University of California at Berkeley
"Economic Geography of the Industrial World" Prof. R. Walker
Part I. The Macro-Geography of Industrial Economies
Week 1. A new world geography, or where is the economy going?
* Some themes and questions for the course
* The new global economy (from several angles)
Week 2. International Competition and National Economies
* National economies and industrial systems
* International class struggles & neo-liberalism
Week 3. US Reaction and the New World Order
* NAFTA and US industrial strategy guest lecture by Prof. Harley Shaiken
* Domestic Class struggles in the 80s and 90s
Week 4. Regions
* Regional political economy
* California, the industrial power
Week 5. Capital, Growth and Industrial Transformation
* The recession as accumulation crisis
* The new industrial divide
Part II. The Micro-Economics of Industry and Place Week 6. Production
* New forms of production
* Revolutionizing the labor process
Week 7. Industries and technology
* Industries and their geographies
* Innovation and industry growth
Week 8. High tech and natural resources: polar opposites?
* The global electronics industry -- guest lecture by Dieter Ernst or Tim
Sturgeon
* Natural resource industries
Week 9. Labor
* Labor on the run
* Labor on the move
Part III. Beyond manufacturing, or the new industrial economy Week 10. The
labor movement and the new work.
* Organizing in the New Industrial Economy -- guest lecture by Peter
Olney, LA MAP
* The Great American Jobs Machine
Weeks 11 & 12 Firms and markets -- and beyond
*
* The organizational problem in industrial production
* The organizational revolution today
* Industrial organization in Japan guest lecture by Prof. Michael Gerlach
Weeks 12 & 13. Consumption
* The Macroeconomics of consumption
* The Microgeography of consumption
Week 14. Money & Finance
* Financial free-for-all in the 1980s
* Money, Credit and the Functions of High Finance
Week 15. Dead Week
* Review
Finals Week
Final Exam
Full Course Syllabus
Part I. The Macro-Geography of Industrial Economies
Week 1 (8/29 & 31) A new world geography, or where is the economy going?
* Some themes and questions of the course
* A changing global economy and the new competition.
* The prospects for the US and the reaction of US politics and business.
* Where do we fit in? Geographic scales: nations versus cities and
regions.
* California and the country -- and the world.
* The Japanese are coming, or is it the Chinese or the Germans?
* Can high tech save us? new industries and economic growth, or from here
to Silicon Valley.
* Is what's good for GM good for the country? cost cutting and cheap
labor as an economic strategy.
* New forms of work: can we think our way or sweat our way out of
decline?
* Immigration, or putting a new face on the working class.
* Producers and consumers: can we buy our way out of trouble?
* Who works, who contributes and who profits? Class, distribution and
national direction.
* Salvation in the service economy?
* Is what's good for IBM good for the country? The deadends of industrial
organization.
* REAL money: fancy finance and the future of industry.
* Taxes and turkeys, or who killed the golden goose of government?
* Resource wars, or can nature carry the load?
* The new global economy (from several angles)
* The growing permeability of national boundaries to investment, trade,
competition, alliances, migrants.
* Growing volume of international economic activity: capital (DFI) and
money ahead of the pack.
* The explosion of global finance, the real globalization.
* Global cities of finance (glamour and ghettoes).
* Avoiding global hype (global babble, .g. Reich); the limits to
globalization -- nodes and networks, place and space, or the local and
the global.
* The early lead and laggard growth of manufacturing.
* The slow and uneven spread of industry. New industrial spaces. More and
fewer industrial spaces.
* Global competition in productions, production methods, management.
* Global competition in labor , etc.
* The geography of multinational companies. National or international
identities?
* Spatial divisions of labor and intercompany vs. intracompany trade.
What's a national product?
* Rising manufacturers and overseas investors: Germany and Japan and
other upstarts challenge the US.
* Does capital have a nationality?
* trade and the state, finance and the state, warfare and the state;
(Tilly et al).
* production and state protection-enhancement-substitution
* Outgrowing the state: US MNCs, Japanese expansion
* international state-brokered trade agreements: GATT.
* Sub-globalization? Foresight and fear in the new free trade blocs, EC
and NAFTA and East Asian sphere.
* Shifting industrial and trading patterns across the globe.
* The Pacific overtakes the Atlantic: East Asia and the capitalist 'rim
of fire'.
* Japan, the four tigers and China.
* The new frontiers of Asia, including the former Soviet Union.
* Deepening First World ties
* Globalization without the Third World: delinking, disinvestment,
capital drain, informalization.
* New mass migrations: misery, multinational labor, multiculturalism and
national chauvinism.
* Globalization as Morning in America: the US wakes up to the end of an
era, new competitive challenges, declining manufacturing strength.
* falling global profits and overaccumulation: a world crisis of
stagnation?
* globalization and the ideology of neo-liberalism.
* Historical perspective:
* the long-standing world-system.
* waves and eras of globalization.
* European globalization, or the long and sorry history of colonialism
* European migrations, or the white peril.
* Rise and fall of leading nations.
* British hegemony and 19th century freedom of circulation.
* Challenge and defeat of British manufacturing by Germany, US (cf.
Reich)
* European expansion triggers revolutions in Japan, China, Russia, etc.
* The World Wars and European self-immolation.
* making it back to where we were before.
* The triumph and tribulations of capitalism, or spring forward, fall
back.
Week 2 (9/5 & 9/7) International Competition and National Economies
* National economies and national industrial systems
* Rise of the modern state, or globalism (evil?) twin: territorial
unification, uneven parts and peoples, burgers and kings.
* national economies: role of state and nation in economic coherence and
bounding.
* international competition and national systems.
* rediscovery of varieties of capitalism: sorting things out after
communism (globalism vs. national systems)(e.g. Porter).
* national characteristics across all sectors.
* Key elements of national difference: manufacturing base, labor systems,
natural resources, commerce & finance, statism, nationalism,
militarism, business forms, class structure, racial orders.
* National economic base:
* Natural resources: industrial skew, industrial advantage, fallback for
competition. Oil exporters, minerals, food.
* Size, export exposure and domestic market (and income distribution).
* Specialization and international export bases.
* commercial peoples: dutch, english, chinese, arabs, etc.
* financial systems: type of credit and capital markets, expectations and
rates of return.
* Nationalism: cultural systems and secular religion of the nation
(imagined communities).
* systems of labor mobilization and rivalry unto war.
* warfare and economic development
* Militarism and industrialization: Japan, Germany, Soviets, Israel, Iraq
-- and the US.
* Planning, markets and national economic development: the US model
versus Europe and Asia.
* Japanese state, culture and industry.
* 'Dirigisme in the Four Tigers.
* French statism. Italian anarchy.
* Class versus state power and purpose.
* Planning systems and state apparatus: federalism, civil service,
democracy, tax farming, etc.
* regulation, nationalization/public companies; national champions and
direction (Evans) (Evans)
* National labor systems and factory regimes: American labor markets,
European social democracy, British shop stewards, Japanese Nenko
system, German skilled labor.
* Japanese women, African-Americans, German Turks: Segmented labor and
class compromise .
* labor systems and the diffusion of business practices (Taylorism, JIT,
etc).
* Business organization systems: size, ownership, linkages; links to
commerce and finance.
* National systems of innovation: business, labor and state roles. Japan,
Germany, France, US, Taiwan, Korea.
