It's funny how the Internet works. A comment to the post on the SPEP session on sexual difference sent me to Jack Balkin's page, where I discovered a number of pieces from the 80s and 90s on deconstruction and the law. As a brief glance* at some of his texts shows that like me, Balkin might be called a "right-wing Derridean" (calm down, it's not about DeMan, but about whether one stresses the conceptual system or the performativity of Derrida's texts),** I thought hmm, I should go over to Balkinization and see what's up over there.
What I found was a very nice piece by Frank Pasquale on "closed-circuit economics," or, how rich people spending on luxury goods doesn't really translate into jobs for the rest of us. One of Pasquale's links in particular caught my eye: 5% of the population now accounts for 35% of all consumer spending!
According to the Citigroup experts, a plutonomic economy is driven by the consumption of the classes, not the masses: "In a plutonomy there is no such animal as 'the U.S. consumer' or 'the UK consumer,' or indeed the 'Russian consumer.' There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the 'no-rich,' the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie."
* I'll try to do a post one day after I've read some of the pieces more carefully.
** I'll be interested to see where I would put Martin Hägglund's Radical Atheism on that spectrum. A post is forthcoming on that book too.
PS: proof that we are now in a post-post-ideological age. And not a moment too soon!
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