THE BASELINE SCENARIO
http://baselinescenario.com/

THE AUTOMATIC EARTH
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com

I have only had a few moments to look at both, but I think you are right, they are quite interesting.

Then there is your own, at http://mistahcharley.blogspot.com/, not so much an economics blog of course, but certainly in line with some of the pessimistic skepticism that you mentioned, and which I share as well of course — pessimistic skepticism, at the very least, is a minimal requirement in this age of utter absurdity, irrationality, unfairness, and injustice.

More “ground-level” is theautomaticearth dot blogspot dot com – the pessimistic skepticism of the authors resonates with my own mood, but your mileage may vary. Their graphic design, with a vintage photo at the top of each post, is appealing.

I have been having a fantastic day downloading and reading several of the papers on your site, mostly focused on New World. I have been looking forward to this for a long time. I will also be checking UWI Press.

That is quite funny about Polanyi-Levitt, it seems that it’s easier to find her in the Caribbean than in Montreal.

Also, my email address is max.forte@openanthropology.org

Very best wishes and many thanks again,

Max.

thanks for our gracious and generous response! Yes I think your characterisation of what happend at the IIR Conference is probably spot on. BTW you would be interested to know that a major conference was held on “The Thought of New World: The Quest for Intelellectual Decolonization”, be the Centre for Caribbean Thought at Mona (Jamaica) U.W.I. in June of 2005. The proceedings are being co-edited for publication (which should be in early 2010) by Prof Brian Meeks at Mona and myself. I gave one of the keynotes at that Conference and would be happy to share it with you but it is not yet in general circulation.

Re Kari Polanyi-Levitt: I am in regular touch with her and we were together at the Globalization Conference in Cuba less than a month ago! Her book with LLoyd Best “Essays on the Theory of Plantation Economy” has just been published by UWI Press, and in Spanish in Cuba by Casa de las Americas. If you give me your email address I can bring you more up to date with Kari.

BTW: your webmaster or WordPress should be able to tell you how to get rid of rhe annoying strikethrough. I also use WordPress!

Cheers, and thanks again.

Norman

This is one of those occasions where I welcome someone having a laugh at my expense, because the correction you brought here is very important and very valuable. I was a student in the Diploma program in IR that year, attending the conference. It was almost 19 years ago. I remember that the discussions were very polarized — that development was classed as Eurocentric by those on the St. Augustine side, while those on the Mona side seemed very keen to engage in policy-related applied research that took what was then the current situation as a given (under IMF and World Bank mandated structural adjustment). In that light, it seems that both sides placed each other under particular shadows, and sometimes one’s impressions are reinforced through discussion, revision, and repetition among like-minded students.

It is great then that after so many years, I can finally “re-live” the experience with one of the key actors and have my impressions corrected. I did not know how to correct the post above, without then making your comment seem irrelevant, hence the lengthy strike-through, which will surely be followed by a more thoughtful revision.

Incidentally, I very much doubt that you could bore either my readers, or really any readers that I can imagine, at least educated ones. Many thanks for pointing out some of the critical articles — I am working my way slowly through that treasure trove that you generously put together, and I will certainly read the essays that you indicated.

One last little note for now — when the New World Movement emerged in the Caribbean, I doubt that their intended audience would have encompassed an Italian-Canadian (me), and that their work would prove to have a permanently transformative impact on such a person. I have tried to get in touch with Kari Polanyi-Levitt at McGill, to ask about this Montreal chapter of the NWM that I have heard about almost in passing…and you would think that six short city blocks was an inter-galactic distance: it has proven to be impossible for our tracks to ever cross. Therefore I am very grateful again for “accidents” such as these.

Consider me one of your regular readers.

Very best wishes and take excellent care of yourself,

Max.

greetings!I found your blog through the link to mine. I really appreciate your review of blogs. But I must admit I had a good laugh at the decscription of me as becoming a
‘notorious free-maketeer and pro-capitalist’ in the 1990s! I could hardly recognise myself! I certainly don’t agree that critical reflection on the lessons to be learnt by the ‘socialist’ experiments in Jamaica and Guyana in the 1970s (which was among the subjects of the lecture you mention, Rethinking Development), and particularly of the use of state enterprises as tools of partonage of the Party in power, is the same as espousing privatization orthodoxy–surely one can be critical of one experience without advocating its polar opposite! The same holds for the differences I had with a particluiar expression of the World Systems theory at the IIR Students Conference to which I think you must be referring.

Max, if you check out my work, I think if you would be very hard put to find a defence of the free market, neoliberalism and neo-liberal globalisation (a lot of the more recent papers are available as free downloads on my blog, by the way), in fact I have been very critical from the time of the ill-fated liberalisation of the Jamaican currency way back in 1990, and I have been a leading critic of the infamous Economic Partnership Agreement foisted on the countries of the Caribbean by the European Union in 2008 (lots of stuff on this also my blog, BTW, by YT and many other writers).

Anyway, I could write a lot more about this but only at the risk of boring your readers. In case you are interested, I did a synopsis of the evolution of my work and thinking called “One Thing Lead to Another” which is in the ‘About Norman’ section of the website. So, great to be (back) in touch, thanks for mentioning my blog, hope you will be ‘hopeful’ enough to check out its offerings and that there will be more opportunties for intellectual (and political) exchange on ‘matters of mutual interest’.

Yours, Norman

PS If you read only one thing on the blog I beg you to look at “Power Imbalances and Development Knowledge” in the “Caribbean Thought” categrory!

http://petemurphy.wordpress.com/ (the blog)

http://openwindowpublishingco.com/ (the book website)

And, a short clip from the author biography, which I found very interesting:

“Pete Murphy retired in 2004 after working for thirty years in manufacturing and engineering for a major chemical company. During those thirty years, he witnessed first hand the devastating impact that globalization has had on U.S. manufacturing. In 1993 he began formulating his theory of population density-induced decline in per capita consumption….He holds a BS degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Notre Dame and began his career following three years of service as an officer in the U.S. Navy….He currently resides…in southeast Michigan – “ground zero” of the devastation inflicted by blind trade on U.S. manufacturing.”

If you‘re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, then I invite you to visit either of my web sites at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com or PeteMurphy.wordpress.com where you can read the preface, join in the blog discussion and, of course, buy the book if you like.

Pete Murphy
Author, “Five Short Blasts”

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/