra special because the potholder loom she used was mine as a kid and my mom's before that. (And because she now knows about the putting-out system and mechanical looms and the Luddite rebellion.)
Learning to weave while being told about the importance of weaving and the fiber industry to pre-industrial and industrial European political economy, touching on the Luddites and labor conditions for girls in textile mills, is peak Getting Parented by Erin Lockwood.
I recently read The Martian on an airplane and thought it was mostly ridiculous, but I also just dug up an truly impressive quantity of potatoes from just two grow bags and two 5 gal plastic buckets, so what do I know?
It's a bit like an essay and a bit like a poem, and I hope you'll give it a read:
Watching Scotland-Brazil in a cottage in the Cairngorms 🏴
"Does my expression convey an appropriate level of ambivalence toward the text?"
In Glasgow to talk about the other 250 commemoration: The Wealth of Nations also turns 250 years old this year. I'm giving a talk on the relevance of the text to our contemporary era of neocolonial quasi-sovereign corporate monopolies and their exorbitant profits.
A trillion pin-point stars printed on paper would stretch from New York to New Zealand.
A trillion goldfish would require a bowl the size of a city harbor.
If you wanted to count from one to one trillion, it would take you 200,000 years.
A trillion kids standing on each others' shoulders would reach nearly to Saturn.
Personally I'm not worried about what the SpaceX IPO says about how we value the decision-making of a man who sought to destroy the US administrative state based on pure racism, because markets are rational and market price discovery allows for the assigning of objectively accurate prices to trades.
Question 1 remains relevant as well, though that feels less prescient and more inevitable ...
Looking back at my Fall 2024 IPE final exam, and wow, this extra credit question ... I'd totally forgotten about this.
Oh no, Smith was definitely aware of that, and in fact argued that this only heightened the case of doing away with the monopolist structure of exclusive companies in favor of freer trade -- but that the company was incapable of understanding the "sovereign's" interest in open markets.
Adam Smith is writing here about the East India Company, but there's a broader warning here about the hazards of governance by merchants and those motivated solely by private interests.
Shorter NYT: One candidate is a skilled orator, religiously observant, and advocates for inclusion. The other has a Nazi tattoo, a history of violence, and treats women like shit. Here's why these are the same.
Among many other issues with the CFTC suing states for enforcing gambling laws against prediction markets, "fostering innovation and competition across U.S. derivatives markets" is absolutely not the mission or purpose of the CFTC in any respect. Blatant regulatory capture.
On the one hand, I totally get it. Yes, academic books are (often) expensive. On the other hand, the careful production of scholarly knowledge is costly and worth investing in. As Liming writes, "what value does that work hold if books themselves have been judged as valueless?"