Morton J. Marcus is a former Prof of IU’s Business School (it has a corporate sponsorship but I’ll exercise my freedom to ignore it). He was director of the Indiana Business Research Center (IBRC) for more than 30 years, having retired from the university in November 2003. He is published every Friday in the Bloomington [...]
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Economics and Kindergarten
I would like to offer the following as a critical warm-up to the following “economics” article from the Times (from 2010) about the “value” of the Kindergarten experience. First, be clear, I think these early grades are THE most important in terms of the relationships we maintain with institutional power and control. After two centuries [...]
The Fiscal Freedom to Inculcate Evil
The following snippet is from a piece by Andrew Leonard on the SCOTUS ruling striking down the Montana Supreme Court decision to limit political contributions (in the teeth of Citizens United). It’s a clear loss for people and the planet as corporations have ONE interest, creating wealth for their owners (and no, that’s not “shareholders”) [...]
Okay, I Guess, Whatever
The paradox of the mercantile culture we label “capitalism,” or probably more descriptively and truthfully for most of us, consumerism, is in its “false” interconnectedness. At the level of production, at the level of industrialized processes, people are parts of the machinery of the economic system that serves that process. In that sense, we are [...]
“Choice!” The Mindless Battle Cry of the Addicted
In a local newspaper opinion piece today the editors cry “Choice!” regarding the proposal by New York Mayor Bloomberg which seeks to ban the sale of toxic liquids in containers over 16 0z to human animals. From the editorial, “Our opinion: People should watch their intake — by choice,” here is the argument: We were [...]
The Child of the Marketplace Metaphor
Since the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, organized in covenants as a joint stock company, imagined themselves a mystic brotherhood reborn in the body of Christ, American history has progressed under the sway of two, conflicting vocabularies. One, the language of exterior, marketplace relations, takes the contract as its master symbol. The other, the language of [...]
Calculable Obligations: Motivations of Money and Technology
Debt, that is, as opposed to a promise, is a calculable obligation. I was reading a review of two books on the current state of global indebtedness in the London Review of Books (“Forgive Us Our Debts” by Benjamin Kunkel) when it seemed clear to me that this is the basic ground of all domination [...]
Educating Business Ethics
The population of the US seems to be experiencing a kind of national awakening regarding the harsh and endemic inequalities of our “Us vs Them” economic reality. Though it seems possible that our bail-out and bubble-induced slogans of solidarity will fade into our historical moment to be studied by the future (should there be one [...]
Learning Bathroom Discipline: Let Freedom Aggregate
One of the abiding memories of school for many of us is the fact that you have to ask permission to use the bathroom and that that request can be denied you.* We are taught in school, and perhaps this is the sole abiding goal of the institution, how to be bossed; to learn the [...]
The Epic of The Once-ler
In an age of too much, too fast, too late we have already shoved the Seussian idea of ecology into the recycle bin of useless messages. I would rage against this idiotic cotton candy confection–but to what purpose? I participated in the very cultural act it’s supposed moral speaks against as I went to the [...]