* National class systems, including landlords, peasants, indigenes (race,
class and state).
* Class struggles in the countryside: Japan's rice economy and the LDP,
ridding Korea and Taiwan of landlords, Mexico's institutionalized anf
failed revolutions.
* The Soviet model: party, planning, subsidies, welfare and warfare.
* International class struggles & neo-liberalism
* Imperialist Rivalry, Wars and economic development East and West.
* US-European imperialism and Meiji revolution, Sun Yat Sen, Bolsheviks,
Attaturk, Diaz, etc..
* Japanese imperialism, US-Japanese rivalry, colonial legacy.
* German nationalism, state formation, catchup, defeat and national
socialism.
* Class housecleaning and economic renewal at WWII: defeat of fascism in
Japan and Germany.
* Non-warfare developmental states in Japan and Germany.
* England totters on; the US gets a New Deal. Continuity and change.
* Soviet triumph and tragedy; attraction and repulsion of the Communist
model in the Cold War era.
* Korean War, Vietnam War and Chinese Revolution: East Asia gets another
boost.
* America's Century and the imperial system of the Cold War era.
* US ascent, apogee, decline - and resurrection?
* century US manufacturing might, trade closure, competitive dominance.
* Postwar Golden Age (America's quarter-century).
* Marshall Plan, SCAP and keeping the world safe for capitalism; origins
of the Cold War (Did we have to drop The Bomb?)
* The almighty dollar: Bretton Woods, sound money, and national power and
prestige.
* America's dual role as national economy and world power: dilemmas of
being banker, policeman and shopper to the world.
* Erosion of US industry and rise of new competitors.
* Germany #1 exporter (1986); Japan #1 GNP/cap. (1989).
* Self-pity and pitilessness of the One Great Power.
* Reagan-Bush policies and the attempt to restore US power, or the New
World Order.
* The end of the Cold War: what do you do when there's no one left to
fight?
* Can US competitiveness and power be restored by military might?
Spending everyone into decline.
* Selling arms to restore the trade balance.
* Neo-liberalism as the new bourgeois religion, led by Saints Thatcher
and Reagan.
* Free market fantasies and the attack on the state.
* Refusal of the rich: lower taxes, bigger paychecks.
* Reaction to declining profits or profiteering by the capitalist class?
* Internal austerity in the advanced capitalist countries and the
disciplining of labor.
* The end of the welfare states.
* Decline of organized labor. Diminished welfare of the prosperous
working classes.
* International labor competition and the global labor surplus.
* Repeating the past? National rivalries and imperialism.
* Japan and Germany at the brink of power: how long can they be put off?
Realignments in the UN, World Bank, etc.
* Trade blocs to bolster sagging states or to confirm new empires? the
downside of subglobalization.
* Fear and loathing in the First World: Nationalism, racism and facism in
the New World Order.
* Dependency and development: controlling resources, technology,
competition, and your own fate.
* Backwardness and late developers: selective advancement of NICs
* state direction versus free markets in playing catch-up and national
liberation.
* International class alliances in the First and Third World.
* Force and freedom: Democracy and national development for the few,
discipline for the many.
* Punishing upstarts, or a few good wars from Nicaragua to Iraq ("America
the most peaceful nation" -R.R.)
* Postwar growth in the poor countries.
* Overaccumulation, the debt crisis and 'structural adjustment' --
austerity programs and international economic discipline.
* Globalization without tears (or, who cares about Africa?).
* A few save havens: Bahamas, Singapore, and the like.
* Fast money: Mexico hype and calamity.
* The fall of communism: lessons in history, economics and political
change.
* Whither or wither Russia and Eastern Europe? New classes out of old,
market shock treatment (Sachs & Gaidar), reform or destruction?
democracy or dictatorship?
Week 3 (9/12 & 9/14) The New World Order Comes Home to Roost
* NAFTA and US industrial strategy: guest lecture by Prof. Harley Shaiken
--
* Mexico's role in US industrial plans, border industrialization, and the
transformation of the Mexican economy. Implications for workers here
and there. Collapse of the peso in early 1995. Chiapas and domestic
upheaval in Mexico.
* Domestic Class struggles in the 80s and 90s
* The long term decline of the US?
* Was LA's outburst an IMF riot?
* The plight of US economy and society in the 90s.
* California in the depths of depression.
* Signs of things gone wrong: job shedding, unemployment, trade deficits,
foreign investment, fallen dollars, fallen banks & S&Ls, fiscal crisis,
homelessness, crime etc.
* The New Republican era. Reaganomics: deregulation, tax cuts and
military spending.
* Financial deregulation: setting capital loose or stimulus to
speculation?
* The Second Cold War boom (Military Keynesianism)
* Tax cuts and the new millionaires: the Age of Forbes.
* New money and new skills in the Yuppie era: the upward spin of the
Middle Class.
* The attack on labor and the missing middle: the downward spin of the
Middle Class.
* Distribution and class struggle in the long view: the 80s, 20s and 80s.
* Who is the us in US?
* Rolling back the New Deal and the New Left: The onslaught of the Right
against social welfare and social activism; curbing the pretensions of
workers, women and people of color.
* California's nefarious role in reaction: Nixon and Reagan and company.
* Gingrich and the New Wave riding on long coattails.
* The final assault on everything? Can hyperexploitation of labor,
nature, social assets and the state save us?
* The New World Order begins at home -- or, the Reagan chickens come home
to roost on Bush.
* Clinton's victory and limits of neo-liberalism: budgets, austerity,
NAFTA, workfare, etc.
* Deficits and bankruptcy of the state.
* Saddam, welfare queens, criminals, foreigners -- the rhetoric of
political economy, or who can we blame?
* Leftover and the left out: the homeless as the unemployed and unhoused.
* Hopeless in the 'hood: drugs, crime and social disintegration in
Wonderland.
* Angry White Men? Right-wing populism in a declining economy.
Week 4 (9/19 & 9/21) Regions
* Regional political economy
* Regional economics and geography, the forgotten corner.
* The rediscovery of regions in the Post-fordist era of realignment.
* Beyond or beneath the nation-state?
* Long-standing subnational regions in countries like Britain, Mexico,
France, Brazil, Spain (need we mention ex-Yugoslavia?)
* Decline of the nation-state?
* EU subventions and the new regionalism.
* Scales of regionalism: Industrial districts and micro-regions. Cities
and metropolitan regions. City-hinterland definitions (e.g. Chicago,
SF). Systems of cities and territorial production complexes.
* the problem of scale and infinite regress in definition.
* Regional formation : nature and culture versus political economy.
* Natural resources and peoples.
* economic linkages and shared economic base.
* Regional specializations and 'worlds of production'.
* Culture and economy: beyond the old regional geography.
* class, race and politics, or the local relations of production.
* Regional development, the flip-side of geographical industrialization.
* Regions over time: layers of industrial history, uneven development,
rise and fall of local industries (long waves and other epochs).
* industrial cluster definitions (system house/subcontracting,
interactive clusters, labor pool, special zone,etc).
* Regional competition, localism and boosterism. Micro-geography of the
new competition.
* Regional policy: industrial policy in the EC , Japan and Mexico (growth
poles, redistribution, export zones, science cities).
* Is economic policy enough? Discard zones like Chiapas.
* Regional shifts in the new industrial era today.
