Adam Tooze listener's questions episode
Added 2023-08-04 15:45:04 +0000 UTCOn the 16th of this month Adam Tooze will be returning to PTO to answer your questions. Adam's writing is famously wide-ranging so feel free to throw some curveballs - but some topics you might want to ask questions related to might include the Ukraine war, the nature of Bidenomics which Adam recently discussed on his podcast Ones and Tooze, US-China relations, our last conversation on defining fascism, or the first interview Adam did with PTO on his 2006 book, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy.
As usual please post your questions below the line, or alternatively email
politicstheoryother@gmail.com with 'Tooze questions' in the subject header. Time constraints may mean we'll struggle to get to every question but we'll do our best.
Finally, apologies for the late appearance of the Richard Seymour listener's questions episode - this will be out in the next few days. Thanks as ever for your support!
Comments
Hi everyone, here's the episode with Adam: https://www.patreon.com/posts/adam-tooze-to-88492577 thanks for the great questions!
Politics Theory Other
2023-08-31 08:03:11 +0000 UTCI would like to hear this too but in a recent substack he wrote "With the inflation (or should we say price shock) drama in the West largely played out, there is no story more important in the world economy right now than the question of China’s future". Those brackets give you a clue!
Jon
2023-08-22 05:37:46 +0000 UTCI think the picture is mixed - in short, the 'green growth plan' has been cut (because delayed) but is still policy (for now). I also think Labour have moved away from Bidenomics at the rhetorical level, repeating the phrases 'fiscal rules' and 'there is no money' together so often as to redefine the meaning of the former to be equivalent to the latter. At any rate, there is clearly some opposition to Bidenomics within the Labour right and among some Labour-alined actors and so I'd be interested to hear some analysis of that position.
Reader11
2023-08-13 09:44:46 +0000 UTCI don't actually agree that they're turning away from Bidenomics. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/07/bidenomics-lessons-labour-looks-to-democrats-as-it-prepares-for-power
Matthew Lowery
2023-08-11 12:05:09 +0000 UTCCould we hear from Tooze about where he stands on the inflation debate at present? From what I can remember from his interviews and blogs in 2022, he had been skeptical of claims that we have entered a period of long-term structural inflation. The declining inflation rates of late 2022/early 2023 appeared to support his position, even if we do not have to thank central bankers and interest rate hikes for this. I understood Tooze as contradicting the arguments of people like James Meadway, who repeatedly emphasizes the long-term inflationary impacts of fragmenting trade and production networks and (above all else) worsening ecological crises... but perhaps not so much Isabella Weber's focus on sector-specific "seller's inflation."
Gabriel Young
2023-08-06 16:31:10 +0000 UTCAt one time it seemed as though the UK Labour party was preparing for a version of Bidenomics but the faction that dominates the party leadership now appears to be backing off that agenda. However, it’s unclear to me what the Labour right critique of a UK Bidenomics is, and what alternative plan for growth they have. I wonder if the idea something like the following: ‘Bidenomics-style government investment isn’t going to work for the UK as we are too far behind the US and China in the race for green technology - and we can’t borrow what it would really take to catch-up with them because the market would punish us (as they did Truss). But the fundamentals of the economy are ok (we still have the City of London etc.) and so, if we keep out of trouble (see again Truss) moderate growth will return.’ Is this your understanding of the reasoning against Bidenomics in the UK, and is there anything to be said for that line of argument?
Reader11
2023-08-05 18:32:24 +0000 UTCGreat question Emily!
Politics Theory Other
2023-08-04 18:20:03 +0000 UTCIn his 2019 New Left Review article Perry Anderson stressed the “situational and tactical awareness” of your work, a Keynesian stress on “pragmatic crisis management in the form of punctual adjustments without illusion of permanency.” You've also spoken about your identification with a professional-managerial class politics, and at times you seem to view yourself as contributing to the collective rationality of that class (at the very least holding out the possibility of collective learning from the past). Yet I do not get the sense that you are as optimistic as, say, the international historian Patrick Cohrs about an elite capacity to learn from one international conference to the next. Indeed the in medias res approach explicitly thematised by Chartbook seems to point in the opposite direction – to an elite constantly buffeted by the emergent complexity of the polycrisis. In your 2021 LRB article on Andreas Malm, you noted that the climate crisis poses an additional problem for this left-liberal politics: time is simply running out for the professional-managerial class to find a solution. Two years later, has your sense of your position changed? And while Perry Anderson contrasted your situational, tactical methodology to a structural one, to what extent do you think that your present-tense reportage from within the PMC highlights its relative powerlessness in the face of structural and impersonal forces?
Emily Dyson
2023-08-04 18:18:56 +0000 UTC
