Answered: - Please help with the definitions and the questions on this study

Question Details

Answered: - Please help with the definitions and the questions on this study

Please help with the definitions and the questions on this study sheet.

POS 310 ? INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The Midterm Examination is two hours long and covers material from Modules 1?4 of the course. It

consists of 30 multiple choice questions and 2 essay questions.

The Final Examination is two hours long and covers material from Modules 5?9 of the course. It consists

of 35 multiple choice questions and 2 essay questions.

?globalism.? - Globalization is the process of ideas, products, and people moving around the planet with

greater ease and efficiency. Globalization takes advantage of cheaper labor in less developed nations but

increases free trade between nations and the free flow of capital.

An historical period - an era of history having some distinctive feature

An economic phenomenon ?

We come to our announced topic, the economic phenomenon. Modern society exhibits a vast

development of technology, and correlatively, a vast advance in the scope and channels of social

administration?and correlatively, a vast increase in the complexity and scope of production, transport,

and consumption of use-values. The latter make up the physical economy. It might be thought of as

technology or engineering by someone for whom economics begins with commodification. However, its

sociality makes it very different from engineering in the usual sense. At any rate, just this physical

economy warrants a discipline which describes it, measures it, ponders its manifold dynamics. The

discipline would be quantitative and network-conscious because the subject-matter itself is.

But then there is something else. The entire phenomenon is commodified. All use-values are

property. Delivery of a use-value typically means an exchange of property for an equivalent in an

auction. Its paradigm, then, is the trade; everybody all the time is engaged in trade. (But the emphasis

which Neoclassical economics puts on the trader?s autonomous choice is ideological.) As for production,

its paradigm is the industrialist and factories. (Not the household or school, which, in a less ideological

perspective, would not have to be separated in conception from production.) Work is sold to an owner

by workers. Workers spend most of their time working?and that is what a physical perspective would

see?but all that commodity economics sees is the very small amount of time the worker spends making

the wage bargain with the employer.

The circumstance that the vast system is steered, or at least locally steered, by trades is mindboggling. (But not so mind-boggling if we remember that in reality, equilibration is not painless.)

Beyond that there is financialization. Money, borrowing, and the secondary market in IOUs.

Green pieces of paper are treated as use-values. Wealth is a vast pyramid of debt. Wealth becomes a

vast financial illusion. The relation between the physical world and the world of fictions is inverted. The

availability of loans comes to control the possibility of economic activity at all. A constitutive illusion

called inflation becomes an urgent concern. What is this at all? How has human survival become

dependent on the stipulation and transmission of trillionfold illusions? To that has to be added the

unique phenomenon of taxation. And that returns us to the institutional side of it, because the state

acts as guarantor of property and contracts (for example)?in the broadest senses. Another institutional

fact: the state has made the interest rate a policy variable. That is an incredible development, a

cancellation of laissez-faire from above.

It is entirely quantitative?and the physical is interwoven with the fictitious (prices and money).

One of the goals of the discipline has to be to account for this vast network of quantified phenomena, all

human-made.

But that is only the beginning, because there are so many dimensions to it. Economies have

overarching behavioral principles. In this society, engineering is not a neutral discipline; it is inseparable

from Neoclassical economics. In a certain sense, if Neoclassical economics were discarded, nothing of

the physical economy would be left. Even physics is inseparable from Neoclassical economics: the

action principle. Engineers maximize several physical goals simultaneously?how? By adding them

together with ?weights??prices, in effect?to get objective functions. No engineer knows how to design

an automobile without commodification. No engineer can discuss capital construction without interest

rates.

Another dimension. Determined attempts have been made by ?radical economists? to show that

some activities consist in the ?cheating? of one group by another, in the guise of a ?fair trade.? Capitalist

exploitation; imperialist exploitation. I write about that?I don?t blame people for suspecting that there

is such a thing as a ?windfall to the capitalist role,? for example?but the received arguments of this

nature such as Marx?s labor-power?well, they haven?t convinced.

Two questions of the greatest breadth may be asked. Let us take the speculative question first.

Is an economy possible at an advanced technical level which treats property and behavioral

imperatives entirely differently? (The question of communism, collectivism, abolition of profitmaximization and prices.) We do not speak of a mere policy, reversible after the next election or change

of dictator, but of the accession to a higher civilization.

Pursuant to this question, certain fundamental observations about capitalism come to the

forefront. Property rights do not inhere in the human condition. Private property is appropriation.

(Who owns people, who owns the air, who owns time?) Then, to posit relative efficiency as an

economy-wide goal is ideological posturing. (It describes no economic system, certainly not capitalism.)