* The distinctive economic histories of US regions: New England, the
Midwest, the South and the Far West compared.
* Why slavery, puritanism, farm settlement and the like still matter.
* California, the industrial power
* California: a nation within a nation.
* mining the world's wealth: California, the US and globalization -- a
model for all resource extraction? California's role in mining, hydro,
dams, oil, fisheries, and atomic power.
* California labor and industrial innovation.
* Projection of regional innovations and political economy.
* Silicon Valley, Aerospace alley, Hollywood and other industrial
subregions: worlds within worlds (of production).
* Regions within California: economics, culture and politics.
* A room with a view: SF in the continental and global systems.
* Dilemmas of LA and the Bay Area today: are they one-horse towns? Is the
core rotten? can we live without war? fancy finance and flat-footed
industry
* California at the crossroads: why we have no state economic policy.
Wrongheaded policies are no accident. cost-cutting and ideological
diversions.
* California's place in US politics: Reagan and his sunshine boys.
Military spending and California aerospace industry. Counterrevolution
in one state.
* Government in gridlock.
* The new California citizenry.
* Education and the brain gain.
Week 5 (9/26 & 28) Capital, Growth and Industrial Transformation
* Expansion and recession: rhythms of accumulation
* Upturns, downturns and the fate of places: failed hopes and false
praises.
* The current recession in California, the US and the world.
* Regional and national synchrony and asynchrony, or California versus
the rest of the country, US versus the world.
* What is a recession? what is a depression? politics of naming.
* Implicit theories of recessions and the business cycle, and of epochs
(e.g. Reich p 27)
* Uneven growth over time: cycles, booms and slumps.
* Growth trends and variations.
* Growth swings of different lengths, from 2 years to 50.
* What indexes and statistics to use?
* Leading and lagging indicators and the propaganda of business cycles.
* What is growth? Accumulation of capital and economic expansion.
* what causes growth in a capitalist system? neo-classical,
Schumpeterian, Keynesian (Harrod) and Marxian theories of growth.
* The dynamic effects of competition, surplus profit, product change and
productivity gains ( versus static efficiency and cost-cutting).
* The capitalist business cycle: investment waves, rising profits, rising
productivity, wage increases, high expectations, spending and demand,
virtuous circles.
* Balanced growth in an unbalanced system: disequilibrium theories (S,K
and M). Rates of change and adjustment. Key variables of balanced
growth: demand and supply bottlenecks, output and underconsumption,
investment and technical change, fixed capital and excess capital, debt
and financial bubbles.
* Sectoral growth, unevenness and the aggregate economy: compensating and
linked movements.
* Time and space: geographic imbalances -- linkage, different sectoral
bases, and the balance wheel.
* Slumps and downward slides into recession.
* signs of trouble: falling profits, high indebtedness, supply cost
inflation, intensifying competition, output price declines,
overproduction & inventory build-up, stetched payments or slow
deliveries, reluctant lenders, etc.
* in a slump: layoffs, bankruptcies, cutthroat competition and price
cutting, idle capacity and plant closure, cutbacks in investment and
equipment purchases, slack sales, calling in debts, reluctant lenders,
etc.
* What good is a recession? The devaluation of excess capital and
disciplining of markets and labor.
* Fiscal policy and Keynesian intervention: what can government do?
* The politics of the business cycle: cause or effect?
* Accumulation and the tendency for capitalism to expand geographically:
trade and conquest, investment and overinvestment, transportation and
communication, mining and manufacturing, capitalist institutions and
social change.
* crisis, delinking, disinvestment, capital drain, labor drain,
informalization.
* The new industrial divide
* Where are we in time? Out of the 80s boom and into the 90s bust. Is
this a structural crisis and historic shift?
* Industrial restructuring run amok.
* Geographic signs of economic transformation (again): globalization, new
competition, new centers of production, new trade blocs, new patterns
of investment flow, monetary values, regional shifts, etc.
* Periodization of economic history: capitalist era, centuries, long
waves, medium waves, short cycles. Science and politics of naming.
* The idea of epochs and structural shifts -- virtues and cautions.
* The long wave of the last 50 years.
* The great post-war boom in the world economy.
* The next 20 years of discord and upheaval. The 1970s: declining profits
and stagflation. The 80s: renewal or false prosperity?
* Marx's falling rate of profit redeemed?
* The Golden Age and the American Century reconsidered.
* Permanent stagnation, or new industrial era?
* Time and space, or Uneven development: national and regional rates of
growth in the world system, center and periphery or north and south.
* Theories of the new industrial epoch: Fordism and Post-Fordism, or Mass
Production versus flexible and Lean Production (Japanese mass
production, flexible specialization)
* Multiple forms of improved production, not to mention sectoral change,
organizational, financial, and consumer change --- or the New
Industrial Revolution.
* Regulation School and Social Structures of Accumulation: strengths and
weakness.
* Neo-Schumpeterians: technical epochs and computerization.
* Is it all a technical matter? Restructuring class politics as both
cause and effect.
* End of the class accord and all its forms (contracts, welfare state,
etc.)
* The Mean Season and the harsh global winds: Post-fordism and new levels
of labor exploitation (work intensification, deskilling and layoffs,
wage cutting).
* Hopes and fears of new forms of work and labor relations: Japanese,
Third Italy, etc.
* Japan's dilemma, or don't idealize the top dog: even the mighty
stumble, realignment of industry in the 70s, 80s and 90s,
overaccumulation and speculative madness, land and labor costs,
politics and social change.
Part II. The Micro-Economics of Industry and Place
Week 6 (Oct. 3 & 5). Industrial Production
* New forms of production:
* Industrialization and industrial location: what are they? An
introduction.
* The new industrial revolution revitalizes the field of economic
geography -- and the global geography of industry.
* The new competition, new forms of production and new challengers --
from Japan, Korea, HK, Germany, Italy, etc.
* Long period of catch-up with the US.
* Reworking the old, rethinking the new. Radios, cars, ships, steel, etc.
* US manufacturing in retreat.
* Fordism and post-Fordism: a useful shorthand which hides a lot.
* Merits and limits of national/regional models of industrial production
and location.
* Merits and limits of production models: new products, new markets, new
industries, new forms of labor exploitation, new forms of organization,
etc. -- as we'll see.
* Mass production, American style, or Fordism and Taylorism: minute
divisions, lofty management, by the book, excess inventories, long
setups, work rules, job titles, absenteeism, infantilization, shoddy
work, etc. -- porosity, rigidity, Q control, inventory cost, etc.
* The real achievements of Taylor and Ford, the ideology of mass
production, and the degeneration of the model.
* How pervasive was it?
* leading sectors and large corporations.
* Diffusion of the American system.
* Japanese mass production: pull through (kanban), just-in-time and low
inventory (lean production), total quality control, work groups and
mutual aid, multiskilling and multiple machine tending, learning by
doing (kaizen) and suggestions, fast setups and product innovation,
self-monitoring machines & fix-on-time, hands-on management, robotics.
* Lifetime employment and retraining (Nenko), company unions and
labor-management cooperation.
* Work intensification, labor control and exploitation.
* Subcontracting and integrated production systems.
* Outside the core: exploitation of peripheral workers.
* Shift to Japan and new Japanese industrial regions
* Flexible specialization in the Third Italy and California: flexible
machinery, flexible networks, flexible skills, flexible deployment of
labor.
