THE ROAD NOT TAKEN: Yemen, Gulf Strategy, and the Cost of Choosing War Over Integration Strategic Compression vs Strategic Patience in the GCC, When Speed Becomes Strategy and Strategy Becomes Drift. A Strategic Analysis in Three Parts

A useful lens: strategic compression vs strategic patience. War promises fast outcomes. Integration builds slow resilience. Yemen shows what institutions struggle to choose.
👇
thinkingprospectus.substack.com/p/the-road-n...

#Strategy #PoliticalEconomy #ConflictStudies #Development #GCC #Statecraft

Canada isn’t “socialized medicine”—it’s state-funded healthcare running through capitalist delivery systems. The state pays, capital delivers. That's not abolition of the market, just insulation from it. #HealthcareMyths #PoliticalEconomy

The Mondragon cooperative. Nordic municipal utilities. Japanese consumer co-ops.

Public Trust Foundations synthesize these models with the CCO currency system.

#EconSky #CoopEconomics #PoliticalEconomy #PublicPolicy

BetterToBest.github.io/research-hub/

James O'Connor (academic) - Wikiquote James O'Connor was an American political economist.

Made my first WikiQuote page for political economist James O'Connor.

en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_O...

"...banking became national and international and global financial markets now have more influence on the shape of local industry ...than local businesspeople and residents." #politicaleconomy

The Gulf States Strategic Paradox: Engineered Wealth, Imported Security, Emerging Autonomy Are Gulf States Real Strategic Actors? Beyond the “Client State” Debate: How the GCC Plans Long-Term and Where It Doesn’t.

Scenario: reduced U.S. guarantees → higher risk premiums, rapid hedging, new informal security bargains.

Full essay + sector risk matrix:
thinkingprospectus.substack.com/p/the-gulf-s...

#Geopolitics #GCC #MiddleEast #SaudiArabia #UAE #Security #PoliticalEconomy #Energy #Strategy #Risk

This doesn’t mean “fake prosperity.” It means real assets operating under real constraints.
The strategic posture emerging is multi‑alignment: diversify partners without hard breakups.

thinkingprospectus.substack.com/p/the-gulf-s...

#Geopolitics #GCC #MiddleEast #PoliticalEconomy #Energy #Strategy

The Gulf States Strategic Paradox: Engineered Wealth, Imported Security, Emerging Autonomy Are Gulf States Real Strategic Actors? Beyond the “Client State” Debate: How the GCC Plans Long-Term and Where It Doesn’t.

Economic strength = long-horizon investment, infrastructure, institutional continuity.
Security weakness = dependence on external architectures + uneven performance in complex conflicts.

Read Essay:
thinkingprospectus.substack.com/p/the-gulf-s...

#Geopolitics #GCC #MiddleEast #PoliticalEconomy

Andrew Hall (Alesina Seminar) "In this paper, we define and measure a previously unstudied channel by which companies react to, and attempt to shape, politics: internal policy teams. We use the text of more than 100,000 job listings to classify the roles of roughly 100 million workers, identifying more than 250,000 individuals working in policy roles in the US..."

Today at 4:30 pm: Stanford professor Andrew Hall examines the influence of internal policy teams, presenting "Investing in Political Expertise: The Remarkable Scale of Corporate Policy Teams" at Alesina Seminar this week.
www.iq.harvard.edu/event/andrew...
#PoliticalEconomy #Lobbying #TextAnalysis

Muskism: a book, an economic model, a horror film Slobodian and Tarnoff's book gives a lot of insight into Elon Musk's machinations and motivations and four dark futures I don't want to come true.

While Slobodian and Tarnoff proffer four possible futures for Muskism, the one I’m more keen to believe is something like a Grok/Trumpian Human Centipede.

Please read the full article here

#musk #AI #politicaleconomy

open.substack.com/pub/breaking...

Promotional poster for a course titled 'Political Economy for Beginners' by GFTU Educational Trust. It mentions tutor Hwanhee Bae and details four sessions from 3 June to 5 August 2026. The background features red and green colours.

The image is a flyer for an event called "Political Economy for Beginners." It features the logo of GFTU Educational Trust at the top. It includes a photo of a person, identified as an Economics PhD candidate at SOAS University of London. The text mentions their role and research interests, including financialisation, housing, pensions, welfare, and political economy.

👋 Political Economy for Beginners course, new to our 2025/26 programme.

Get to the heart of the issues shaping work, inequality, power & change ♥

🎓 Tutor announcement | @hwanheebae.bsky.social

🔗 Sign up: gftuet.org.uk/courses/political-econom...

#GFTUET #PoliticalEconomy

Moral economy isn’t nostalgia — it’s institutional design. A concise lineage from embedded norms to modern decoupling and re-embedding.

