Book launch: Our Money: Monetary Policy as if Democracy Matters

Date: Wed 22 Oct

Time: 17:00 - 18:30

Room: S1, Alison Richard Building

Speaker: Dr Leah Downey

Discussant: Dr Inga Rademacher

Chair: Dr Pedro Mendes Loureiro

The power to create money is foundational to the state. In the United States, that power has been largely delegated to private banks governed by an independent central bank. Putting monetary policy in the hands of a set of insulated, nonelected experts has fueled the popular rejection of expertise as well as a widespread dissatisfaction with democratically elected officials. In Our Money, Leah Downey makes a principled case against central bank independence (CBI) by both challenging the economic theory behind it and developing a democratic rationale for sustaining the power of the legislature to determine who can create money and on what terms. How states govern money creation has an impact on the capacity of the people and their elected officials to steer policy over time. In a healthy democracy, Downey argues, the balance of power over money creation matters.

Downey applies and develops democratic theory through an exploration of monetary policy. In so doing, she develops a novel theory of independent agencies in the context of democratic government, arguing that states can employ expertise without being ruled by experts. Downey argues that it is through iterative governance, the legislature knowing and regularly showing its power over policy, that the people can retain their democratic power to guide policy in the modern state. As for contemporary macroeconomic arguments in defense of central bank independence, Downey suggests that the purported economic benefits do not outweigh the democratic costs.

Deterrence and Retribution as Motives for Supporting Punitive Public Policies

Date: Wed 05 Nov

Time: 17:00 - 18:00

Room: 138, Alison Richard Building

Speaker: Dr Tom O'Grady

Chair: Dr Margarita Gelepithis

Punitive policies such as migrant detention and benefits sanctions are growing in popularity. Politicians claim that the threat of punishment deters undesired behaviour, yet much evidence suggests that this is incorrect. Why, then, is punishment in public policy popular with voters? Building on literature from crime and punishment, I use vignette experiments in the UK to test whether this is because they believe that punishment acts as a deterrent, or because they view it as retribution for immoral behaviour. Respondents rated the likelihood of desired behaviour from hypothetical migrants and benefits claimants, and from themselves, in response to punishments of varying severity. They believed that the policies had only very small deterrent effects, yet supported them anyway. Punishment was seen as fair because migrants and benefits claimants fail to live up to people’s behavioural standards. In these circumstances, punitive measures serve to reinforce moral standards and a rule-bound, orderly society.

Fear of full employment: Labor as a driver of inflation at the Fed, 1970-2020

Date: Wed 19 Nov

Time: 17:00 - 18:00

Room: 138, Alison Richard Building

Speaker: Dr Ben Braun

Chair: Dr James Wood

The debate about the political economy of central bank independence hinges on the institution's distributional consequences. Have independent central banks helped grow the cake for everyone, or have they increased the slice going to capital? At the heart of this debate lies the role of the labor market—both in central bankers' understanding of the inflationary process and in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. With its explicit dual mandate, the Federal Reserve is a pivotal test case. We measure Fed policymakers’ understanding of the labor market as a driver of inflation via LLM-assisted text classification methods, applied to the complete corpus of Fed communications during the period 1970-2020. Our results show a robust negative relationship between the rate of unemployment and the salience of labor as a driver of inflation. Crucially, this relationship holds only for the internal deliberations of the FOMC, not for public speeches. Contrary to what the Fed’s full-employment mandate would suggest, our findings do not indicate a ‘rhetorical Phillip’s curve’ but a genuine ‘fear of full employment’.

Between the Cloud and a Hard Place: A thesis on technological transformation

Date: Wed 26 Nov

Time: 17:00 - 18:00

Room: 138, Alison Richard Building

Speaker: Dr Devika Narayan

Chair: Dr Ilias Alami

This talk will offer a perspective on digital transformation that melds sociotechnical analysis of computing infrastructure with industrial and organisational political economy. The old-fashioned, unglamourous computer industry has given way to a much more pervasive and powerful tech sector. I will explore this shift to discuss the material practices of acceleration and capitalist volatility.

Fugitive Care: Beyond the Violence of Welfare

Date: Wed 28 Jan

Time: 17:00 - 18:00

Room: 138, Alison Richard Building

Speaker: Dr Ida Danewid

Chair: Dr Pedro Mendes Loureiro

This project examines how care and welfare systems emerged in a global context of empire, (settler) colonialism, and racial capitalism. By extending the insights of the abolitionist critique of prisons, police, and borders to care and welfare institutions, it charts how state-sponsored forms of care have functioned as technologies of pacification, expropriation, abandonment, and control. Working with a set of movements and organisers, it also explores how hegemonic notions of care are resisted, subverted, and reimagined by local communities struggling for dignity, justice, and sovereignty. In so doing, the project ultimately works towards an anarchistic approach to abolition which seeks, not just to fund care, but to transform and conceive of it anew: what I call fugitive care.

TBC: Prof Ben Clift

Chair: Dr José Tomás Labarca

Date: Wed 25 Feb

Time: 17:00 - 18:00

Room: 138, Alison Richard Building

TBC: Prof Ronen Palan

Date: Wed 11 Mar

Time: 17:00 - 18:30

Room: S1, Alison Richard Building