* High tech, new crafts industries (batch) as fertile ground.
* The rediscovery of industrial districts.
* Small firms and entrepreneurial hype; the limits to small firms.
* The dark side of labor flexibility and small firm competition
* Germany : Batch production and continuous reskilling.
* New leading industrial regions, remaking of old.
* The computer revolution's impact on production methods, or the
information age.
* better machines, new machines, machine control, feedback and monitoring
of production process, communications among units, CAD-CAM, etc.
* Does this model have a place of origin?
* Japanese exports, Japanese transplants.
* US entry by Germans, Koreans, HK, Taiwan, Mexico....
* Imitation and diffusion, restructuring and revival in US industry
(turning back the challengers in chips, cars, etc.).
* Lean and mean? downsizing of plants, growth of big companies,
outworking, lean production, new machinery, etc.
* Is flexibility the thing? Labor productivity in mass, batch and custom
output.
* Capital 'productivity': capital saving and circulation of capital
(continuity, realization, turnover).
* Many non-conforming cases: aerospace, pharmaceuticals, steel, garments,
etc.
* Multiple industrial paths and the breadth of the new industrial
revolution.
* Industrial diversity of nations and regions versus specialities.
* The social basis of production models:
* how Japan got there: labor struggles, catch up, T. Ono,etc.
* the rich anarchy of Italy
* German crafts and unions
* California freedom etc.
* Harnessing labor and revolutionizing the labor process
* Continuing centrality of human labor: workers versus machines.
* Exploitation and participation of labor: the necessary evil for
employers.
* The two faces of labor: production/exploitation, control/creativity,
mental/manual, cooperation/division.
* the skilled and the unskilled, and their relativity.
* Labor skills and location (Reich et al).
* Labor participation and productivity (Japan? Saturn, Silicon Valley
etc)
* Industrialization and improving the labor process.
* Classic dimensions of the direct labor process: specialization,
cooperation, material and information flows, direction, monitoring &
testing.
* Machinery and automation/self-regulation, machine maintenance, machine
set-up.
* Skilling and deskilling: the rise and fall of workers and the dispersal
of production (runaway shops, Maquilas, etc.)
* Coordination of collective labor: sequencing, balancing, communication
& coordination, allocation of labor, machine utilization, inventories &
material flows
* Capital circulation vs. simple labor productivity.
* The First Industrial Revolution and the labor process (and the factory
system). Geography of the IR
* The Second and Third Industrial Revolutions: What was achieved, what
was not.
* Mass production before Ford.
* Taylor and scientific management.
* Ford's assembly line: sequencing, flow, dedication, standardization of
parts, machine reg..
* Rise of the midwest.
* Japanese mass production and flexible specialization in light of above
elements: continuation of a long tradition from Babbage and Ure,
refocussing.
* Material bases of production: divergent paths of industries and product
lines (e.g. Philly vs NE, steel vs meatpacking, chemicals, oil,
electricity, farming, etc. -- again the non-conforming cases
* Materials revolutions, productivity and new possibilities - e.g.
hybrids, alloys, cracking, electric motors, electronics.
* Materials and classical industry location theory; decline of raw
inputs.
* Machine development beyond the labor process and products without
precedent.
* Science and high tech: the rising level of industrial sophistication.
* Where do computers fit in?
* The breadth of all industrial revolutions (epochs again)
* Extended production systems: the social division of labor & multiple
workplaces.
* processing chains, assembly systems, interlocking systems (from job
shops to sub-sub-contractors ).
* research, design, testing and other extensions
* extensive spatial divisions of labor and complex labor in regional
clusters.
* dualized or segmented labor systems: hierarchies and unities of
opposites (e.g. semiconductors, autos, garments & shoe, etc.)
* Multiple industries in places, linkages, labor.
* dualized or segmented labor systems by place. (e.g. Japan, California,
Italy)
* Production and consumption: a dance of equals, but who's leading?
* Importance of demand for production types: Philly fashions vs NE again.
* Design and product improvement.
* Product quality and function: relation to manufacturing process and
effect on productivity (realization).
* Production systems organized for the market: flexible mass p,
fashionable batches, custom work.
Week 7 (Oct 10 & 12) Industries & technologies
* Industries and their geographies:
* From Detroit to Silicon Valley: the identification of places with
economic specialties.
* National & regional production models vs. industries.
* Industries as basic building blocks of the economy.
* Problems of definition: products and industries, product families,
product proliferation; input/output webs, production systems; activity
groups and arenas of competition and investment.
* Census categories and national differences.
* Categories of thumb (up and down): Low and high tech, heavy and light,
capital and labor intensive.
* Major industries over time: the long march of leading industries. (from
textiles and clocks to cars and computers).
* Overlooked industries: craft and batch, agro-resource, etc. (materials,
products and labor processes).
* New technologies and technical bases for industries.
* Ever-higher tech: the rising curve of techologies and the long
historical march of leading industries.
* Rising basis of all industries, unevenly.
* Base technologies over time: handicraft, machinery & machine tools,
railroads, autos, steel, semiconductors.
* The classical theory of industrial location: inputs, outputs and
distance in a cost-minimization framework.
* Dynamics versus statics: the revolution in industrial geography and the
theory of geographical industrialization.
* The dead-end of product life-cycles
* Real dynamics of shifting technologies (products, processes) and
demands: e.g. iron and steel to aluminum and plastics.
* Industrialization and the production of place: exogenous factor costs
vs. changing cost structure; symbiosis of industrial and regional
growth.
* New industrial spaces
* Industrial clusters versus single-plants
* Growth and conquest of outlying areas -- winning markets and
competition vs. cheap labor and industrial maturity.
* Industrial renewal and change (upgrading old industries and
places)(e.g. Silicon Valley, Hollywood, missiles, German machinery,
etc).
* Shifting centers and the decline of industrial places (e.g. iron and
steel, autos, textiles, jewelry, machining, etc)
* High cost locations and the business climate: the dubious politics of
place competition.
* Cavaets re: labor, markets and natural resources, complex and
hierarchical spatial divisions of labor in contemporary industry.
* Historic US patterns of location and changing location, industrial
differences & specificities. (meatpacking, electrical & electronics,
films, automobiles, machining, aircraft, etc.)
* Long waves, industrial epochs and the complex stratigraphy of
industrial geography: sectoral and regional (e.g. NE vs Midwest, SF vs.
SV, Cinncy vs Chicago)
* Japanese manufacturing expansion reconsidered (also US-Mexico shift,
German and European investment in US).
* Innovation and industry growth
* technical change and industrialization: the objective function in
modernization.
* Technical change and competitive edge.
* Technical change and industrial change: sectoral histories (e.g.
sailing ships, steamboats, clippers, ICE, size, megatankers and
freighters, etc.)
* technical waves raise all boats -- industries and base technologies.
* Lack of economic theory of technical change; rediscovery.
* Neo-classical models (demand pull), Schumpeterian models (technical
push and entrepreneurship), Marxian models (competition, surplus value
and accumulation of capital).
* Institutional models of innovation: the holy trinity of technical push
models: invention, innovation, adoption (or diffusion).
* University science models: from German dyestuffs to Silicon Valley.
* Shortcomings of the model: universities without industry, converting
science to industry, industry building universities. (e.g. Stanford,
Cal's recent abortive policy)
* The corporate R&D model: corporate divisions of labor and their
fecundity -- and sterility (Bell labs, Dupont etc).