Read Essay:
thinkingprospectus.substack.com/p/the-moral-...

#MoralEconomy #SocialTheory #Embeddedness #PoliticalEconomy #EconomicSociology #InstitutionalDesign

The Moral Economy Tradition: Intellectual Genealogy, Structural Theory, and the Architecture of Embedded Responsibility A Supplementary Essay to The Great Decoupling

A guided map of moral economy — Thompson, Polanyi, Scott, Granovetter & Akbar — showing how proximity, reciprocity, and voice sustain legitimacy.
Essay
thinkingprospectus.substack.com/p/the-moral-...

#MoralEconomy #SocialTheory #Embeddedness
#PoliticalEconomy #EconomicSociology #InstitutionalDesign

The moral economy tradition argues that markets are never morally neutral: legitimacy depends on embedded norms and enforceable obligations. This essay traces that lineage from E. P. Thompson’s account of “just price” expectations in English crowds, through Polanyi’s embeddedness and “fictitious commodities,” to Scott’s subsistence ethics, Granovetter’s networked markets, and Akbar’s built-environment responsibility regimes — ending with a practical framework for diagnosing modern “decoupling” and what re-embedding requires. #MoralEconomy #Polanyi #Thompson #Granovetter #SocialTheory #Governance #Legitimacy #Embeddedness #PoliticalEconomy #EconomicSociology #InstitutionalDesign #Accountability Moral Economy Embeddedness Political Economy Economic Sociology Institutional Design Accountability Legitimacy Social Theory Karl Polanyi E. P. Thompson James C. Scott Mark Granovetter Jamel Akbar Built Environment Governance Re-embedding

Why markets aren’t morally neutral: from grain riots to fictitious commodities to network embeddedness — an intellectual genealogy of responsibility.

Read Essay:
thinkingprospectus.substack.com/p/the-moral-...

#MoralEconomy #SocialTheory #Embeddedness #PoliticalEconomy #EconomicSociology

Freedom under capitalism isn’t freedom—it’s purchasing power. If you’ve got capital, you get options. If you don’t, you get instructions. The system doesn’t need chains when it can just starve you into compliance. #ClassStruggle #PoliticalEconomy #WageSlavery

Across finance, technology, housing, and governance, modern systems increasingly allow decision‑makers to capture gains while externalizing harm. Profits are privatized; losses are socialized. Authority operates without consequence. Accountability diffuses until it disappears. This essay names the pattern: the Great Decoupling — the systematic separation of power from responsibility, profit from value, freedom from obligation, and legality from legitimacy. The problem is not bad actors or moral decline. It is system design. Contemporary institutions reward distance from consequence through fragmented ownership, short time horizons, opacity, and regulatory minimalism. The result is a world where markets clear, systems scale, and trust erodes simultaneously. Drawing on moral economy theory and real‑world institutional failures, The Great Decoupling diagnoses how economic, institutional, and social incentives came apart — and why this architecture produces instability by default. The essay then advances a concrete re‑coupling agenda: design patterns that bind decision rights to downside risk, align incentives across time, embed traceability, give affected parties real voice, and make harm legible and costly. This is not a call for heavier enforcement alone, nor a return to nostalgia. It is an argument for engineering accountability directly into the systems we rely on. When no one is responsible, responsibility disappears. Systems designed this way may function — but they cannot hold together indefinitely. #GreatDecoupling #SystemDesign #Accountability #PoliticalEconomy #MoralHazard #Institutions #Capitalism #PowerAndResponsibility #Legitimacy power without responsibility accountability in modern systems institutional design failure moral hazard and system design externalities and accountability re‑coupling power and responsibility moral economy and capitalism why modern institutions fail system design incentives legitimacy versus legality

The Great Decoupling examines how modern systems systematically separate decision‑making power from responsibility — and why re‑coupling them is essential to stability, legitimacy & trust.

thinkingprospectus.substack.com/p/the-great-...

#Accountability #Institutions #SystemDesign #PoliticalEconomy

SIX PROOFS AND A WARNING: A Synthesis Essay in Urban Political Economy Vienna’s Housing Model, Tokyo’s Zoning Revolution, Henry George’s Tax, the Democratic New City, Why Remote Work Didn’t Save Us, and What the Slum Knows

Vienna proves housing can be treated as infrastructure, not an investment vehicle.
Tokyo proves abundance is a zoning decision—not a cultural miracle.
Read Essay⬇️
thinkingprospectus.substack.com/p/six-proofs...

#UrbanPolicy #HousingCrisis #UrbanEconomics #Housing #Urbanism #PoliticalEconomy #Cities

Pakistan's GSP+ Status: The Economics of Loss & The Politics of Retention What happens if Pakistan loses duty-free access to Europe's markets - and why the EU may not be positioned to withdraw it

Pakistan's GSP+ Status: The Economics of Loss & The Politics of Retention #EU #HumanRights #PoliticalEconomy #GeoPolitics #Iran #USA open.substack.com/pub/suhailaw...