From a communist vantage-point, then, market equilibrium is an equilibrium of force and fraud. All

prices are invidious constructs (more so than IQs, for example).

Most of my work in economics has explored this subject-matter?has been concerned to theorize

the economics of a higher civilization. But clearly this subject-matter is not the order of the day, not

remotely. It is far in advance of a political program. Moreover, the question of whether a higher

civilization is ?good? has to be treated cautiously. It could be, for example, that in a higher civilization

nobody would own a stock of jewels as a store of wealth. (How about a slave to fan you in hot

weather?) Some people will always consider that a deprivation. We are abstracting from what I would

call anachronistic privilege; we ask whether we can imagine anything that would be coherent and

feasible. We are competing not with Gerard Debreu but with Freeman Dyson.

Our second question is down-to-earth. What is the economic phenomenon in our time, what is

its measure, what are its behavioral patterns, how does it change in the large? In recent years I have

done more work on this question, all preliminary. Let me say at the outset that to idealize the free

market mathematically in order to prove the existence of an equilibrium which is also optimum is

ideological trash. My research excludes any such exercise.

One side of a descriptive investigation would be to delineate actual system flows. Physical inputoutput models, or linear models with joint products and depreciation, give a foretaste of the apparatus

required. Because of capital wear etc., such modeling already goes far beyond any lay discourse on the

economy. The utilization of the modeling apparatus cannot be dictated by Walrasian idealization to

secure ideological results. When there is unemployment, for example, the researcher must register it

without being argumentative or coy.

Then the pecuniary magnitudes which are operative in the economy need to be tracked.

Empirical prices, interest rates, money supplies, volume of debt, etc. Again, there are various realities

which embarrass the ideologues which must be registered without being argumentative or coy. The

state sets the governing interest rate (abolishing the free market at the core). Then?it is normal for

markets to be rigged. The analysis of price-determination in markets would look nothing like the

Neoclassical model.

There certainly are phenomena of demand in market behavior. Substitute and complementary

products can be observed; one can attempt to test elasticities of demand statistically (if one is willing to

accept results that belie Neoclassical theory). On the other hand, the deduction of demand for coffee or

rice from the autonomous psyche is ideological nonsense.

As for pecuniary indices which governments have created for administrative purposes, such as

?inflation? or GNP, whether economics need to recognize them even as an operative fiction is an open

question.

I am sneaking up on a critical analysis of the existing economy by making qualitative studies of this or

that piece of commercial activity.

a) What businessmen actually do. (Enron etc. etc.) It can never be spoken about in school for obvious

reasons: the Establishment and the criminals are one and the same.

b) Special sectors, such as lending, i.e. interest as income. Although Neoclassical economics legitimates

lending at interest, economic institutions continue to treat lending as highly suspect. The possibility of

economic activity at all is dependent on a line of business which continues to be highly suspect, like

selling addictive drugs.

The triumph of American values ?

1. The Founders believed that unnecessary government is dangerous and destructive of the moral

character of its people.

2. Character begins in taking responsibility for oneself. State involvement, when a person can care for

himself, damages moral character and reduces care for the truly needy.

3. Government entitlement programs have terrible moral consequences. These programs lead to a loss

of self-worth, an attitude of entitlement, and a lack of gratitude for what is provided. Why work if the

government provides a handout?

4. People need the emotional reward of feeling needed. Men especially have been denied rewards for

their involvement. When the State becomes totally responsible for the financial support of their women

and children, men are denied this reward. As the State expands its role, nothing is left of liberty and

dignity.

5. American churches and other voluntary groups have been an essential part of American culture that

becomes denigrated when government expands into their role. Charity and volunteerism are reduced

substantially in leftist states, a detriment to the needy and to the volunteers' sense of community

contribution.

Another jewel. "There are fine individuals on the left and selfish individuals on the Right. But as a rule,

bigger government increases the number of angry, ungrateful, lazy, spoiled and self-centered

individuals."

And another jewel. "The Left's altruistic motives have created the Welfare state, and the Welfare state

creates selfishness."

Prager's book discusses all the many underlying philosophical differences between conservatives and the

Obama left, and in my opinion, he discloses the fallacy underlying all the liberal concepts. Prager

discusses how the Age of Reason's and the Enlightenment's rejection of religion and God resulted in the

rejection of the concept of the inherent immorality of man -- a rejection which took over Europe.