* The individual genius and entrepreneurial spin-off model: Bolton &
Watt, Edison, Einstein, garages, hackers
* Great inventions in context of exploration and technical base
* Cultures of innovation?
* the cost of vulture capitalism.
* innovation by acquisition (e.g. biotech).
* The nagging problem of science and nature: technical advance and human
capability
* how much can technology be forced? Quite a bit, but not without limit.
* How much can technology be exploited? Freely.
* High tech and higher tech: the rising curve of science and industry.
* A grounded model of technical change in industry.
* Science and industry: who leads whom?
* Science and experience, science as hard work.
* Practical mastery and skilled labor and learning by doing.
* Investment and new machinery.
* Intersectoral effects: learning by using and the interplay of products
and processes.
* Cumulative change and technical trajectories.
* Incremental change, new combinations and base technologies: structures
and breakthroughs.
* New models for innovation: flexible districts, international alliances,
Japanese sashimi system.
* Industrial clusters and technological milieux: collective labor and
industrial genius, small firms and large, exploration and
entrepreneurship.
* Alliances for everything: joining forces, competitive cooperation,
false hopes and real payoffs (past record, eg. oil cracking
corsortium).
* Japanese corporations: labor and learning, groups and rolling divisions
of labor, controlled spinoffs, etc.
* Further recognition of difference: national systems of innovation (what
about regional or company systems?)
* The breakthrough illusion: big bangs and whimpers, lost opportunities
of UK and US inventions.
* Intellectual property rights: the new American strategy.
* The nagging problem of planning and state direction: corporate planning
versus entrepreneurship, state planning and industrial cooperation,
planning for the expectable unexpected.
* Debates over mobilizing innovation and the policy gap (EC, MITI,
science park mania, info highways, etc.).
* Highlights in the history of planned innovation: Springfield armory;
German research universities and Bismarck; Nazi planning and purges.
* recent US government (hidden) role: big physics and nukes; Cold War and
aerospace; postwar medical research and biotech. Sterile or fertile?
* Blind to possibility/disasters in failed innovation: US steel, the CFC
debacle, DEC, IBM, etc.
* How do backward nations catch up technologically? Imitation, learning,
reaching, trying a different way, necessity and invention.
* Growth and innovation: success breeds success, success breeds
sclerosis.
* Cases: California, Japan, Korea, Brazil, etc.
* Production of industry and place via forced innovation.
* Limits to technology forcing (again)
* Geographies of innovation, planned and unplanned (summary)
Week 8 (Oct. 17 & 19) High Tech and Natural Resources: polar opposites?
* The global electronics industry: a case study. Guest lecture by Dieter
Ernst.
* Natural resource industries
* nature as a resource: extraction, commodification, circulation and
accumulation.
* natural wealth and regional development.
* natural resources and location: coal and sheer weight in Alfred Weber.
* the declining weight of natural resources in industry, development and
location.
* did natural resources drive the industrial revolution?
* the triad of labor, nature and technology.
* extraction without benefit: the colonial resource economies and the
global division of labor.
* international trade theory and natural advantage
* refining, processing and development strategies.
* nature vs nurture: the social relations of profit extraction.
* rent, property and land: big money to be made.
* international rents.
* The resource-intensive ACCs, or the anomoly of the white settler
colonies.
* the place of natural resources in US development (Wright).
* Resource intensity as a development path (David).
* Nature's bounty and American conquest.
* Nature's metropolis (Cronon) or city and countryside: Chicago, San
Francisco and the Great West.
* California as resource nation.
* resource extraction and processing industries --their special
character.
* innovation and resource revaluation.
* technical change, resource shifts, and geographical industrialization
-- clustering and shifting location in resource industries.
* the curious case of agriculture: point of all departure.
* agribusiness and modern industry.
* agro-industrialization and the division of labor.
* decline of agriculture in development -- and its rediscovery by the
World Bank.
* power to fuel your industry: water power, coal, the oil economy and the
atomic age. energy and value.
* the energy crisis and capitalist response: Japan vs US, market
flexibility.
* OPEC as bogeyman:limits to monopoly & cartels.
* limits to energy theories.
* fisheries and overfishing: sardines, anchovies and chicken feed.
* the timber industry, past and present: selling deer and buying chips,
globalization and the decline of the northwest, plantations and old
growth.
* water and the west.
* will nature's abundance fuel your future once more? Hyperexploitation,
sacrifice zones and regional endgame. Slash and burn capitalism.
* regional futures: the South, the Midwest and California, Mexico and
Chile.
* nature's revenge: depletion, scarcity and economic decline -- local
definitely, global maybe.
* ideology of escape to nature: social denial of dependence on nature and
economy.
* escapism and the New West, and new exploitation of nature.
* land ethics and bioregionalism: what could it mean?
Week 9 (Oct. 24 & 26) Labor
* Labor on the run
* Where did everybody go? (Whatever happened to the Great American Middle
Class?) (again)
* Declining wages and employment conditions of American labor in the last
20 years.
* Overworked Americans: the lengthening work week (Schorr) -- up one
month/year since 1960s.
* Overtime in the time of unemployment: ironies of capitalism.
* Americans work two months longer than Germans or French, less than
Japanese (Tabb).
* Two-earner households and eroding family wage.
* Women's increased labor participation (67%) and 2d shift (65hrs).
* higher teenage employment (goodbye youth culture?)
* Why such overwork? K logic: training costs, benefits, fixed salaries,
profit erosion, profit max.; W logic: declining wages, consumerism,
women's lib., kids' lib, lack of unions, national mania.
* To maintain 1973 real income, must work 6+ weeks more/year.
* When is enough? Productivity and income double that of 1948.
* Shorter work weeks and shared employment: German workers and 35 hour
work week.
* Changing families and labor supply.
* Greater autonomy of women and kids, or greater dependence on family
earnings and support?
* stress, sleeplessness, turnkey kids, marriages, etc.
* Poverty and families: the declining state of American children; youth
unemployment in Europe.
* Paradox of 'family values' campaign: blaming everyone except the market
and capital.
* Disappearing unions and declining protection (and militancy).
* Reaganism and the political attack on labor. Anti-labor legislation and
administration from PATCO onward.
* The employer offensive: breaking labor for the hell of it.
* The degeneration of collective bargaining: takeaways, stonewalls and
suits.
* The economic causes of rollback.
* Deindustrialization: the wolf finally came.
* What jobs? Underemployment of the US labor force (from 3.4 to 6.1% at
peak of booms).
* Unemployment and labor discipline.
* NB: the politics of unemployment figures and welfare reform (or, when
welfare meant well-being).
* New industries, new divisions of labor, new industrial spaces: the
rolling stone of capitalism.
* New flexibility, new jobs, new insecurities: temps, part-timers,
self-employment, small firms -- lack of contracts, benefits, careers
and wages.
* Immigration and competition for jobs.
* the changing face of the working class: women, youth and immigrants.
* The ups and downs of US labor history.
* Long struggles over unions, wages, hours.
* Outbursts and organizing, 1870-1921.
* 1920s: the American plan, anti-communism and labor's defeat.
* The Great Depression and the leading role of labor: CP, CIO and New
Deal.
* Wagner, wartime and Taft-Hartley.
* Postwar prisoners of the American Dream.