Better To Best Research Hub: Economic Innovation for Poverty Elimination Open-access research on eliminating poverty through dual-currency systems (Creative Currency Octaves), community ownership models (Public Trust Housing/Foundations), and democratic governance. 14 peer...

The Phi-rate (1.618x golden ratio bonus) is the most unusual mechanism in CCO.

Businesses producing goods of exceptional quality earn an elevated conversion rate.

The economy rewards craft deliberately.

#EconSky #BehavioralEconomics #PoliticalEconomy

BetterToBest.github.io/research-hub/

BasisPointInsight.com - From Invisible Hand to Iron Fist: When Populism Rewires Capitalism by R. Gurumurthy Populism is reshaping capitalism, expanding state power while weakening institutions. As markets grow politicised, the balance between democracy, governance, and economic freedom faces a critical test...

3/4 The bigger concern is institutional erosion. When governance becomes personalised and rules become flexible, do markets lose their foundation? And if so, what replaces the trust that once underpinned global capitalism?

#PoliticalEconomy

The Weird Paradox: We could work less - but don't.

We already reached: productivity levels Keynes predicted for leisure

But instead: 👉 we kept working?!

#WorkParadox
#PostWork
#FutureOfWork
#AutomationEconomy
#MeaningOfWork
#FalseFreedom
#PoliticalEconomy

Capitalism’s Source Code How the State Makes Markets — and Why Cronyism Comes with the Package

#capitalism #cronyism #publicchoice #politicaleconomy #codeofcapital
www.eccentricecon.com/p/capitalism...

#Geopolitics #ElitePower #InternationalRelations #Epstein #Iran #PowerNetworks #GlobalPolitics #WarAndPower #PoliticalEconomy #LiberalInternationalOrder #Accountability #ForeignPolicy #IRTheory #GlobalElites #WarEconomy

Book cover of The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction by Ali Kadri. The cover is red and purple and features a picture of a sandy street with a single sandal lying on the ground.

“The Accumulation of Waste” by Ali Kadri is now in paperback at €40! It shows how under capitalism, waste drives profit, from militarism and austerity to pollution. Wasted lives become commodities, war an industry of perfect waste.

🔗 brill.com/display/ti...

#PoliticalEconomy #AcademicPublishing

Lula Struggles to Blunt Bolsonaro’s Rise in Tight Brazil Race Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is struggling to respond to Flavio Bolsonaro’s rise in polls as tensions mount within his inner circle over how to counter the surge, adding to a string of c...

#Brazil #Elections #October #Lula #PoliticalEconomy #LeftPolitics #FlavioBolsonaro #FarRightPolitics

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Rethinking East Asia's welfare model: Nan Yang & @stefankuehner.bsky.social's #fsQCA study challenges the Productivist Welfare Capitalism thesis: buff.ly/Pa7icaZ

#WelfareRegimes #SocialPolicy #PoliticalEconomy #Globalisation @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social @uoypolitics.bsky.social @sagepub.com

Der gemeinsam mit Frank Daumann (Universität Jena) verfasste Beitrag, der in der 2. Auflage des Handbuchs "Politik und Wirtschaft" erscheinen wird, gibt einen Überblick über das Thema "Sportpolitik" aus politik- und wirtschaftswissenschaftlicher Perspektive. #PoliticalEconomy

Dubai’s skyline dazzles. The model beneath it: rentier wealth, a three‑tier society, anti‑city design, and financial opacity.
The result is exportable spectacle—with imported servitude. Full essay: thinkingprospectus.substack.com/p/the-dubai-...

#Gulf #Urbanism #UrbanDevelopment #PoliticalEconomy

In science, models that discard most variance get rejected.

In economics, we use one to run society.

Then we wonder why it fails.

#PoliticalEconomy #Modeling

@josephestiglitz.bsky.social @pkrugman.bsky.social

#HousingCrisis
#AffordableHousing
#Urbanism
#CityPlanning
#Housing
#UrbanPlanning
#Homelessness
#Gentrification
#ZoningReform
#SocialHousing
#PoliticalEconomy
#LandValueTax
#HousingPolicy
#UrbanPolicy
#NIMBYism
#YIMBY
#PublicHousing
#RentControl
#HousingAffordability
#UrbanInequality

Why can't cities just build more?

Homeowners vote at higher rates and dominate local politics. Restricting supply protects their asset values. They show up; renters don't. The asymmetry is structural, not accidental.

#PoliticalEconomy
#LandValueTax
#HousingPolicy
#UrbanPolicy
#NIMBYism