Contrary to this European post-Enlightenment concept, the Founders retained in the Constitution the

concepts that man is immoral and that the essence of man is most interested in self-satisfaction. This

led the Founders to incorporate Montesquieu's advice in the Constitution and to create three branches

of government in which each branch had equal power. This was their attempt to counter the inherent

self-interest and immorality of man. It is my dream that a clear-thinking philosophy major would use

Prager's book to generate a short version for consumption by independents. Such a text would help the

world appreciate the inherent weaknesses underlying the social democracy of the Obama

administration.

A social and technological revolution - Technological revolution is (in general meaning) a relatively not

long period in history when one technology (or better a set of technologies) is replaced by another

technology (or by the set of technologies). As Nick Bostrom wrote: ?We might define a technological

revolution as a dramatic change brought about relatively quickly by the introduction of some new

technology.? [1] It is an era of an accelerated technological progress characterized not only by new

innovations but also their application and diffusion. A new technological revolution should increase a

productivity of work, efficiency, etc. It may involve not only material changes but also changes in

management, learning, social interactions, financing, methods of research etc. It is not limited strictly to

technical aspects. Technological revolution so rewrites the material conditions of human existence and

also reshape culture, society and even human nature. It can play a role of a trigger of a chain of various

and unpredictable changes.[4]

"What distinguishes a technological revolution from a random collection of technology systems and

justifies conceptualizing it as a revolution are two basic features:

1. The strong interconnectedness and interdependence of the participating systems in their technologies

and markets.

2. The capacity to transform profoundly the rest of the economy (and eventually society)."[5]

The consequences of a technological revolution are not exclusively positive - for example, it can have

negative environmental impact and cause a temporal unemployment (so called technological

unemployment).

The concept of technological revolution is based on the idea (not unquestioned) that technological

progress is not linear but undulatory. Technological revolution can be:

sectoral (more technological changes in one sector, e.g. Green revolution, Commercial revolution)

universal (interconnected radical changes in more sectors, the universal technological revolution can be

seen as a complex of several parallel sectoral technological revolutions, e.g. Second industrial revolution,

Renaissance technological revolution etc.)

The annihilation of distance -

Levels of analysis -

Evolving modern history -

Foreign policy ?

On power - Power is a central concept in international relations, but its meaning is contested.

Predominately, it is understood as control over resources, others, and/or outcomes; however, scholars

increasingly recognize that these conceptions of power are inadequate. Progress towards a more

sophisticated understanding of power relations is hampered by outdated meta-theoretical assumptions

about the structure of concepts. At the heart of many debates about contested concepts lies the

assumption that definitions must capture a singular, unifying essence of concepts, and that specifications

of sub-types must be contained within the bounds specified by one overarching definition. Recent

developments in cognitive science reveal that these assumptions?prevalent in the Western political

thought?are untenable. Dispensing with these assumptions makes room for a richer understanding of

the different types of power. It allows us to develop a typology of power that includes not only the

dimension of power that is associated with domination, coercion, oppression, exploitation, military

might, and violence, but also the dimension that relates to the capacity of a collectivity to stabilize and

shape political order based on a horizontal social contract. These two dimensions cannot be contained

under one overarching definition of power.

World affairs since the end of the Cold War have made it clear that the traditional view of power is too

narrow. In this context, I argue that Hannah Arendt's conception of power as corresponding, in her

words, ?to the human ability not just to act, but to act in concert,? offers invaluable insights. I build on

Arendt's insights about horizontally generated power to distinguish four different types of power in

international relations: coercive power, bargaining power, concerted power, and political power. Coercive

power and bargaining power are different forms of ?power as control?. They depend on military and

economic resources. My explication and analyses of concerted power and political power provide

grounds to believe that it may be possible to replace political dynamics in which violence always looms

as an immediate, if implicit, threat with dynamics that relegate violence to the margins?even in

relations between states.

Anarchy as the essence of international life - Power is a central concept in international relations, but its

meaning is contested. Predominately, it is understood as control over resources, others, and/or

outcomes; however, scholars increasingly recognize that these conceptions of power are inadequate.

Progress towards a more sophisticated understanding of power relations is hampered by outdated metatheoretical assumptions about the structure of concepts. At the heart of many debates about contested

concepts lies the assumption that definitions must capture a singular, unifying essence of concepts, and

that specifications of sub-types must be contained within the bounds specified by one overarching

definition. Recent developments in cognitive science reveal that these assumptions?prevalent in the

Western political thought?are untenable. Dispensing with these assumptions makes room for a richer

understanding of the different types of power. It allows us to develop a typology of power that includes

not only the dimension of power that is associated with domination, coercion, oppression, exploitation,

military might, and violence, but also the dimension that relates to the capacity of a collectivity to

stabilize and shape political order based on a horizontal social contract. These two dimensions cannot be

contained under one overarching definition of power.