* Militance of the 1960s and new organizing drives of public workers.
* The wages of whiteness and macho: a working class divided against
itself.
* The tragic history of racism and sexism in American labor history --
and today.
* Immigration and ethnic divides among Europeans, and the instability of
the US working class.
* We are not alone: the erosion of European unions and full employment (a
lost generation, immigrants and EuroDisney).
* Mexican one-party control and its enemies, Canada's militant workers
and NDP.
* Japan's divided and overworked laboring class and the debate about
overwork, family and cost of living.
* Korean militance; rising wages in SE Asia.
* The prospects for global labor with capitalism in China and the USSR
* Possible labor futures. New jobs, new skills, new management styles.
* How to organize NUMMI or McDonalds? How to organize labor markets?
* Is worker internationalism a dead slogan? Towards a new New Deal?
* Carey, Trumka, LA Map, AFLCIO organizing institute, mergers, and other
efforts at union revival.
* The importance of California and the new industrial places.
* Labor on the move
* Where'd everybody come from? Immigration, laborforce creation, and the
California boom.
* The redeployment of US industry to the sunbelt: geographical
industrialization and cheap labor.
* Pete Wilson's class analysis of surplus value and the burden of
immigrants
* Migration in US and California.
* Cycles of migration: labor rides the waves and gets caught in the
undertow.
* High end and low: labor market segmentation, immigrants high and low.
* Labor demand and immigration.
* Industrial trajectories and changing labor forces.
* Again: do immigrants take away jobs?
* history: politics and economics at both ends.
* Divisions of the working class: varieties of jobs and skills
* Reichian delusions of an all-skilled laborforce
* Bogus skills and job bias: gender, race and class divides.
* Machinery of dominance: gender and job change.
* Wage-labor: the market for workers and the labor exchange.
* Work and pay: what's in a wage packet? what's in a day's work?
* Employment relations in the workplace
* Comparative labor markets: US, Germany, Japan, NE v California, Atzlan,
etc.
* The geography of labor markets and journey to work (2/3 within 15 miles
of plant in LA); single plants vs clusters (e.g. aerospace).
* Employment relations inside and outside the workplace -- Localized
wages and conditions.
* Cities and labor pools: submarkets, segments and wedges.
* Industry and labor supplies: forms of recruitment, forms of training,
use of internal and external labor markets.
* The hierarchical California education system and labor supply.
* specialized training institutions and universities (created by
industry): e.g. CalTech, textile design institutes, Hamburger U.
* Unionization, big plants and industrial clusters: industry creates its
own opposition.
* Locality, militance and American unions; the strengths and weaknesses
of localism.
* Organization strategies against labor: subcontracting, spinoffs,
company unions, new hires, screening, etc.
* Geographic strategies of capital: captive laborforces (company towns,
women), parallel plants, greenfield sites, offshoring, threats to move,
recruiting outside workers (e.g. IBP).
* Labor control and local politics: class power and its limits.
* Capital on the move: labor costs, labor control and the pull of new
labor pools (suburbs, California, China, Mexico, etc).
* Limits of the cheap labor model: when is labor not cheap, when does
labor not matter?
* Employment relations and the immobility of capital.
* Local advantage, capital immobility, and inward investment (e.g.
biotech, Hollywood, car design, software).
* Geographic shifts, innovation, and dislocation of the working class.
Part III. Beyond manufacturing, or the new social economy
Week 11 (Nov 7 & 9) The Division of Labor and Industrial Organization
* Can Services Save US?
* Salvation and services: the rhetoric of the 1980s and 26 million lousy
jobs.
* What fueled the services bubble? cheap labor, class consumption,
speculation and surplus.
* Who killed New York? (Fitch)
* The growth of 'services': finance and real estate (FIRE); business
(management); medical; education; misc. consumer; transport &
communications; distribution (wholesale & retail).
* Uneven development over time.
* Manufacturing growth and the services superstructure: Japan and Germany
versus the US and UK.
* International service centers: global finance, commercial centers, etc.
(UK, Netherlands, Hong Kong, etc.)
* Global cities and services (New York, London, Tokyo etc).
* US Service exports and payments balance.
* Specialized spaces of services: another arena of economic geography.
* the emergence of office clusters in central cities.
* decentralization of office parks and offshoring of offices.
* hospitals & medical centers; university clusters.
* infrastructure networks and nodes.
* warehouse districts and shipping centers, ports and airports (e.g. SF &
LA) (retail and consumption below)
* Services as non-manufacturing: the census categories and theoretical
incoherence.
* The simple view of history: primary, secondary, tertiary...
* Merchant capitalism as a service economy.
* California's long pattern of high services.
* Recall Japan and Germany and Britain
* Where is global manufacturing?
* What is a service? The expanding social division of labor.
* Individual and social labor.
* Goods and labor services: a minor issue.
* Outputs and labor inputs.
* Direct and indirect labor.
* Extensive labor processes and labor hierarchies.
* management labor and technical labor.
* Production and circulation.
* Finance, trade and transport, retailing.
* DOL in the consumption sphere (see consumption week).
* Circulation and temporary exchanges.
* Circulation of things and of paper (and money)
* payments to owners and transfer payments
* The consumption of services: personal service, the sales effort, and
new modes of consumption.
* Social consumption and social services: education, medical
* The medical boom: is anyone being served?
* The good old days of expanding education
* When is something a commodity?
* Private markets and state providers.
* Internalization and externalization of labor.
* New forms of production and the growth of services: new commodities,
new production networks, new kinds of labor.
* The service economy, service labor and the service class: a new middle
class? Class effects over the last century.
* Automation of manufacturing versus 'services': must productivity grow
so slowly in non-manufacturing work?
* The organizational problem in industrial production
* Why are IBM and GM in trouble?
* stagnation of F500 employment 1975-90.
* management of large systems and the technology of management.
* Labor divided, labor reunited: the problem of integration in complex
divisions of labor.
* Social labor: input-output systems, production sequences and management
hierarchies.
* Vertical and horizontal integration and distintegration.
* Indirect labor and production sequences (R-D-M, C-M-E, B-Db-S, etc.).
* Available modes of organization: enlarging the palette and getting
beyond markets vs. hierarchies.
* Market, firm, and factory: the basic triad.
* The institutional basis of markets and firms: critique of transactions
cost theory.
* Between and beyond market and firm: interfirm networks
* Contracting and subcontracting; system houses, interactive clusters,
and JIT networks.
* organizing spaces of production: the workplace, the multilocational
firm, the international firm, subcontracting systems, etc.
* Organizing for innovation: corporate strategies, industrial districts,
and national structures.
* organizing for marketing: product groups, international access, sales
strategies, licensing etc.
* Alliances, licensing and joint ventures. which sectors, which firms?
International alliances.
* Capital and firms, markets and networks: organizing for investment,
profits, risk, uncertainty. (time andthe unknown future).
* Organizing for power: labor control, state power, freedom from
regulation.
* Planning in organizations versus capitalist anarchy: building in the
future, creativity, flexibility, diversity, risk, etc.
* Beyond firms, markets and trading networks.
* Ownership and management ties; family control and extended families.
* Industry and employer associations; unions and workers.
* Territories and states: industrial organization as spatial order.
* The industrial order of places.
* Projections of state power and industrial order beyond borders: US and
Japan compared.
