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13th AIPEN Workshop Talk

I gave the following talk at the 13th AIPEN Workshop to be held at the University of Melbourne on 10th February 2023 – thanks to Dr Sara Meger and colleagues for organising. You can view the talk’s slides here, and hear the talk and Q&A audio here. In the talk recording I mentioned a Downtown Josh Brown piece called You Weren’t Supposed To See That.

From Jones to Sunak: How The City and Financialised Hedge Funds Shape The United Kingdom’s Political Economy

Rishi Sunak’s rapid ascension to becoming Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in October 2022 signalled how financialisation and capital accumulation shape the United Kingdom’s political economy. This paper investigates how Sunak’s career in Goldman Sachs and in the hedge funds the Children’s Investment Fund Management and Theleme Partners gave him the reputation and the decision-making skills to outflank former Prime Minister Liz Truss, whose Trussonomics fiscal policies sought to provide unfunded tax arbitrage for her 1% donors. The blow up in October 2022 of Liability Driven Investment leveraged strategies in United Kingdom pension funds created a classic Bagehot-style run on the gilt: financial markets reacted by deligitimating Truss and instead backing Sunak. I show how Sunak was able to use the unique meso-level (organisational) strategic subcultures of hedge funds to accumulate capital and to gain valuable tactical skills for his subsequent political career, from COVID-19 crisis alpha (reflected in Theleme Partners’ position size in the pharmaceutical firm Moderna), to pursuing new fiscal and monetary policies that reflected the City’s Big Bank deregulation experience under former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, far more than Liz Truss’s wishful idolisation of Thatcher as a leadership symbol. Global political economy lessons are drawn for future capital accumulation in Sydney (Australia), Tokyo (Japan), and Singapore financial hubs, despite the high likelihood of a bear market and continued geopolitical volatility. The likely result despite counter-hegemonic demands will be a version of the Matthew Effect: the (already) successful will become more successful.

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AIPEN 11th Workshop Audio and Slides

I’m presenting at the Australian International Political Economy Network’s 11th Workshop on 6th February 2020 at the University of Sydney on political economist Branko Milanovic, Australia’s liberal meritocratic capitalism, and my PhD work on mobilisational counter-power. You can now read the talk abstract, hear the audio, and view the PowerPoint sides. Thanks to AIPEN for a travel grant to attend the 11th Workshop.

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AIPEN 2020 Abstract

The abstract for a paper (to be written – accepted 29th November 2019) for the Australian International Political Economy Network‘s 11th annual Workshop, to be held at the University of Sydney on 6th and 7th February 2020:

Australia’s Liberal Meritocratic Capitalism and the Political Economy of Mobilisational Counter-Power

City University of New York’s political economist Branko Milanovic (Capitalism, Alone, Harvard University Press, 2019) has argued that Western countries like Australia personify a ‘liberal meritocratic capitalism’ that contrasts with China’s rising one-party ‘political capitalism’. However, Australia is currently experiencing significant social conflicts – illustrated by economic recession fears, corporate wage theft disclosures, inequality-based social stratification, and growth in climate change activist movements like Extinction Rebellion – that highlight divisive tensions in Milanovic’s ‘liberal meritocratic capitalism’. This paper draws on recent PhD qualitative research at Monash University to further develop the political economy microfoundations of an analytical theory of counter-elite driven change: mobilisational counter-power. I use process tracing to explore these significant social conflicts and what they may mean, in particular, for transdisciplinary narratives about ecological crisis, financialisation and labour exploitation.

Keywords: liberal meritocratic capitalism; microfoundations; mobilisational counter-power; political economy; process tracing

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PhD Pre-Submission Seminar / Final Review Documentation

My PhD Pre-Submission Seminar / Final Review documentation can be accessed here. My thanks to the Monash University committee in the School of Political and Social Inquiry: Associate Professor Steven Roberts, Associate Professor Ben MacQueen, and Dr Bill Flanik, and to my PhD Supervisors, Dr Luke Howie and Dr Zareh Ghazarian. This PhD milestone was passed on 14th November 2018.

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What I’m Reading

  1. Russian ‘Hybrid Warfare’: Resurgence and Politicization by Ofer Fridman (Oxford University Press, 2018). Hybrid war using non-military means and the operational codes of Vladimir Putin’s networks are two ways to update Jack Snyder’s original work on strategic culture for what I call fourth generation scholarship. Fridman’s book examines rival conceptual definitions of what hybrid war is – and how political elites in Russia and the United States have incentivised the concept.
  2. Extremism by J.M. Berger (The MIT Press, 2018). I’ve spent part of my in-progress dissertation trying to develop a causal model of belief adoption about violence that leads strategic actors to prefer terrorist tactics as a means to pursue strategic goals. Berger’s scholarship is critical to this aim, and he draws on George Washington University’s Haroro J. Ingram, who is a rising star about violent extremism in policy-making circles.
  3. Negative Capitalism: Cynicism in the Neoliberal Era  by J.D. Taylor (Zero Books, 2013). In studying Aum Shinrikyo for my in-progress dissertation I’ve made political economy connections with Japan’s ‘lost decades’ of macroeconomic deflation and debt leverage. In many ways Japan’s sociopolitical experience foreshadowed the Great Recession or Global Financial Crisis that has affected the West since 2008. Taylor’s book reflects the United Kingdom experience with neoliberal austerity policies and is bracing to read.
  4. Alpha God: The Psychology of Religious Violence And Oppression by Hector A. Garcia (Random House, 2015). Several years ago Max Taylor suggested that counterterrorism analysts study evolutionary psychology to understand distal and diachronic influences on terrorists. Garcia’s book suggests a range of infra- and inter-group dynamics that could be used for qualitative coding of the terrorism studies literature.