https://hdl.handle.net/10419/157768 2026-09-14T01:22:48Z 2026-09-14T01:22:48Z Dillon, Sean https://hdl.handle.net/10419/312938 2025-04-25T14:07:41Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Earning Through Obsolescence. An Examination of Falling Household Durables Usage Lifespans in the United States 1970-2018 Authors: Dillon, Sean Abstract: This study examines the declining usage lifespan of household consumer durables in the United States between 1970 and 2018, situating the phenomenon within a heterodox political economy framework. While mainstream economic narratives attribute the rising rate of consumer durable waste over this time to “overconsumption” driven by consumer materialism, this study challenges that perspective through an empirical analysis of waste generation, consumer spending, depreciation rates, and corporate profitability within the consumer durables sector. *** The findings reveal a significant divergence between rising levels of durable goods waste and relatively stable per capita ‘real’ consumer spending, suggesting that falling product longevity is largely not demand-driven. Instead, the data indicates that manufacturers have profitably reduced product durability, as evidenced by increasing rates of geometric depreciation and a rise in total sectoral earnings without proportional increases in earnings margins. *** These findings align with the theory of “planned obsolescence,” whereby firms deliberately shorten product lifespans to drive replacement purchases and sustain profit growth. Given that this strategy cannot be adequately explained within conventional neoclassical economic models, the article draws the Veblenian theory of “strategic sabotage” to conceptualize the deliberate underutilization of technological capacity in pursuit of pecuniary gains. The study provides both empirical and theoretical evidence that the decline in consumer durables product longevity observed between 1970 and 2018 is structurally embedded in capitalist production of consumer durables goods.

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z Moure, Christopher Gorsky, Shai https://hdl.handle.net/10419/323238 2025-08-02T05:16:56Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: "No place to be sick": Cooptation and convergence in the US hospital care sector Authors: Moure, Christopher; Gorsky, Shai Abstract: This paper tries to answer the question: in what ways does the logic of capital accumulation shape the organization of hospital care in the US - a sector characterized by a preponderance of both public and private "not-for-profit" institutions? Rather than taking different hospital ownership types as our analytical starting point, to answer this question, we approach the dynamics of the sector as a struggle between "capitalized care" and organized resistance to it. Taking inspiration from the capital as power political economic approach, we define "capitalized care" as a system of health care in which care is subordinated to the ongoing accumulation of power and profit. We map our investigation of organized power onto four empirical dimensions, focusing on the years 2011-2021: organized resistance to capitalized care; distribution of hospitals by ownership type; relative size and concentration of hospital systems; and relative inflation of price markups. We find that these dimensions are closely connected, suggesting that the hospital sector at large is deeply caught up in the logic of capital accumulation. While marginal, organized resistance to capitalized care continues to shape the other dimensions of the hospital landscape - namely, the balance of power between for-profit (FP) and not-for-profit (NFP) hospital systems, the profitability and concentration of large hospital systems, price inflation and medical debt. Not just FP hospitals, but also public and NFP hospitals have become tightly integrated into an overall logic of capitalist accumulation within the sector, leading to increasing consolidation, price inflation, health care inequality, and paradoxically, a large and growing public cost of healthcare.

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z Bichler, Shimshon Nitzan, Jonathan https://hdl.handle.net/10419/301395 2025-02-27T08:45:52Z 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: The Road to Gaza Authors: Bichler, Shimshon; Nitzan, Jonathan Abstract: *** You can read, quote, reference and link this working paper, but you cannot reproduce or post it in any form unless permitted in writing by the authors ***** The war that started in 2023 between Hamas and Israel is driven by various long-lasting processes, but it also brings to the fore a new cause that hitherto seemed marginal: the armed militias of the Rabbinate and Islamic churches. The Rabbinate militias, embodied in Jewish settler organizations, have taken over not only Palestinian lands, but, gradually, also Israeli society. The Islamic militias, represented by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, rose to prominence after the traditional resistance groups of the Palestinians – primarily the PLO and the PFLP and, by extension, also the Palestinian Authority – weakened and proved unable to reverse, let alone stop, the Israeli occupation. The rise of these militias, though, is hardly unique to Israel/Palestine, or even the Middle East. It is part of a broader, global process, in which ‘private’ military organizations, financed by states, church-related NGOs and/or organized crime, fight for and against states as well as each other. The ascent of such groups is closely related to the decline of the nation-state and its popular armies, a model that developed in the wake of the French Revolution but no longer resonates with the increasingly globalized nature of capital accumulation. Our previous studies of Middle East wars emphasized the ‘state of capital’ – our notion that the capitalist mode of power fuses state and capital into a single logic in which dominant capital groups are driven by the power quest for differential accumulation. We showed that, in the Middle East, this logic was imposed by a Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition of large oil and armament corporations, OPEC, financial institutions and construction firms, whose differential incomes and profits were tightly correlated with – and helped predict – the cyclical eruption of ‘energy conflicts’. But this mode of power comprises not two elements, but three. In addition to state and capital, it also includes the supreme-God churches, and in this paper we outline the role of these churches and their militias in capitalism generally and in Middle East wars specifically.

2024-01-01T00:00:00Z Mouré, Christopher https://hdl.handle.net/10419/301397 2025-02-27T08:45:52Z 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Consolidation and Crisis in the US Banking Sector 1980-2022 Authors: Mouré, Christopher Abstract: Much of the economic analysis of banking crises focuses on the interplay between concentration and stability. A common theory is that concentration is associated with greater stability, whereas competition is associated with instability. In this view, there is a trade-off between, on the one hand, the higher prices and higher profits associated with a banking cartel, and on the other, frequent banking crises and lower prices caused by a fragmented sector. However, this theory is not entirely convincing. Principally, it tends to treat competition and concentration as independent variables, whereas in reality, causality works both ways: banks actively work to transform the structure of the system and transcend apparent constraints – whether through coordinating interest rates, influencing policy, or by transforming the business landscape through corporate amalgamation. In addition, the last two major banking crises in the US occurred in dramatically different conditions of concentration from one other, complicating any obvious empirical connection between concentration and stability. In this paper, I try to move beyond this hypothesis by investigating the relationship between corporate concentration and banking stability through the lens of organized power. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, I make two claims. First, since the 1980s, the differential profitability of large banks has been driven by corporate amalgamation. Second, crises tend to be followed by an increase in the pace of amalgamation. As a result, since the 1980s, banking crises have preceded a dramatic redistribution of resources and control to a handful of large banks. While it is not clear that concentration makes a banking crisis less likely, the evidence suggests that crisis makes concentration more likely. Though the research presented here is only tentative and exploratory, it indicates that since the 1980s, large banks have remade the business and regulatory landscape in ways that defy the logic of a simple binary relationship between concentration and stability, and that this needs to be taken into account when analysing the dynamics of banking crises.

2024-01-01T00:00:00Z