* Multiple and competing forms of industry organization: uneven
development, national differences, and competitive advantage.
* National patterns of firm size, networks, territorialization,
ownership, etc.: US, UK, Japan, Germany, Italy, Korea, Taiwan.
* Advances in organizational technology: the corporation is not the
beginning and end of organizational history.
Week 12 (Nov 14 & 16) Industrial organization as competitive advantage
* Industrial organization in Japan: guest lecture by Prof. Michael
Gerlach
* The organizational revolution today
* The centrality of organization theory in current thinking on industrial
advance. Labor process, technology and organizational dynamics.
* Recognition of national differences and their strengths and weaknesses:
US, Germany, Japan, Korea, France, Italy, Taiwan, etc.
* Four key models: corporate, keiretsu, industrial districts,
international alliances.
* Chandler's theory of the large corporation: why size and structure were
thought to be invincible.
* Evolution through vertical and horizontal integration.
* Chandler's critique of monopoly theory.
* Critique of the large Sloanist corporation.
* Efficiency versus risk (neo-classical versus evolutionary models, ie.
Williamson versus Nelson & Winter).
* monopoly and social power.
* The puzzle of small firm persistence.
* the irony of Williamson's shifting position.
* Corporate geography versus classical location theory.
* Contradictions of Sloanist-Fordist spatial division of labor.
* Requiem for corporate geography.
* New corporate forms: flexibility and internal management, flattened
hierarchies and adhoc groups, downsizing, and externalization.
* Industrial districts: smaller firms and collective strength.
* Vertical disintegration and clustering.
* Reemergence of an older form and rediscovery of local worlds of
production.
* Reagglomerations and shifts of production.
* Problems and politics of industrial order: collective governance
* Inter-firm alliances and joint ventures: reaching out across corporate
and national boundaries.
* Forging working relations and floundering in a sea of alliances.
* Japanese Keiretsu and subcontracting networks.
* More flexible and competitive US forms of networking.
* Disorganization and the bottom line: dilemmas of a declining US
economy.
* Organizing for social good: is there an alternative to capitalism and
the market? the end of socialist planning? Capitalist possibilities and
fetishes.
Week 13 (Nov 21 & 23) Consumption: What's the Use of Industry?
* The Macroeconomics of consumption
* Who consumes? people, business, government.
* Final and intermediate consumption (and the division of labor), capital
goods. Half the economy.
* consumer goods.
* Luxury goods and wage goods.
* government provision of public goods (pure thory and reality of
arbitrary and political choices).
* government for itself: spending on the state by the state.
* spending for business.
* Effective demand and capitalist growth: workers, governments and
investors.
* Keynesian policies of stabilization.
* Investment booms, government pump priming and consumer-led recoveries.
* Distribution, property and income: he who gets, consumes.
* Luxury, investment and ordinary people.
* Savings rates and consumption rates by class.
* Consumption and regional development: consumer-led (retirees, richies,
parks ), government-led (military, infrasructure, transfers and
subsidies, etc), business-led (investment, luxury).
* Consumer styles and regional markets, regional specialities, flex spec.
* Does consumption drive the system? critique of neo-classical theory.
* Consumption and the industrial revolution: meeting needs, producing
wants over time.
* Credit and consumption: leveraging development from FHA to high flying
Yuppies.
* Theory of Fordism and mass consumption: does mass consumption create
mass production, or vice versa?
* The class accord and postwar prosperity.
* The history of mass consumption in the US: critique of the Regulation
School.
* Falling wages and worker consumption in the 1920s and 1980s:
underconsumption, breakup of mass markets, or diversion of profits?
* The new luxury consumption and craft industry boom (tie to flex spec).
* Alternative national models of consumption and distribution.
* social relations of the American mass market. Private wealth and public
squalor.
* European consumption and the class schism. Social democracy and
collective goods.
* Japanese saving and the great drive to overtake the US.
* Letting the steam out of the kettle: rising consumption in Japan.
* Overheating: US consumption, credit and the delusions of endless
affluence.
* The consumptive middle classes, from Britain to Brazil.
* the Keynesian Marxism of the underdevelopment school (Amin, Frank)
(articulation of production and consumption)
* Mass consumption as the high road to development? Consumption and
productivity.
* The IMF and the low road of austerity politics: those who produce
without consuming.
* The divided highway to growth: high profits, high investment, low wages
(East Asia).
* International consumption and development. The consumption of the
affluent nations: whom does the market serve?
* The persistent drag of luxury consumption: those who consume without
producing, balance of trade, savings drain
No class (Thanksgiving)
Week 14 (Nov 28 & 30) Consumption (cont'd) + Finance (I)
* The Microgeography of consumption
* Growing affluence and development of new wants and needs: the joint
evolution of production and consumption.
* Capitalism, consumption and competitive advantage: a theory of product
proliferation and improvement.
* income and price: affluence, cheapening of goods and industrialization
as a virtuous circle.
* the puzzle of consumer demand: where do needs come from?
* the capitalist goal: how to link up with the hearts and minds of
consumers?
* the practice of selling: the immense division of labor and commitment
of resources to the sales effort.
* Fashion, design, packaging: product aesthetics and demand stimulation.
* Product differentiation and market niches: serving and exploiting
social difference and human variety.
* From Wedgewood to Singer to Sloan to ....
* The pursuit of consumers: marketing and advertizing.
* Mobilization of desire: images, art and mass media; the hidden texts of
commodity society..
* Planned obsolescence, consumer manipulation, and limits to producer
sovereignty.
* consumption habits and material life.
* New modes of consumption: from household manufacture to the
industrialized household.
* New technologies and new product uses: development of capacities to
make and to use.
* regional and national styles: from Swedish modern to the Nature
Company.
* selling to business: world of business ads, custom design, salesforces,
long-term relations, clustering, etc.
* The bourgeois family and women's place in the home.
* Scientific management and the hygenic home.
* Consumption as women's work: shopping , clerking, housekeeping, caring.
* geography of the home: single-family suburbanization in America.
* Retail as a business sector.
* The history of retailing: from mom & pop to Megamalls.
* Types and evolution of retail: shops, general stores, chains,
dealerships, department stores, supermarkets, shopping centers,
megachains.
* Scale and diversification: efficiency and economy of selling.
* the art of display.
* Serving and self-service: the job and business of shopping.
* managing the sale and the consumer: spaces of illusion and convenience.
* Spaces of consumption, territories of consumption: the downtown, the
strip and roadside empires, big stores and bigger malls.
* Emporia of pleasure: Boulevards, department stores, fairs, theme parks,
and the all-consuming joy of shopping.
* Cities as consumer havens and shopping centers: taste, class formation,
money, display, etc.: from Paris to Miami.
* shopping as recreation and compulsion.
* men and women in stores and cities: who shops? whose freedom? whose
bondage?
* Shopping at a distance: mail order and the Post Office, the catalogue
and distribution centers, and the home shopping network
* traveling salesmen and Avon calling; Tupperware parties and Amway.
cultivating customers and cults of selling.
* Consumer contradictions: liberation or subjugation?
* Money, Credit and the Geography of High Finance
* Money and exchange: means of circulation and measure of value.
* specie: gold, silver and 'real'money through the centuries and in
different quarters of the globe.
* mining the earth from Bohemia to the Andes to California (quicksilver,
too).
