Certainty means more Mergers, Mergers mean more Uncertainty, Uncertainty means more Crime?

This morning in a criminology seminar we discussed a section of Crime and the American Dream by Richard Rosenfeld and Steven F. Messner (the section in this book). Their “thesis is that the anomic tendencies inherent in the American Dream both produce and are reproduced by an institutional balance of power dominated by the economy” (Rosenfeld and Messner 2011: 179). The dominance of the economy, they argue, weakens other institutions like the family, the government, and education, and the American Dream encourages unrestrained individualism and innovation. The cultural and institutional preferences given to individual economic success, along with the breakdown of other institutions which might foster community oriented values leads to a loss of social control and high levels of criminal behavior.

After class I opened up nytimes.com and this was the lead story: “Confidence on Upswing, Mergers Make Comeback.”

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Wealth in daily life

Adam Davidson’s NY Times magazine essay about Edward Conard’s view of wealth has been on my mind for a few days. There is much to criticize here, not the least of which is Conard’s application of a discredited functionalist model of society that says stratification is a function of occupational importance, such that the most important players receive the most lavish rewards.  Clearly this is Conard’s argument, and he would like more inequality because he believes it would generate the motivation for those who are currently ‘wasting’ their talents on things like art to move into other, more productive lines of work.

In particular I’ve been thinking about the primary players in Conard’s model of investor driven capitalism, which I take to be ‘investors,’ and ‘consumers,’ and the relations between these actors.  In this model, the risks of investors pay off in better lives for consumers.  Another category of actor which is really only hinted at is ‘workers.’  Workers in Conard’s ideal capitalism appear to serve at the pleasure of investors who are driven to improve the lives of consumers.  Conard shared an example of improvements to soda cans which make all of us richer because increased efficiency means each can costs a few cents less.  He also shared examples from computing technology, Davidson himself writing that even progressive economists believe the economic success of companies like Google spreads ‘value’ throughout the economy.