* merchants and empires: the need for currency through coinage and
merchant bills.
* commercial credit and the rise of Venice, Amsterdam and London.
* Fuggers and princes: bad debts and lost fortunes.
* London today and global commercial credit.
* Wells Fargo Express company.
* money as a store of value.
* savings and hoards.
* money as power over things.
* love of lucre and modern acquisitiveness: the desire for money.
* mercantilism and the wealth of nations: gold, silver and impoverishment
(fall of the Inca and the Spanish empires).
* fear of inflation and devaluation: the sanctity of money.
* Germans and the bankers' worldview triumphant today.
* borrowing and lending: the power of money to demand payment (interest).
* useful money: the time-value of money and the interest rate.
* creditors and inflation: debt discounted and the Western Wizard of Oz.
* investment: money in search of more money (rate of profit versus rate
of interest).
* capital: the modern system of investment and accumulation.
* making money: banks and private money (bills and checks).
* The banking function: collecting, transferring and lending money.
* The commercial banking system: clearings and geographic integration.
* bank money: how lending expands the money supply.
* supply and demand and the price of money.
* bank panics and deflations: cleaning house through the business cycle.
* Banking centers and urban hierarchies.
* West versus East: fear of bankers and the state banking system of the
US versus Canada or UK.
* Behind the banks: the federal reserve keeps watch on money.
* The geography of the Federal Reserve system.
* international banking centers: the London network of the British
imperial age.
* global cities today as financial centers.
* shifting centers: Lyon to Antwerp, Antwerp to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to
London, London to New York, Tokyo's banks versus London's traders.
* national currencies and the modern nation-state.
* internal integration and the commerce clause.
* Bank of England and the Pound Sterling.
* Failures of the two Banks of the US and the Civil War greenbacks.
* Post Civil War: national over state banking.
* the rise of New York to national financial center (nothing even close,
challenger to London).
* the international payments system: banks, currency markets and central
banks.
* the gold standard and the sterling system of the 19th century.
* the dollar sytem and Bretton Woods of the American Quarter Century.
* floating exchange rates after 1970 and the growth of currency markets.
* Sound as a dollar: the value of money and the long-term rise and
decline of national currencies (national production and national
currency value).
* The supply and demand of national monies: currency markets and relative
prices.
* Interest rates and the return on national monies.
* Demand manipulation by national treasuries.
* Supply manipulations by national banks and treasuries.
* The Yen and the Mark and the Swiss Franc. And now the ECU.
Week 15 (Dec 5th and 7th) Money & Finance (II)
* Dynamics: money for development, money for speculation
* Money for economic growth: credit-money and regional/national
development.
* Industrial, commercial and consumer credit.
* Industrial credit and investment in fixed capital and productivity.
* consumer credit and purchasing power: selling consumer durables.
* commercial credit and trading functions.
* Banking on development: banks and the circulation of capital.
* US development and regional banks: money flowing in and out of banking
centers (e.g. Chicago, SF).
* California's financial grease: mining banks in the 19th century, Bank
of America and branch-banking in the 20th century, the credit card
revolution.
* SF versus LA: unity or schism? who's on first?
* Bankers and industry (and agriculture): blood ties and feuds.
* Big banks and big corporations: how much autonomy?
* Age of Morgan versus the Age of General Motors in the US.
* national banking systems: Germany, Japan, and the close oversight model
versus arms-length commercial banking in the US and UK.
* banks: sleepy rentiers or aggressive capitalists?
* Securities markets (stocks and bonds).
* securities as alternative forms of saving and lending, and
concentration of capital.
* the first stock markets: railroads and mining in NY and SF.
* Big stock markets and global cities.
* brokerages as financial actors: the New York houses and Charles
Schwab's discount revolution.
* Investment banking: rise of JP Morgan, NY and the big corporations.
* Blythe to Montgomery Securities: investment banking in California.
* Regional specializations in finance for industry: Mellons, Bank of
America & agriculture.
* Venture capital as a new form of investment finance.
* Silicon Valley as the birthplace of venture capital.
* What do venture capitalists and investment bankers do? Seeking lenders,
packaging finance, managing, oversight of industries.
* Securitization in our time: the global trend to securities.
* Secondary cities and the globalization of securities markets.
* the curious tale of Chicago's Board of Trade & Mercantile Exchange:
from commodities to securities derivatives.
* global investments and the 24 hour global exchange.
* US banking reforms and the challenge to banking.
* Glass Stegall and the 1929-33 bank collapse.
* Separations of banking functions, banks and securities markets; state
banking.
* the new financiers: brokerages and express companies, industrial and
retail corporations.
* new banking functions: securities handling and currency transactions.
* regional banking and bank concentration.
* Securities and capital markets versus banks and lending.
* Short-term profits and portfolios: American investment myopia.
* Patient capital in Japan and Germany.
* Financiers versus managers: merger mania and buyout bulemia.
* Japan Inc versus T. Boone Pickens (Tabb).
* Are US corporations leaner and meaner or bigger and fatter for all the
financial activity?
* Junk bonds and merger madness: the empire of Michael Milliken on Rodeo
Drive (Drexel, Burnham).
* Financial mobility: sectoral shifts and geographic shifts.
* Sectoral rates of profit and capital flows: disequilibrium and
equalization of profit rates.
* Venture capital and new start-ups: capital pushes the envelope.
* the export of capital and geographic expansionism:
* East-West capital flows in the US.
* SF and its rivals.
* bleeding the poor or fueling development? It all depends.
* Dollar distress by 1970: Nixon ends fixed exchange rates and devalues
the dollar.
* Foreign dollar accounts lose, US industry gains.
* Depression and bank collapses of 1973-75: the great turning point.
* dollar buildup in the 1970s: Eurodollars, debt expansion, and
inflation.
* A sign of manufacturing decline? Surplus capital seeks an outlet in the
banks and the capital markets and real estate.
* international lending and banking after 1970.
* the debt trap and international financial crisis: banks and countries
on the brink.
* Wringing out inflation under Volkler and the international banking
crisis of 1982.
* Money in command in the 1980s: high interest, a strong dollar and US
industrial decline in the Reagan era.
* securities take command: mutual funds, derivatives and fast money.
* the long run up of the stock markets.
* Mexico: a case of bankruptcy.
* Bank of America: the incredible shrinking bank of the 1980s.
* Deregulation in the face of pressure on banks and S&Ls: a formula for
disaster.
* Excesses of fast deposits, real estate schemes, and junk bonds.
* The S&L debacle: $250 billion evaporate.
* Securities controls relaxed: scandals on Wall Street (insider trading).
* Leverage and funny money.
* How derivatives bring down the house: October 1987, Barings, Orange
County.
* financial madness in Japan and the crisis of the 90s.
* Capital flows downhill in the 80s: Japanese surpluses and US T-bills
and real estate.
* the rising yen and pressure on Japanese industry.
* A strong Yen and the value of Japanese bank capital.
* Is Tokyo real estate for real?
* Deflated dreams: Fall of the Nikkei and real estate.
* Corruptions of high finance, political debacles, and Japanese banks on
the brink
* Comparisons with 1929 in the US.
* Real effects of financial excess.
* Empty buildings and the junkyards of urban dreams: the pretensions of
LA, Houston and other nouveau-riche places.
* Housing inflation and deflation: unloading white elephants.
* cutting government spending.
Econ Geog
